The warning bar has mouse rollover effects and can be linked to any page of your choice. You can see a simple example here: Warning Bar Example

I went ahead and zipped up my version and uploaded it to Secure Delivery- its a free download, so if you want it feel free click below and begin your download- no signups, mailing lists, etc.

It’s nothing special- a few lines of code- but it might save you a few minutes one day.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Enter IE Tester, a handy free tool that lets you check your site using the rendering engines in IE 5.5, 6, 7, and 8 (beta 1).

Its an awesome piece of kit for web developers and its cheap and free! You can download the alpha version of IE Tester from My DebugBar.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

We switched to SupportCenter after having some issues with Kayako. Kayako was great software too, but it’s encoded and required a performance robbing decoder that affected the entire server. That and Kayako’s customer service sucks.

The Support Desk

SupportCenter does just what we need it to do without all the extra fluff. You can tell they really took a Gmail philosophy to UI design with their “less is more” AJAX interface that is clean and easy to use. There is a full featured trouble ticket system complete with escalation rules, multiple cues and notifications, custom data fields, and email piping. We use these features in a couple different ways:

Web Based Tickets-

SupportCenter allows you to insert a ticket submission form anywhere on your website. For us this was key as we wanted to integrate the support form in to our Secure Delivery app and pass user information from Secure Delivery to the help desk system. We set up a few custom data fields for user information that we use in troubleshooting problems customers are having- things like their account email address, customer ID in our system, and account class. Once there were set up we designed the integrated support ticket form to pass these variables for logged in users using simple hidden form fields.

When the tickets come in the are automatically filtered based on the custom fields like account class- tickets from paid accounts go in to a high priority queue while free accounts go in to the regular queue. Using the Support Center notification system I have an alert set up to send me a text message to my cell phone email address for priority paid tickets so even if I’m sipping on burbon in the back yard I’ll know a paying customer needs me.

Email Based Tickets-

Support Center also supports email piping, the must have feature for a serious support solution. Basically what email piping does is parse incoming emails to a specific address, read them, and insert them in to the web based support ticket system. This is important basically two ways-

First, when we reply to a web based ticket (the standard way for SD users to create support requests) the reply is automatically sent to the customer’s email. They can then simply reply to the email in their email reader to update their ticket. Their replies are piped to Support Center, parsed in to the support database, and show up in our web based administration panel automatically. This is far superior to other systems where you have to click on a link to go to a reply web page, enter a ticket ID and password, and then reply.

Second, email piping allows users to create new tickets by simply sending an email to our support@ address without even going to the web site. Although we don’t get the custom field information on the customer such as user ID when they email their support requests in directly, we do store the custom field information within Support Center so if they have ever submitted a ticket through the web form in the past it still shows up with their email. All custom fields have the option to be ticket based (associated with this incident) or user based so that their custom info shows up on every ticket they submit, even through email.

There is great value here for the money, and at $99 as opposed to the $299 Kayako eSupport price its really hard to beat.

Knowledgebase

Support Center also includes a built-in knowledgebase system that is quick and easy to use. You can easily create categories and KB articles. You can attach images to KB posts while you create it making the generation process that much quicker- no seperate ftp uploading. The KB generates search engine friendly URLs automatically and actually generates static HTML pages as opposed to dynamic docs. To check it out in more detail you can see the Secure Delivery Knowledgebase.

The knowledgebase is nearly perfect- the features you need without any extra crap slowing you down. I love it- now I just need to find the time to write about 100 kb articles…

Oh, and one other thing- the web based ticket forms, even custom integrated forms, can load KB article suggestions as the users type their questions in through a bit of javascript- an awesome feature that keeps users from asking already answered questions over and over again :)

Support Center… Support

I have only had one problem with Support Center- a funny error with generating KB articles. The great thing is that after contacting the developers they diagnosed the issue, solved the problem, and had an update posted to their website in less than 3 days! I know a little bit about web application development, and let me tell you- this was awesome.

They regularly update Support Center as you can see from their changelog. They use web based delivery to issue updates, so you can easily log in to your account and download the most current version at any time.

The only gripe I have with Support Center, if you can even call it that, is that its mildly difficult to customize. I’m used to looking at complex web applications, so I can somewhat sort through the mix of AJAX, php, and HTML to find what I’m looking for, but they sure didn’t make it easy. While they did provide some basic template files to change the basic submission form, knowledgebase layout, etc. I could see novice developers having a hard time wrapping their head around customizations.

Still, this is a small price to pay for all the power and functionality you get for such a great price, and I would recommend Support Center to anyone who wants a full featured, reliable support desk without breaking the bank.

Give Support Center a look, try their online demo, or download the free single agent version to give it a try- you won’t be disappointed.

Note: The links above are not affiliate links. We personally use this software at Secure Delivery, I love it, and thats why I’m recommending it. If you want an affiliate link you can click here :)

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

1. Product Affiliate Program

Now vendors can set up and run their own product affiliate programs for any PayPal or 2CheckOut product. Secure Delivery charges not transaction fees, setup fees, approval fees, or anything else.

The Product Affiliate Program will always be included with paid accounts free of charge with no additional fees, and for a limited time even Free accounts can set up the affiliate program for their free trial product!

The Secure Delivery Product Affiliate Program supports traditional hop-links as well as our special touch- Affiliate Buy Buttons. Now affiliates can sell your products directly from their blogs, email lists, and even forum posts while you maintain complete control over the payment and download. Maybe a better way to think of affiliate buy buttons is “managed resale” or something, eh?

When you enable the Product Affiliate Program for a product it is automatically added to your Affiliate Program Manager on the dashboard. From here you can get your unique affiliate signup URL, invite or remove affiliates, download PayPal Masspay files to pay out affiliates, and access communication options to email all your affiliates, all affiliates for a single product, or a specific affiliate.

2. 2CheckOut Support

We now support 2CheckOut as a paid account processor. We also support 2CheckOut for use with the Product Affiliate Program.

3. User Interface Improvements

We have tweaked the user interface to incorporate all the new affiliate features for both vendors and promoters. As a result, Secure Delivery users will notice a new tabbed Dashboard interface and tweaked visuals during the product setup process.

4. New Support System and Knowledge base

We’ve upgraded the crappy old support system to a true email based ticket system with email piping, priority queuing, and the like. We’re pretty nuts about product support and our old system was not meeting our expectations so this is a welcome upgrade for us anyway :)

The new Secure Delivery Knowledgebase is pretty slick too. We’re still adding articles, but there is already a wealth of information and setup guides already listed. Its not a bad place to learn more about Secure Delivery either- be sure to check it out!

But We’re not done…

Throughout the month we will be releasing bug-fixes and enhancements based on user feedback to improve upon the already unique and powerful Affiliate Program features.

As I stated above, running your own affiliate programs will be a paid account feature, but for a limited time we have it open to all accounts- including free. We’re really proud of our results and we think you’ll like it too- try Secure Delivery free now.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

My goal for 2008 is to grow Secure Delivery to the point where it is my primary, full time source of income. As it stands now, Secure Delivery is in the black but does not generate enough income where we can work on it exclusively- we have to make ends meet with other contract jobs, outside development, etc.

I don’t like that. What I do like is working on Secure Delivery. Thats what I want to do full time, and damn the rest. Right now updates are slow to SD, and with good reason- we have to pay the bills somehow. Its hard to dedicate the time needed to grow a business when it only produces a fraction of your income, but we are willing to do it.

It will be a hard goal to reach though. For one, my current income level, and the current income level of my business partner, are pretty high by world standards. We both make in excess of $50,000 a year now, so there will have to be major growth to replace all that income from multiple contracts, etc. with income from Secure Delivery. We are both willing to take a “pay cut” to make it work, but we have to be realistic- we both have mortgages, car payments, and wives- or in the case of my business partner, a wife by the end of the year :)

On the bright side, Secure Delivery is picking up. Sign-ups are up, paid subscriptions are up, and we have a couple great features that are coming out in the next few months that are going to rock people’s socks off. We are structuring the non-fee parts of our site to expose users to the paid features to help conversions and planning a whole rash of promotional methods to get the word out on our new features and the overall Secure Delivery offering.

I predict 2008 will be a good year- here’s to everyone meeting their goals in the new year.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Click on the static image below to see an example of the dynamic charts that we are integrating now:

We plan to release a full analytics package that will show composite and drill down stats for each product and for every processor. Of course, this is a big undertaking so we’re going to start with the affiliate system we are developing now and eventually release the analytics site wide for standard products, products that use ClickBank and PayDotCom, etc. in the future.

I think they’re pretty slick and will definitely be a selling point for users who want treat their digital product sales as an actual business as opposed to those just wanting to make a few bucks. Casual sellers will think they are pretty cool too :)

This is just one of the features we are currently implimenting to attract experienced, professional sellers and those new to digital product sales alike.

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

When you run a big online service (code-wise in this example) there are always a number of bugs. Most of these bugs are minor issues that don’t affect the functionality of the service- for example, on the Secure Delivery forums I know there is a slight table misalignment in the forum navigation bar that makes it 10px too far to the left. These kinds of bugs impact no one adversely, and to be honest I don’t think most would even notice.

Every now and then one of our users will uncover what we call a “show stopper”, or critical bug that immediately stops them from being able to use the service. These are the most severe sort of bug- they are the ones that lead to canceled accounts if you don’t work quickly and decisively to fix them ASAP.

Luckily, our number of show stopper bugs has been very few- I think we have had 3 or 4 total reported, and all were fixed within 24 hours. Typically when we encounter a confirmed show stopper bug that prevents a subscriber from using the service we refund their entire month of subscription fees as a way of apologizing for the inconvenience and thanking them for working with us to resolve their issue. This seems to work well, and our attrition rate on people that report errors is very low.

Unfortunately, every now and then you get a show stopper bug that you are unable to reproduce. “The Bug From Hell” (TBFH) was one of these bugs. It involved large product uploads not being saved to the product database even after giving the user the proper feedback and letting them complete the setup process.

In Secure Delivery each product has a little icon that shows its current readiness status to be sold- most products have a green check mark under the status column (or “green light”) and are 100% good to go. If there is a problem during product creation Secure Delivery flags products with problems with a yellow exclamation point icon, or what we call a “yellow light”. This shows the user that the product is not ready to be sold and usually results from bailing out of the product creation process before entering all the required information, loss of connectivity to the Internet during product setup, etc.

Well, TBFH was not saving the uploads and causing a “yellow light” to show up for that product’s status. Let me tell you, the most maddening thing a customer can ever see after uploading their big ass product for 30 minutes is a yellow light when they think they are done.

TBFH only affected the 0.3% of our users who uploaded big products, and it was completely random at that. Sometimes everything worked great (we have 700MB ISO files successfully stored in our database), and sometimes it would just grind the server to a halt. By big uploads I mean in excess of 90MB when our average product size is somewhere around 12MB. Unfortunately, that 0.3% were also paying customers, so it usually resulted in someone paying for Secure Delivery getting peeved (free accounts are limited to 50MB products, so they could never experience the error).

The worst thing about TBFH was that we knew it existed, but we were unable to reproduce (and fix) it until now. Long story short, last night we were able to successfully identify the cause of the bug and fix it after a subscriber reported the issue to us. After identifying the issue we were able to tweak a couple files and we have been busy testing the fix this morning. Shortly we will push the bug fix to production and update the customer on it’s status (we don’t typically push updates at night- we like to be awake if something breaks).

