Technical Tuesday: Aliasing Your Site’s Email Address

Recently I had a client who was irked by the way the “from” email address for messages sent by the subscriptions module appeared in users’ inboxes. The subscriptions module, like others that send email (including user registration and password reset) pull the “from” mailing address from the site settings (admin/settings/site-information). Often times you may use an address like “info@mydomain.com” or “sitehelp@mydomain.com” for this. While getting an email that simply comes from “info@mysdomain.com” might make sense for a user registration confirmation or password reset email, it does not necessarily look pretty for a subscriptions generated email, or a notifications generated email. Well, it turns out that you can alias this email address, much in the way that you could change your “display name” on email you send through your desktop mail client, or webmail service. Here is what you do: Visit admin/settings/site-information Fill in the “Email Address” field following this pattern: “Alias <info@mysite.com>” where “Alias” is the desired display name. Do not include the quote marks when you enter this into the form field. While this is a convenient little trick, I don’t think it is the best solution. Ideally, any module that sends email from Drupal would allow you to specify the from address AND alias on its settings page. This would allow an administrator to set different addresses for different...

The Way We Work: Chris Fassnacht

As promised last week, here is part two of “The Way We Work” with Chris Fassnacht and Stephanie Pakrul. Gregory: Have you worked remotely before working for CivicActions? Chris: Not really. I was doing some remote contract work for a couple of months before starting to work with CA, but for the most part I’ve worked in standard office and lab settings in the public and private sector. GH: Do you work from home? or from an office? or a cafe? Do you work around other people? or alone? CF: As Stephanie mentions, our home is our office, though we make a clean distinction between our living space and our office space. I couldn’t imagine working in a cafe. We drop into cafes occasionally and grab some wifi, but it’s hard to focus in that kind of environment. Too many distractions. The two of us work together, usually in tight coordination on the same or related projects. It’s a very productive kind of shared working environment. GH:What kind of computer do you work on primarily? what are your favorite peripherals? 30 inch monitor? track ball? CF:I use what is affectionately known as “The Beast,” an overclocked (3ghz) quad core running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) with 4gb of ram and dual mirrored 320gb hard disks in a large silent black Antec case, with twin 19-inch monitors driven by an NVidia 8600gt fanless display card. For a pointer, I use a hand-me-down trackball from Stephanie. We keep everything on our 1.5TB RAID1 NAS (network attached storage) for easy access no matter what machine we’re on (7 desktops + 2 laptops +...

Tips For Increasing Blog Readership and Subscribers

This is an interesting post about increasing blog readership through RSS and email subscriptions. One tip: “Popular bloggers will all say that to build a large dedicated following you must keep a blog that is consistently on topic and make it as easy for your visitors to subscribe.” Another tip that is repeated in the post, and in the posts linked to is prominence of “subscribe” buttons, both for RSS and for email subscriptions. One point I may be too tech savvy to confirm or appreciate is that many web users and blog readers are not totally comfortable with RSS. I would think that with Google and Yahoo both including RSS Reader functionality alongside their webmail functionality that many readers of blogs are familiar with and comfortable with...

Write Up of 50 Social Sites

A few weeks ago someone pointed me toward this interesting writeup of 50 social sites, it is geared toward sites where businesses should try to build and maintain a presence, but I think that it is applicable for NPO and NGOs too. The article is split into 5 sections: Social-Media/Social-Bookmarking Sites Professional-Networking Sites Niche Social-Media Sites General Social-Media Sites Job Sites It includes some of the obvious sites like Digg, and Del.icio.us, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Tribe, Wikipedia and 43Things, and Monster. But there are also some sites that I had not thought of or heard of like Wet Paint for free wikis, SEO TAGG for articles about search engine optimization. The article provides a pretty good primer on what each of these 50 sites specializes in, so it is a pretty good resource to review if you have heard of Furl, or Squidoo but have no idea what they...

The Way We Work: Steph Pakrul

In a new twist on our “Way We Work” series, I present this interview with one of our star themers, Steph Pakrul. This is sort of the first in a two-parter–Steph works very closely with her husband, Chris Fassnacht, so close, we sometimes refer to them as “Christeph”. Without further ado: Gregory: Have you worked remotely before working for CivicActions? Steph: Yep, I’ve worked remotely most of my career, at least the parts I’ve enjoyed the most! I started doing web design contract work in high school and have always kept it up, at least part time. GH: Do you work from home? or from an office? or a cafe? Do you work around other people? or alone? SP: I work from home, together with my husband Chris. We have a warehouse loft in Oakland with a dedicated office space. We do enjoy getting together with other local CivicActioners and coworking on occasion. GH: What kind of computer do you work on primarily? what are your favorite peripherals? 30 inch monitor? track ball? SP: I’ve got a pretty beefy self-built desktop with dual monitors (one widescreen, for code/Photoshop/email and one 4:3 for web browser), ergonomic split keyboard, and trackball. We’ve got a great home office with a NAS for backup and sharing all our files and laser multifunction printer. I also have a Macbook that I use for lighter work while stretched out on the couch, and testing sites in Safari. I definitely couldn’t live without my hyper-programmable trackball. GH: Any special furniture you could not work without? SP: No, actually my furniture kinda sucks (cheapest Ikea legs +...