i broke the world

OK well maybe not the world...
I was as surprised as anyone that having looked at the analytics I'm getting about 30 or so folks every day (and even more so that someone's reading this on a blackberry!).  I thought I wonder if I can put google's adsense up on the blog and make some money.
I then followed the required steps and filled in the necessary form that needs a non sub domain so ben.best as opposed to blog.ben.best) this I filled in and although they promised me a response in a week a few hours later I received a response back telling me that there wasn't enough contents on http://ben.best/
Following my cname success with lunch.ben.best I thought "I can do this". Those astute enough to have looked at the website http://ben.best will have realised that I can't. Of course because this is DNS I will need to leave it a couple of days (at least) to confirm that I have messed it up and not got it right but it's not propagated yet.  I suspect it might be a few days before http://ben.best is also pointing to this blog.
I might have it right, and the little checkbox that says 'redirect ben.best to blog.ben.best' in the blogger settings might actually work or I might have it wrong and have to go back either way I suspect that it's a lucky thing I'm not relying on my DNS expertise or the (yet to exist) ads on this site.
In the meantime buy this book and read it (oh and I'll make a couple of pennies if you do).

managing a mailing list

This was specific advice I wrote to a friend who is starting to look into email marketing.

As with all things it sort of depends exactly what you're trying to do. I'm going to imagine that you're trying to send out a weekly email to around 3000 people.

What not to do:

Don't try putting their emails into the bcc field.

It's really easy to mess this up and put it into the cc, meaning that you've sent everyone each others email addresses.

Also doing it that way you end up having to deal with unsubscribes, people changing email address etc. all yourself.

What I'd suggest:

Look at mailchimp.com and campaignmonitor.com

They're both good, I've used both in the past, I have a slight preference for mailchimp as their ceo bought me pudding once but look at both and decide which you prefer.

Use one of their included templates it's free or nearly free, it means that you know it works with their site and has been tested to look good in most mail clients.

After you've sent out a few you might decide that you want to create or have created a specific template.  That's great and I'm happy to help with this (by which I mean I can recommend some people), but I'd wait and see if you're happy with what you're doing first and then look at it.

Test, test, test.

Create a small group (3-4 people max) of friendly people who can phrase criticism well (I'm happy to be on this) . Before you send any email out to a large group send it to these people and then email them as a group (this time cc them in) asking for comments.  This should mean that some mistakes get caught (some will always get through).

Allow people to unsubscribe easily

This should be covered by the template, the reason you want this is that if you don't do this then people will mark your emails as spam.  That means the big providers will start to see all you emails as spam. As well as this mailchimp, campaign monitor or whoever will stop providing services to you (they'll warn you first) they can't afford emails they send to be marked as spam.

Make your emails relevant

Following on from the above, there is no point in sending an email to a group of people that have never been to your venue a discount for those returning for the 25th time. (There are better examples but this was the one that came to mind).

Both Campaign monitor and mailchimp allow you to split your subscribers into groups, do this. It will take time and be frustrating but it's worth doing.  It will allow you to send more targeted emails that are more relevant and therefore produce (hopefully) better results.  Mail chip also definitely allows you to add code to add subscribers directly from your website, you should do this as well and if you can have them put into specific groups.

Look at the stats

After you've started sending the emails it's important to look at the stats that are generated.  It will allow you to start refining what to put in and when you send emails.

That's probably more than enough for a starter and no doubt contains some irrelevant bits that you already know and others that you don't need to.

reading about testing and then remembering that this is fun...

As expected I got a bit of a chance to play with the app this evening.

I started looking at the velocity test framework that I was talking about previously.  I found a couple of very interesting articles and managed to get the cucumber example running.  You do this by running test.sh in the higher directory I suspect that this is to do with which of the test tools require a mirror to work and which don't.
These are the links that I found most useful and intend to return to at least once:
Youtube video about velocity

Velocity and Jasmine really (really) thorough blog post

Then I continued with the app...
I added a login function (though I'm not yet actually using it for anything and it has an annoying extra button that I need to figure out how to remove).
I've also added a total time and a button that uses some of the router magic to work with links.

Finally I played with DNS and now the url lunch.ben.best points to the current deployed version of the app.  That's a really nice (and really simple) option from meteor, they're still hosting it, it's all done with cname magic.

Of course once I deployed the app I messed up the data, so that I know where to come back to to reset the data the details of how are in this stack overflow answer.

I've got a day long usability course at work tomorrow, so that should be interesting.  I may well decide that it's time to re-visit the wireframes or perhaps start from scratch.

I'm really pleased with where I am so far and will continue to get there, here's an image of where we are so far:

Note the url

innovation days, mailing lists and scheduled tasks

as expected I had a couple of nights off, but now I'm back.
Some interesting things have been happening at work, from next year we'll have "innovation days" these are days we book through the holiday booking system that we can take some time to look at something interesting and to prepare to present it to the company. I have a couple of plans for this that I'll go through at a later date.  I think it's supposed to resemble the 20% from Google and is a really interesting path for us to be heading down.  I'd like to see if I can bring something from the Christmas lunch project into it but we'll see how that goes.
I was also asked my advice on setting up a weekly mailing, which I've responded to (http://blog.ben.best/2014/12/managing-mailing-list.html), but I'll put my thoughts into a blog post (so that next time I'm asked it's easy to find the details).  I'll have to make a couple of changes to the details to protect the innocent but I should get that up later today or tomorrow.
I'll be back on the lunch app later today, I've also had a couple of ideas for little apps to do after this one is finished.  I'd like to do a house buying / selling checklist tool and maybe make it generic enough that it can also be used for other similar things (registering a birth / death etc.). I suspect / hope that I'll eventually be able to merge them into one thing with an idea of templates so if you're cooking a Christmas lunch or buying a house it's the same underlying tool, but you use a different set of templated steps.
Finally I realised I hadn't put up a screen dump of where I am so far with the app:

It's a start (do not use these timings for your Christmas lunch)

couple of nights off

Yesterday Simone was out so I was child wrangling, this evening we had a lovely friend round for dinner. This has meant that I haven't been able to get on with the project.
It's unlikely that I will be able to make any headway tomorrow either.   However I have been thinking about it and will be fiddling with the wireframes over the weekend.

playing with velocity

It's pretty, that's not something I had thought I'd say about a testing framework. Velocity is really pretty. It also works with a load of test frameworks and reporters.  I had some problems downloading the examples (that wasn't their fault, I'd messed up my git install somehow), but when I did there were examples for jasmine, nightwatch, cucumber and mocha. I really wanted to get cucumber working as there are several of my colleagues who are big fans of it, unfortunately only the nightwatch and mocha examples seemed to work.  I'll play a bit more with them, but this looks promising.
Velocity looks really nice and I'm looking forward to playing properly with it.

See it's pretty

unit tests because "later equals never"

Having re-read my previous post and having come across Robert Greiner's quote "Later equals never" again I decided to stop and figure out how the unit testing worked within meteor.  This led to me finding Velocity which looks really interesting. Unfortunately my laptop decided that I wasn't able to use git any more.  I've now fixed this but it means I've only now been able to get the example application downloaded.  I've read the details on their website and think that this should be feasible, but it'll be tomorrow now before I get to play with it properly.

I'll also probably be revisiting the code that I'm not happy with before I continue moving on, I say probably as I'm still not certain of the right way of doing this.  Hopefully all will become clear as I read more of the meteor book.  The next chapter is on adding users which should be interesting.  I tried to do this myself previously with meteor and really messed it up, so it'll be nice reading how it's supposed to be done.