On the plus side, the tweak made to correct The Bug From Hell will improve overall performance for everyone. It’s not often that there is something wrong that we can’t fix with Secure Delivery, even if it affects only a small minority of our users. I’ve actually lost sleep over this one, so let me tell you- after testing the fix last night I slept like a baby :)

In an hour or so TBFH will be history and I feel great!

Sponsored By: Portal Labs Custom web application design and development that doesn’t suck.

Server Environment:

While I am not going to give server specifications here for security reasons, I will say that we lease dedicated Linux boxes for Secure Delivery. The #1 reason for having a dedicated server is that we completely control the web server environment and no other shared hosts on the same server can compromise the integrity of our service.

We access the server using sFTP (SSL enabled FTP) and SSH mostly. I use SmartFTP (or the built in FTP in Dreamweaver) for the sFTP and Putty for the SSH. As opposed to telnet and regular FTP, the SSL enabled methods are secure and someone can’t see the information we are transmitting over the Internet between our development computers and the web server in plain text like the non-SSL counterparts. A little more of a pain in the ass to set up, but worth it fo the security benefits.

We also enjoy root access via SSH so that we can configure every aspect of the server including the linux kernel used, apache and php versions, etc. This is critical for maintaining your own web service that does more than just serve HTML pages, but is more complicated than simple $5 shared hosting (after all, you have to learn Linux and how to actually administer a web server).

Backups:

We also have a stand-alone solution in the same data center that we run daily backups of Secure Delivery to at night. In the event of complete hardware failure on one of the production Secure Delivery boxes, we can re-image a new server using backup data over a private NIC within minutes and be 100% operational again within hours.

Version Control:

We use Subversion for version control on the server. On my windows machine I use TortoiseSVN to browse repositories, and it integrates well with Dreamweaver.

The basic premise of version control is this: My business partner Jacob has his own working copy, as do I. We make changes to our working copies, check them in to the “main” repository. Code conflicts are resolved here (if say, both Jacob and I work on the same page). SVN automatically emails both of us when a check in is made and tells us whats changed. When a feature is complete, we “publish” the main repository to the live site.

This basically allows us to work on projects for days or weeks without it affecting the live site. When we do publish the site is down for about 12 seconds while the new pages are written and the new features are instantly available to subscribers.

Writing Code:

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3: I started using Dreamweaver back when it was owned by Macromedia and called UltraDev back in 1998ish. I like dreamweaver for its integrated FTP, handy code browser, good CSS display, layout, and editing support, and its Live Data / development server functions.

Its also probably the most expensive editor on the market, but its the choice of pros everywhere.

If I’m making a quick edit on the web server, I’ll use Vi, a built in editor in most every Linux version.

Image Editing:

Photoshop CS3: I don’t really think I need to explain Photoshop as its the gold standard for image editing, period. I will say that it is difficult to learn for beginners because of the 2,000,000 different features, but there are also 50,000,000 tutorials online to show you how to do just about anything. Couple that with free resource sites like BittBox who give away brushes and link great content and you’ll be ’shoppin with the best of them.

Vector Editing:

I use Illustrator CS3 for vector editing. I would rather make buttons, logos, etc. in Illustrator because vector graphics scale without losing quality. Illustrator CS3 is expensive, and I would call it optional for most people if you are not buying it in an Adobe package like we did.

Tutorials:

For screen-casts and tutorials I use a pretty old version of Macromedia Captivate. This lets you record screenshots and animations and annotate or voice over your presentation, showing how to do complex tasks on your screen. It outputs a Flash version of your video to embed in web pages.

Web Video:

I use Sorenson Squeeze to encode web video formats. It does just about everything from WMV to Flash video.

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In conclusion, my toolbox is not the most affordable out there. For those just starting out online there are may free resources that will do most of the functions of the software above, but at a much more approachable price tag. The reason I use the expensive stuff is this- I am used to it. I hate nothing more than learning new software, so I tend to stick with the expensive stuff I know.

I hope that answers your message mystery contact person, and I hope it was at least interesting to read.