The Small Green Tree Blog

Ryan from visualrush.com spotted that the co-branding tag on emails (ie ‘web-form-processor powered by your-domain.com‘) was not being displayed if the email was retrieved via www.buddydata.com.

That’s now fixed.

Thanks Ryan!

If you’re interested in a simple, fit-and-forget, powerful, and FREE backup solution for your PC, we can recommend MOZY (When we say “free” - you get 2Gb of free storage, but if you need more storage the pricing is very reasonable).

We discovered MOZY following a bit of a scare we had with an office PC the other day. It was a Monday morning (when else?) and our normally totally reliable but aging Compaq refused to wake up. “Holy cow - what’s going on!”

Now we did have a backup plan for the PC in place. But it’s at a time like this that you discover how good or bad that plan is.

The trouble is - we have tried many types of backup software for our office PC’s down the years, and we’ve never really been happy with any of them. Backup is one of those problems that if you start to think about it it’s like turning over a stone.

• what do you back up? It seems practically impossible to backup up everything because of speed/storage constraints
• how many backups? Do you simple keep one total backup that you overwrite each time? If so, what if you have some corruption or loss from two weeks ago? If the backup is daily, unless you catch it before the next backup dump, the error will simply be written into your backup data! The solution to this problem is “incremental” or “differential” backup” - but then that makes the first issue of storage space even harder and requires intelligent backup software
• when do you backup?
• where do you keep the backups?
• how do you know the restore will work when push comes to shove?

I remember on one occasion we needed to restore a backup we had dutifully kept. We had used a built-in Microsoft Windows utility which we had wrongly assumed to be future proof. I forget the Windows versions involved - it may have been 3.1 & 95 - but when it came to restore we found the backup files (from the previous Windows version) were no longer recognized by the new Windows software. The backup disks ended up in the bin (fortunately the setback wasn’t too severe).

In the case of our deceased Compaq PC we found that sure enough some key files had been getting regularly backed up across the LAN on another PC. This was using Acronis Backup (that I can’t say we can recommend). We had set up the routine some months back. How good was it going to be now that we needed to use the backups in anger?

Well what we found was that we did not face a huge problem - the most important data was saved. But all the same it was clear that it was going to take a lot of time and patience to get back to the status quo. Very tedious.
And why was that? Why was the backup so limited? Well, we had found that although Acronis claimed to offer FTP backup to a web server, it never really worked properly. And even across the LAN it was so slow and resource-hungry we had found it only practical to backup the most critical data only. The result was that we felt obliged to take a calculated gamble with the medium-critical data!

Anyhoo, the ending was a happy one. We discovered that the heatsink on the Compaq processor had lifted clear, and as a result the machine was quite sensibly refusing to boot for safety reasons. Once the heatsink was fixed the lovely beast woke up and the data was safe (I say “fixed”, the technology involved a whisky tumbler of cold water sat on top of the processor - a solution only marginally improved since then by a paperweight fixed on top of the heatsink!).

But it was in the course of all this hassle that we stumbled across a link to MOZY - and very good it seems to be too.

MOZY is an Internet backup solution - so you don’t need to worry about disks or backup media. The key features are:

• simple to set up
• Performs backups automatically in the background
• Encrypts all files on your PC before transfer
• Performs incremental backups
• Backs up only blocks that have changed
• Backs up open/locked files

Our experience so far? I guess we’d say “it does exactly what it says on the tin“, and we are very pleased. It seems to be able to work in the background without a fuss. That’s probably because of the capability it has to lock/unlock files. However for this feature to work you may need to change your hard drive from FAT32 to NTFS if you haven’t done so already (in Windows XP that can be done by selecting Control panel >> Administrative Tools >> Computer Management >> Disk Management).

To get a free 2GB Mozy account click here

We have now added support for the Australian Bank Card to web-store-buddy (web-form-buddy payment forms already have this).

Not a year goes by it seems without new countries being added to the European Union. With the start of 2007 the number of EU countries increased form 25 to 27 with the addition of Bulgaria and Romania.

If you’re in the EU this may affect how your store needs to charge sales tax (VAT) for these countries. So we are pleased to announce that we have updated web-store-buddy to cope with the EU enlargement.

This is now the full list of EU countries:

AT ~ Austria
BE ~ Belgium
BG ~ Bulgaria
CY ~ Cyprus
CZ ~ Czech Republic
DE ~ Germany
DK ~ Denmark
EE ~ Estonia
ES ~ Spain
FI ~ Finland
FR ~ France
GB ~ United Kingdom
GR ~ Greece
HU ~ Hungary
IE ~ Ireland
IT ~ Italy
LT ~ Lithuania
LU ~ Luxembourg
LV ~ Latvia
MT ~ Malta
NL ~ Netherlands
PL ~ Poland
PT ~ Portugal
RO ~ Romania
SE ~ Sweden
SI ~ Slovenia
SK ~ Slovakia

At present we do not offer an affiliate scheme for our “buddy” web site applications.

