AWeber Custom Parser

AWeber custom parser is exactly same as we used for phpBB.

1. Trigger rule should be your webmasters from address in your vBulletin and this is tested in Headers.

   From:[^\n|.]+SomeName\@domain\.com

2. Rule 1 to get email address from the sent email headers.

   \n[>\s]*E-mail:\s+(.+?)\n

3. Rule 2 to get username of phpBB forum as name in Aweber.

   \n[>\s]*Username:\s+(.+?)\n

Now Joomla members will be automatically sent a confirmation email from AWeber when they sign up on your site.

Still don't have AWeber? Grab it now for only $1.

Create the Custom Parser

We now need to create a parser in AWeber to parse data from phpBB. Setup the following Custom Parser in AWeber.

1. Trigger rule should be your webmasters from address in your vBulletin and this is tested in Headers.

   From:[^\n|.]+SomeName\@domain\.com

2. Rule 1 to get email address from the sent email headers.

   \n[>\s]*E-mail:\s+(.+?)\n

3. Rule 2 to get username of phpBB forum as name in Aweber.

   \n[>\s]*Username:\s+(.+?)\n

Upload the Notification Plug-in

Create a new administrator in your forum with listname @ aweber.com as admin email. This will be a dummy admin because phpBB do not have any functionality to notify some email address about the new user registration and so you need to install this plug-in as well. You can download directly from my archive.

After you have successfully installed the plug-in test it to see that you as an admin get the notification of newly registered user and this will also mean that your AWeber account starts getting the notification.

Remember that this plug-in will notify all forum administrator's and so if you have quite a few administrator's you may need to edit the code of the plug-in for $admin_ary to notify only the newly created admin for AWeber.

All done and I hope this is helpful to all who prefer to use phpBB over vBulletin

Try Aweber for $1 and see what it can do for your Forum

Now let me tell you a recent incident.

Simple Story

When it comes to consulting doctors I always prefer homeopathy medicine and try to consult homeopathy doctors as much as I can. Few years back (Probably 5+ years) I used to visit one doctor whose name I will not disclose but let him be known as Dr A.

Few years back when we shifted, I visited a local homeopathy doctor who is very good and very much similar to Dr A. This made me not to visit Dr. A for years now until recently when I suddenly happen to visit Dr A last weekend and I was shocked to see that he now has multi-storied series of chamber which was just a one room chamber few years back.

He did something really good for many years apart from being a gem of a doctor.

He always used to see patients for free for one full day in a week.

This is not followed by any doctor I know.

Marketing View

At that time being a non-marketing guy I thought it was just a service to the society (and that is actually very true) but now when I am into marketing my view point has enhanced not changed. I looked at it from more than one perspective. Apart from serving to the society he also worked for himself which is

1. This gave him a way to brand himself to people who could not afford his fees of 600 INR per visit at that time.
2. Made people to line up before dawn or may be some people slept overnight outside his chambers.
3. Spread his name and brand virally. I am also not sure how many patients my father and I have referred him but they were quite a few.
4. He is well respected person for his activities towards society.

Then and Now

I was curious to know if he still follows the same principle of seeing patient for free.

The answer is yes and no both. He does not see them for totally free but for a very nominal fee of 1/25th of his normal fees and that too for one and a half day now.

So this means he is still working on building the brand of Dr. A for elongated time in a week and this way he not only is serving the society but also allows his name and service to reach the masses. He is not few of homeopathy doctors for the rich.

His current chambers hospital has more than 20+ visiting homeopathy doctors.

Lessons to be learnt

1. Dr. A as an individual started to brand his service (medical practice) and still continues to reach the masses.
2. It is not that you as an individual cannot brand yourself but you need to be innovative in it and good at reaching the masses.
3. Serving the society is always fruitful in the long run.

See the list of individual blogger's that I follow and all have branded themselves well enough to gain reputation online as a blogger's.

Do you think yourself as a brand?

So now I have to ask. Do you work to build you as a brand?

If your answer is no it is right time to act. If your answer is yes then how much time you dedicate on it? Remember brand is not something you can build overnight and so you should not be working only on building the brand. Remember Dr A. saw patient for free only once every week and charged handsome otherwise.

I don't think they actually pushed Buzz but I think they launched Buzz when it was ready to handle millions of Buzz per hour. Erick forgot those stats of 160,000 comments and posts per hour.

Erick Schonfeld mentions 3 points where he assumes Google Pushed Buzz and so here is the clarification of each from my perspective.

1. If you can buy something for less do you need to pay more for it? No, and if your answer is No I don't think there is a point in more clarification. Same is the case with Google. A week later release would also mean Twitter react the same way. Don't you think so? If they buy or don't buy Twitter is all together a different story according to me. If Google have a product which can compete with the fastest growing product of 2009 why on Earth they will not launch it and why it is termed as pushing? In fact this means other players like Microsoft now need to push hard at buying Twitter and probably Google may not be interested in buying Twitter anymore.

2. Google needs to have its own realtime micro-messaging communications system.

   I don't see this as a reason to push Buzz but just an addition of more functionality to GMail. Why on earth this can stand as a reason to push Buzz I don't understand. As we all know Google have purchased many products in the past and integrating them has taken quite a bit of time. More than expected and if Buzz is well integrated right from the word go what is the harm. Why on earth it means a Push?

3. Google already has twitter in Google Search Results and if they have product which can enhance Google Search I think this should be seen as step towards user based search.

Probably we all know Buzz had some serious bugs related privacy and Google addressed it faster than anybody could even think of. But my question is which software on this planet is bug free? I think it is a part of development and release and not pushing of products. It could be that they may have missed the privacy testing but that does not means hurrying on things but may be lack of good software development team or even testing team.

I don't think Google Pushed Buzz. What about you?

I am a long term follower of TechCrunch but I guess TechCrunch needs to focus more on its core i.e. news which they are very good at.

Register at Go4Expert.com (if and only if you are not already a member) and see it in action but if you are already a member we are in process of importing all our existing users into AWeber but you can also get yourself invited now.

So go get yourself subscribed NOW!!!

So let us get start.

AWeber does not provide any API to integrate registration process of vBulletin but what they provide is custom email parsers. An email parser allows you to integrate your user such that when a user registers at your site you can email Aweber about it and subscriber can be added to your campaign.

If you can an email AWeber about the details of your user who just registered at your vBulletin forum and have a custom parser enabled which can parse the content of the email to extract the needed fields Aweber can add the user to the campaign.

It's a three step process

Step 1: Edit vBulletin Email Body Text Phrase

Go to Admin CP > Languages & Phrases > Email Body Text Phrase Type.

Edit newuser from

There is a new user, $username at $vboptions[bbtitle]

To view their profile, go here:

$vboptions[bburl]/member.php?u=$userid

Email Address : $email
Birthday : $birthday
Referrer: $referrer
IP Address: $ipaddress

$customfields

To

There is a new user, $username at $vboptions[bbtitle]

To view their profile, go here:

$vboptions[bburl]/member.php?u=$userid

Username : $username
EmailAddress : $email
Birthday : $birthday
Referrer: $referrer
IP Address: $ipaddress

$customfields

Summary of changes

1. Add the following line

   Username : $username

2. Edit the following line from

   Email Address : $email

   to

   EmailAddress : $email

Step 2: Setup AWeber Parser

We now need to create a parser in Aweber to parse the data from vBulletin. Setup the following Custom Parser in Aweber.

1. Trigger rule should be your webmasters from address in your vBulletin and this is tested in Headers.

   From:[^\n|.]+SomeName\@domain\.com

2. Rule 1 to get email address from the sent email headers.

   \n[>\s]*EmailAddress :\s+(.+?)\n

3. Rule 2 to get username of vBulletin as name in Aweber.

   \n[>\s]*Username :\s+(.+?)\n

I prefer to have vBulletin username as name in Aweber but you can have other Custom Fields in your vBulletin and parse those from the emails to add them to Aweber.

Step 3: Change Your Email Settings to Notify AWeber

New user Registration notification should be sent to YourListName @ aweber.com

Admin CP > vBulletin Options > vBulletin Options > User Registration Options > Email Address to Notify About New Members

And add YourListName @ aweber.com.

All done. If you still have issues do share them in comments and I will be more than happy to help you get it working.

Try Aweber for $1 and see what it can do for your Forum

I had no idea what Export code is? So started searching things on what it is, how to get it, and the process behind getting it. So here I am with the clarification as much as I have currently.

What is Importer Exporter Code or IEC?

IEC is a 10 digit numeric code issued to Indian companies by DGFT – Director General of Foreign Trade, Ministry of Commerce, Government of India and is valid for rest of your life. This means it is just a one time process.

How to Get your IEC?

As I asked some of my friends and relatives I can sense that this is a very simple process.

1. Download IEC application form is available for download on dgft.gov.in or can even get it from offices of Director General of Foreign Trade.
2. Filling the form is easy. If you are an individual freelancer you should be doing this as Proprietor company and so you will just need a bank certificate, PAN card, Date of birth certificate and a Demand Draft.
3. You can submit the application in person to your regional DGFT office and check the current status of your application on dgft.gov.in

What is an Approximate Fee for getting IEC?

I still have not applied for IEC myself and is waiting for the final update from PayPal but as far as what I have inquired it is around rupees 250 only. Many sites and other officials (read dalals) who claim to get IEC in a week for 5000 bucks is all crap and actually you can get it in 1 week if you do yourself for Rs 250.

If you use courier to send your application charges for courier may be added to 250 bucks.

More ...

If you have more questions shoot them in comments and I will try to get answers from people I know who are in the export business.

Update: more details are available here – PayPal will henceforth require a ‘purpose code’ which is different from the Import Export Code mentioned above. This code helps PayPal furnish information that may be required by the Reserve Bank of India to identify the nature of transaction.

So let's get into the list.

1. Problogger aka Darren Rowse - If you plan to become an online entrepreneur or want to make fortune online I think not only Problogger.net is a must read blog for you but also his book secrets of blogging which is a best seller in Blogging and Blogs category at Amazon.

After the conversation I investigated the issue further to see if there is something somewhere that I can improve.

Many of you may be aware that I have multiple email address when it comes to contacting me. Ideally one from each site and that is because it helps me understand the contact point. If you send me an email directly it lands into the given inbox and gets auto forwarded to my main account where I have the needed labels and filters to identify it correctly.

This is where I found very strange thing.

One of my inbox had 30,000+ spam email messages in last 30 days. This means if you email me chances are your email may have landed in the Spam Folder of that inbox which means it does not get forwarded to my main account.

So next time if you contact me and do not hear from me for few days try using contact form as that has custom filter attached which never goes into spam (as far as I know).

Google in an FAQ about PageRank says that Google PR is just one of 200 factors that influence a page's ranking. So Google PR may not be as important as speed of the page and so I thought of checking it for few of my sites and I really saw that my sites seems to be quite slow for more than one reason.

There were quite a few suggestions as well from Google

1. Enable gzip compression
2. Combine external JavaScript
3. Minimize DNS lookups

I am not sure how much accurate is the report but I have mod_deflate enabled into my Apache web server and so it should take care of all compression but definitely I need to look further into it and see if I can reduce my page load time as suggested by Google.

When it comes to combining External JavaScript which is virtually impossible because we all use lots of third party JavaScript Like AdSense, AddThis, Analytics, AWeber and many others which provide their own JavaScript code which cannot be combined always and also needs an additional DNS lookup.

Have you tested your site for "Site Performance" By Google and what are your views on the same?

If you are looking to speed up your pages - 15 ways to Speed up your web pages should be a good read