Gelform builds web apps

I built the Birdy and posted it on the Startup Guild forum. I immediately got some great feedback, and I thought, “Boy, this is great. How can I be sure that continues?” So the first thing I added to to my prototype was a “contact us” link to every page.

I was proud of my creation. So when I got around to making the marketing pages, I was sure to include an “about the Birdy” page that included my story and a photo of me. After a couple of weeks I noticed a trend in the analytics. People were visiting the “about us” page, and then signing up. So I moved my photo and story up to the homepage and saw an increase in sign ups.

I wanted to talk to the people signing up. An occasional email through the contact form wasn’t enough. So I installed SnapEngage, which adds a classy little “chat with us now” window to every page of your site. Nice and subtle, which is my own personal style. A few people a day would chat with me, tell me about bugs they found, or make suggestions. It was great, but SnapEngage was expensive. So after some research, I switched to Zopim, because it was cheaper, even though it wasn’t as classy. It has this big goofy “chat with us now!” speech bubble over the little window, and it says my name in big letters. Twice as many people started chatting with me.

I finally get the store proprietor analogy. I start every support email with “Hey!” because that’s how I talk, and if someone walked into a store I owned, that’s how I would greet them. I apologize when someone has trouble, and I share in their joy when they have a great experience. Even though not all the feedback I get is positive, it all helps me learn how to help better server the next person to walk through the door.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Ira Glass
(By way of Mike Helmuth)

I use Cron jobs to trigger PHP scripts that send out emails, update records or check on data. Cron jobs are wonderful things, working while you sleep. But because they’re one computer talking to another, it’s hard to know what they’re up to. It’s common to have them output to a log, but what if they fail? How do you know? I’ve found that no matter how solid my code is, something can always go wrong.

Here’s a trick I’ve been using for a while now that works well. Write your script to do whatever task you need. This could be in any language. Have it print statements of it’s progress as it goes along – “found 10 records”, “starting loop of 10 records”, “updating user record #1″, “updating user record #2″… you get the picture. This is great because you can go hit the page in the browser and test it a few times.

Now here’s the trick. Don’t reference the script directly in your Cron job. Write another script that uses Curl to call your script and return the results, and then have it log or email you what it returns. What’s nice about this is that it will return your “found 10 records” statements, but it will also return anything else “printed” to the page, like warnings, and fatal errors.

All you have to do is remember to check your log or emails once in a while.