All our buddy applications (web-form-buddy, refer-a-buddy, web-store-buddy & opt-in-buddy) are licensed on a per web site basis and are renewably annually.

However there are no other restrictions or extra costs whatsoever (apart from web-store-buddy, our shopping cart application, where the price depends on the number of products you sell).

• web-form-buddy: No limit on the number of forms you can set up. No limit or cap or additional cost on the number of form submissions you can receive
• refer-a-buddy: Can be set up on as many pages of your web site as you like. No limit on the number of referrals
• opt-in-buddy: Can be set up on as many pages of your web site as you like. No limit on the number of opt-ins

Having said that, many of our customers, for example those who are professional web designers, require subscriptions for more than one web site, and we are keen to support them!

One way we are doing this is through co-branding. We will be rolling this out for all the buddy applications, but it is already in place for web-form-buddy. This feature means that you can replace the ‘powered by web-form-buddy.com‘ link with a link to your own web site.

But we also offer a discount scheme for multiple subscriptions.

This works on a “make two payments, get the next one free” basis, and is the equivalent to a discount of around 30%.

To claim a free license on this scheme just start a free trial for a new account. Then give us the details of two previous accounts and we will uprade your new trial account to a full 12 month subscription.

When you apply for the free account, please provide the details of two payments you have made to qualify for the free license.

• the domain names
• the user ID’s
• the dates of the subscription payments &, if possible, the PayPal or WorldPay payment reference of the payments

(Of course we also need the domain name and user ID of the account for which you are claiming a free license!)

The following conditions apply:

• The qualifying payments can be for new accounts only (not renewals or upgrades)
• A payment can only be used once to claim a license discount
• This scheme applies to all our “buddy” products. But a payment for one type of buddy product cannot qualify towards a different type of buddy product. For example, two payments for refer-a-buddy can only qualify for a third free refer-a-buddy license, and not, say, for a web-from-buddy license
• Ethical marketing: We have a zero tolerance policy towards spam (unsolicited bulk email). We expressly forbid the marketing of any of our products in this way. If you are in any doubt as to what constitutes “spam”, please visit http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html. In particular we note the requirement for email recipients to have granted “verifiable permission”. If we discover that any of our products are being marketed unethically we reserve the right to cancel any discount scheme and, if appropriate. all accounts associated with the spam activities

To apply for a discount simply uses the contact form on any of our “buddy” web sites.

Back in November we added to the capability to include the email address of the person sending you the form in your email subject line text.

The main benefit of adding field data to the email subject line text is that it can help you to scan and sort your incoming form data easier. So to make this even better, following a suggestion from Steve at Saint Specialties, we have done a little more work, and now - for regular, non-secure forms - you can choose to include the data from any field in the email subject line text! (any field, but it needs to be a web-form-buddy required field).

For secure (SSL) forms it would not be safe to include the data in the email subject line as it would not be encrypted. However if you have a field in your form for an email address (and you make it a web-form-buddy required field and you switch on the email validation rule), then you are able to use that.

To set up and use this feature you go to your control panel, select configure form and then select email options.

First add the special tag marker to your email subject line text. This marker will be replaced by the data from the form field.

The tag marker is: !FIELD!

Then choose the field that you want to use to replace the tag marker from the list of required fields.

Hey presto - you’re done!

Some folks think we are heading for man-made global warming catastrophe. Some folks are not so sure.

Without taking sides on the global warming debate, here’s a really cool piece of software to download and install for free.

LocalCooling.com - Fight Global Warming From Your Desktop

This is a really cool web application that helps you save money (or the planet - the choice is yours).

At http://www.localcooling.com/ you can download a bit of freebie software that you can use to control and monitor your PC’s energy use and settings. What’s cool is that it shows you the energy savings you are making in real-time translated into concrete terms such as how many trees and how many gallons of oil you have saved. Also (if you wish) your savings data can be posted back to localcooling.com where they publish the total savings being made by all participating users.

Here’s how it looks:

N.B. to get those stats to show in this blog I had to place the code in an HTML iframe. Unfortunately that means the link “Join The Fight” won’t work. Instead you can fight your fight by going here

Previously If you chose to charge a percentage rate for shipping with web-store-buddy you could only choose a whole number (eg 5%, 10%, 15%). Now it’s possible to specify a percentage rate to one decimal place precision. Cool! eg 5.7%, 6.9% etc.

(Thanks to Diane at yellowbarnweb.com for the suggestion)

The exact workings of Google’s ranking method is known only to Google of course. However here is an article that provides a very well educated guess at factors which may help your ranking - and factors that may damage it!

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm