Category Archives: Web

Introducing sendcat.com

I send files to people, you send files to people. People who have computers need to send files, it’s something we have needed to do since computers were first invented. It could be easier.

Sending files is laborious. You have to open an email, address it, click ‘attach’, choose the file, put something in the subject line, put something in the body and send it. Hassle. I’m tired of doing this.

Sendcat logo

That’s why I created sendcat.com. It’s a web service that makes it *really* simple to send files. There are services out there that promise two-step sending, I’m aiming for one-step file sending.

I want to make it simple to send files, but most developers are heavy terminal users. I’m planning on providing a CLI (Command Line Interface) client as a first-class interface to the Sendcat service.

Join the beta team, get a discount

If you’re interested in the beta head over to sendcat.com and put in your email address, I’ll let you know when it’s in beta and you can sign up. I’ll make sure there is some sort of discount for people who want to keep using the service when the beta period is up, sign up to make sure you’re eligible.

Alpha

Right now Sendcat is in alpha. I’m looking for people to use the service (for free) while I work on features and bug fixes. It works though, I’m using it to send files to people daily.

If you want to try out the service for free email me. You will need a Mac OS X or Linux machine, RubyGems installed and a knowledge of the command line. The GUI client is coming soon.

Happy sharing!

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Should I switch from Sendgrid to Amazon SES?

Update: A new comparison with updated Sendgrid prices, and Postmark is available here.

Probably yes, at least if price is your main concern and you are just concerned with sending email and not with extras. I wanted to see just how the Amazon SES prices stacked up against (that I am aware of) the next cheapest provider, Sendgrid so I graphed it (thanks to carldr for the help with the Grapher formulas):

Cost comparison for Amazon SES/Sendgrid, click for a larger version.

SendGrid can’t be too happy with that, in short at no point is it better to go with SendGrid over SES if you are only taking price into account. Of course SendGrid have value-add over just plain email sending, you decide if it’s worth the premium, but for me the only feature I’d want would be the ‘Whitelabel’ option, and Amazon SES has that included.

Note that you get 2000 emails per day free with Amazon SES if you send from an Amazon EC2 instance, but at this scale there is very little visible difference in cost. I thought it would be useful to take into account the cost of an EC2 instance, even if you have your main server elsewhere you could run your email processing on a micro or small EC2 machine to take advantage of the 2000 free emails per day, here’s a zoom in on the origin:

Cost comparison for Amazon SES/Sendgrid + EC2 instance cost , click for a larger version.

So, there is no point in spinning up an EC2 instance to take advantage of the 2000 free emails per day.

I will be interested in SendGrid’s response to this. Possibly lowering prices? For me certainly their value-add isn’t worth the extra cost over Amazon SES.

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Blocking Internet Explorer 5.5

IE 5.5 is dead. The number of people using it are tiny, at least according to the stats on the most popular sites I run. Here are the numbers.

Jokes-o-matic

Has a larger proportion of Firefox users than Internet Explorer users due to the high level of traffic from some social bookmarking sites, meaning a more web-savvy crowd who are more likely to be using alternative browsers:

jokes-o-matic.com browser breakdown

jokes-o-matic.com browser breakdown

The level of IE usage is still pretty high though, but even so only a single hit from IE 5.5 recently:

jokes-o-matic.com IE versions

jokes-o-matic.com IE versions

Recycling Group Finder

A much more broad and ‘average’ user base with Internet Explorer dominant:

Recycling Group Finder browser breakdown

Recycling Group Finder browser breakdown

Still, only 6 Internet Explorer hits recently, a tiny proportion of overall visits:

Recycling Group Finder IE versions

Recycling Group Finder IE versions

What does this mean?

Yahoo.com as seen in Internet Explorer 5.5

Yahoo.com as seen in Internet Explorer 5.5

These statistics, and others I have seen suggest that almost no-one uses Internet Explorer 5.5 or below any more. The small minority that do must be used to the internet breaking in unique and interesting ways due to the lack of support for more recent developments in CSS and really bad Javascript support (see right for yahoo.com as seen in Internet Explorer 5.5). I predict that a fair number of sites just don’t work in any usable way on anything less than Internet Explorer 6.

Time is money

Designing for multiple browsers takes time. The more browsers you need to support the more time you need to spend supporting them.

A recent project I worked on required a redesign of the site from the ground-up (aswell as a bunch of other stuff) and making the site work in any version of Internet Explorer lower than 6 just wasn’t worth the time, and therefore money, put into it. The return just wasn’t there and I decided that IE 5.5 was gone, dead, obsolete and I wasn’t going to try and mangle the design to work in it. Rather than just display a really crappy looking site to the user I decided I would let them know via a short and to-the-point message that their browser was not up to displaying the site and directing them to upgrade to a new version of their browser.

Give them the good news

IE 5.5 advice message

Message displayed to all users visiting project in anything below IE 6

But how to do this? The site was developed in Ruby on Rails and I’d heard of a neat gem called rack-noie6 that provides a piece of Rack middleware that blocks Internet Explorer 6 and below, but that isn’t going to work in most cases. Hard as it may be to make your site look good in Internet Explorer 6 you can see from the stats above there’s still a large proportion of users using it and to turn them away would be crazy, at least while the pool of IE 6 users out there is still so large.

So a quick fork and patch later (github we <3 you so much) and the new noie6 was accepting an option for a minimum version of Internet Explorer it should accept instead of just rigidly blocking version 6 and below. Configuration is really simple:

Now any users visiting the site in anything below Internet Explorer 6 gets the message above helpfully directing them to update their browser. Not bad for a two line config update.

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Rewriting URL params in nginx

I came across this problem recently, a customer was moving to Ruby on Rails from another framework/language (.NET I think) and needed to re-write a bunch of URLs. Some needed the query parameters rewriting too. One example was rewriting the old search path, so the old URL:

http://somedomain.com/OldSearchPath.aspx?qry=things&page=4

would become:

http://somedomain.com/search?query=things&page=4

This should be fairly simple except for the qry parameter needed to be changed to query. A bit of googling didn’t turn up much but with some experimentation I came up with this using the pre-populated nginx $args variable:

location /OldSearchPath.aspx {
  if ($args ~* qry=(.+)) {
    set $args query=$1;
  }
}
rewrite ^.+$ /search redirect;

It even leaves the other parameters intact, so the pagination will still work.

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Best ‘site unavailable’ message ever

Seen on Fish4:

Thank you for coming to Fish4 this morning.

Unfortunately the fish4 website is unavailable due to the failure of a very expensive piece of Sun hardware (Sun 6900). A Sun engineer is at the data centre but didn’t think to bring the replacement part with him.

We hope the sun engineer will have repaired the hardware by 12pm, and will update this estimate if necessary as the work progresses.

Here is a screengrab of the error: