I tell a bit of a version of this story on the site’s about page, but will share it with you all here as well. Around the beginning of this semester, I was looking online to find out how much money I could save by purchasing some of my textbooks online. As I was doing this, I had multiple windows open (one for each of a variety of different websites that sell books) and was entering the information for each book in each window. It was getting quite repetitive and annoying and I decided that there must be a better way to compare prices and decide where to purchase books from.

Thus, the idea came to me of a very simple, streamlined site without a lot of frills and/or extras where a user would be able to type in information about a book (the original idea was to just be able to search by ISBN) and be returned the cost of that book at various places such as Amazon.com, EBay, etc.

Well, as I began putting that site together, it seemed to keep growing and what I originally intended to be a small simple site now contains 34 PHP files and 2,533 lines of code. It doesn’t seem like much when I look at those numbers, but it sure took quite a bit of time to put it all together and make all of the parts work with each other. In retrospect, this was a great project because along with increasing my knowledge of PHP and CSS, I also learned about API’s and XML (both which I was basically scared of before) and creating/using cookies.

At any rate, I’m fairly happy with how it turned out and hope that all of you fine readers will help me promote my new site and get some traffic to it. If you would be interested in helping me promote this site, check out the Promote page where you can print off posters and business cards as well as retrieve the code to include the 125×125 banner on your site. Also, I have included some social media interaction on the site via Twitter and Facebook. Making use of the three social media buttons that I have included is also much appreciated.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone who assisted by giving me feedback during my pre-release party because I do feel that many of the suggestions that I received were quite helpful and that the site is much better because of it. If the site is not any better, at least I feel better about it and have more confidence in it.

It took me a moment when I first saw it because it looked like they were missing most of the letters. Now, it is well known that Google regularly changes the logo on their homepage to commemorate different days. Coincidentally, they offer a holiday logo archive that contains many of the logos that have been used over the years.

Anyway, the first thought I had when I saw today’s logo was “What holiday or special day would it be?” and then I looked again and a bit more closely… “Wait a minute! That’s morse code!”

I did a very limited amount of research, and discovered that today is (or would be) the 218th birthday of Samuel F.B. Morse. For those who might not know (yeah, like any of my readers would fall into that category) Samuel F.B. Morse was the inventor of the telegraph and creator of Morse Code.

While many consider Morse Code to be a dying art, it is still very useful in a wide variety of situations. It is very versatile and can be “transmitted” in a wide variety of media (flashing a light, a whistle, tapping your hand on a desk, etc) making it an excellent choice for many situations when standard voice communication is unavailable or impractical.

For easy reference, I have included one of the many Morse Code tables that can be found throughout the internet, you can click on it for a larger view:

One of the most commonly thought of things when people think of Morse Code is ham radio, but (for better or worse) there is no longer any requirment for knowing Morse Code for any ham radio license class. It is still used fairly regularly by quite a few people, but there are many ham radio operators (myself included) who do not know it.

I can pick out a few characters here and there and can recognize it when I see/hear it (even some place unexpected like the Google logo) but that is about it. I wish that I knew it better, but I just haven’t really set my mind to it and/or made it a priority to learn. Perhaps this is a sort of subtle reminder that I should do that…maybe one of these days when I get a few other projects finished first.

What about you? Do you know Morse Code? If not, do you have any desire to learn it?

As for some of the other ideas I have in my head, there is at least one and quite possibly two eBooks that I’m thinking about putting together, I’m giving an increasing amount of consideration to the decommercialization and refocusing of this site, and I have a couple sites that I need to get working towards setting up.

I also have a couple new gadgets that I will likely be reviewing and posting about as well as a couple other things that I’m considering getting that might be good post fodder as well. For some reason, I just remembered that I still need to do my beta testing of Windows 7 yet too.

I also want to address the fact that I have yet to officially launch the site that I spent most of February working on. Thank you to everyone who participated in and responded to the pre-release party. I feel much more comfortable with the site now and made what I feel are some very necessary changes. I was hoping to have it released by now, but I have one or two things (probably two but I have to see how things work out) that I want to add yet as well as an issue with click-tracking that I hope to get cleared up and have the official launch before the end of the month.

One final thing I am going to add to this post is that I need to do some math and see what kind of effect my recent, unintentional hiatus has had on my ability to reach my goals for the year, but I suspect that I will probably not be able to achieve the 250 posts without increasing to more than 1 per day, which I’m not planning to do.

Anyway, here’s to keeping things on track and my apologies for falling out of my posting and commenting routines.

What I mean by this is that no matter what the content or quality of my next post, it will be easier for me to write and post it than it to write and post this one. I’m not sure why this is, but it is something that I have come to recognize as an issue that I face anytime that I am forced to step away from this site for a few days (or in many cases longer) and try to resume posting again.

How about you? Do you find that it’s generally more difficult to write the first post back after a break than any of the others that you write? What posts (or types/category of posts) do you generally find to be the most difficult to write? Leave some feedback and perhaps we can look into this more in depth at a later time.

Top Commentators

The total number of comments that were left last month is significantly less than we had in January. However, considering that there were only six updates to the site during the month of February I am more than pleased with the amount of conversation that was had on this site.

Andrea - 7 comments
Martin - 6 comments
Tammy - 6 comments
Ben Pei - 4 comments
The Blogger Source - 3 comments
Best CSS Gallery - 2 comments
Sherri - 2 comments
Ray Ebersole - 2 comments
Derek - 2 comments
Dennis Edell - 2 comments

I’m happy to note that even with the lack of updates I had 10 people who left more than 1 comment and several new additions to the list this month that were not there last month. I encourage you all to check out the sites of the individuals above and leave some comments on their sites as well.

Goals For 2009

Ok, now for an update on my progress towards my goals for 2009. I feel pretty good about my progress even though I don’t have a ton of results to show yet. Even with the lack of posting, my subscriber count appears to have held pretty steady and is currently showing 31 subscribers. Analytics shows 971 vists over the last thirty days. When divided by 30, is about 32 visits per day. Again, this is pretty close to the number from last month but not something I’m disappointed about based on my lack of updates.

In regards to my posting volume. This is the one area I need to keep on top of myself about. In the last two months I’ve had 28 posts (6 in February and 22 in January) as we are 1/6 of the way through the year, multiplying this number by 6 is only 168 which means I would fall short of my goal for the year. However, I have 222 posts left to write (250 - 28 = 222) and there are 301 days left in the year so as long as I don’t slack off too much I should be ok for this goal.

I do have another site pretty much ready to go, so this is very exciting. If all goes well, this site should significantly help me reach my monthly earnings goal. As I mentioned before, it is also what has been keeping me away from this site more than I would have liked. My current plan is to have a little pre-release party where I am going to invite people to check-out the site and give me some feedback. This will allow me to squash any bugs and make any changes that are suggested before the official announcement. I have done some moderately extensive testing and corrected several errors/bugs that I found but I just want to get some feedback and be sure that it’s ready to go. If you’re interested in checking it out as part of the pre-release party, contact me and you may get an invite.

All in all, I am still positive about reaching my goals for the year and think that they are all very achievable.

Note: I am using a Debian system and the examples here reflect that. However, I see no reason why most of the stuff here would not apply to nearly any Linux system. Also, I make no guarantees as to the functionality and performance of the methods described here. This is what I did and it seems to be working pretty good, but I cannot make any guarantees as to how it will work for you.

When I originally set-up this system, I was quite unfamiliar with different ways to setup and operate an email server. As a result, I am using Courier (which seems to be one of the best) for the backend, and am using the configuration where email accounts and users mirror each other. Each “user” then has their mail delivered into a folder in their home directory that is specified for such use. Back when I was getting this site launched and setting things up, I just wanted it to work and be moderately secure and didn’t really know much about it. I simply created seperate users for each email account I wanted (i.e. one for blogging, one for radio stuff, one for facebook, etc) to try and help keep myself organized and once it all worked, I didn’t worry about it.

However, I came upon a situation where the name (and corresponding email address) for one of my accounts was no longer accurate/current and I needed/wanted to change/update it. In thinking about this process, I came up with the following requirements for myself in doing this:

1. Change the name/identifier on the account so that all existing email would be unaffected. This would make it so I would be using a new username for logging in and email would have to be sent to a different address, but aside from that, it would be business as usual and all existing messages would be in the “new” mailbox because it would really be the old one with a new name.

2. Be sure that any email sent to the old address would be forwarded to the new address so that I wouldn’t miss any important messages that were sent.

3. Set up an autoreply so that if someone sends an email to the old address, they will get a response alerting them that the address has changed (and what it has changed to) as well as assurance that the message they sent has been forwarded.

In order to figure out what all needed to be done, I simply focused on one part of the situation at a time and figured out how to do that. After I had that figured out, I changed things back and worked on the next one. After having all three things figured out, I put them all together and actually made the change.

The first part was easy, to change an email address on a system set-up like mine, all that really needs to be done is to change the username used to log-in to the account as this is also the email address.

usermod -l <new username> <old username>

However, since I wanted to completely change the “user” and everything about it, there were a couple of other steps that needed to be taken:

- edit the file /etc/passwd to reflect the changes (change the email address listed for that user to the new one and also set the home directory to reflect the new username as well)
- rename the home directory from the old username to the new one

At this point, the email address has been changed, the new one must be used to log-in, any place that referenced the old username should now reflect the new one. However, as of running the usermod command, any mail sent to the old email address will no longer be delivered as that user no longer exists.

In order to be sure to keep receiving email sent to the old address, an alias needs to be set up. Again, a pretty simple process for someone who knows what they are doing (or is reading this post) but not something that is quite intuitive. In my setup, there is a directory /etc/courier/aliases/ and by default there is a file named ‘system’ inside that directory. Since I didn’t want to mess with anything that is already there and working, I simply created a new file ‘mine’ inside this directory (there is no extension with these files) and put my new setting inside it.

There is only one line of text needed in this file at this time, but more can be added later:

<old username>:<new username>

Save and close the file and you’re good to go…almost. In my testing of different things making sure I knew what I was doing and that this was going to work, I had a couple of times where I made a change to this file and it had no effect on my results. The reason? After modifying this file, you need to run the command:

makealiases

This will cause all files in the alias directory to be read, processed, and take effect. Make sure you do that or else it will not work, trust me on this. Now, you’re email address is changed, but all email sent to the old address will be automatically delivered into the mailbox under the new address. From here, the only thing left to do is to let people know that the email address has changed. Since I’m not a fan of using mass emails for this purpose, my thought is to tell people when they send a message to the wrong address.

This part got a little tricky, and caused the brunt of my frustrations with this project. The first thing you need to do is check the Courier configuration (on my system this is /etc/courier/courierd) and check the DEFAULTDELIVERY settings. For whatever reason, this was originally set to ./Maildir which basically means that courier takes the message and just delivers it with no additional processing. However, in order to set the autoreply, I changed it to maildrop by simply commenting out the original line and adding a new one like in the example below:

#DEFAULTDELIVERY=./Maildir
DEFAULTDELIVERY="| /usr/bin/maildrop"

This is the only change that needs to be made to that file and after making the change, save and close it. Then, restart Courier so that it will reload the configuration and your change can take effect. I also want to note that this step only needs to be done once. Next time you go to change an email address or setup an autoreply, the configuration will already be set correctly and you won’t have to worry about it.

The only thing left to do at this point is actually the part that took me the longest to get figured out. In setting up the autoreply, we are going to use two files. The first is the .mailfilter file (yes, it’s like having no filename but a mailfilter extension - this is similar to the .htaccess file that many of you are already familiar with) where you can set up several different rules for handling email. It’s a really powerful tool and I can already think of a few uses for it beyond what we are doing here. The second file we are going to need is a file with a name but no extension that will contain the content for the body of the email that will be sent in reply. For our purposes here, I’ll call this ‘message’.

Some really good documentation and explainations for ways to use the .mailfilter file can be found here, but I think of that as more of a reference and think I learned more from looking at some examples of using it. To keep the .mailfilter file simple and small, I am taking advantage of and using the mailbot utility.

Here is a slightly modified version of my .mailfilter:

if (/^To: *<old email address>@romandock\.com/)
{
cc "| mailbot -t <absolute path of message> -s 'New Email Address'"
}

In the example above, <old email address> has been substituted for the actual email address that I replaced. Also, <absolute path of message> refers to the location of the ‘message’ file. For example, this might be /home/<user>/message but it can be titled whatever you wanted to be titled as long as the file name matches what you call for in the filter. Finally, my example sets the subject to read: New Email Address anytime someone gets sent an autoreply. For the message file, just use a plain text file and type into the file as if you were typing the body of an email since that is where this file will be used.

Finally, in order to make this work right, maildrop is very particular about the .mailfilter and some of it’s properties. First of all, it cannot have any group or global permissions. This means that the owner should be the only one allowed access. This translates to an octal setting of 600 which gives the owner read/write access and nobody else has any access at all. The other thing to be sure of is the ownersip of the .mailfilter as it must be owned by the user whose account it is in. You may have to do the following:

chown <user> .mailfilter
chgrp <user> .mailfilter

or

chown <user>:<user> .mailfilter

That last part is very important and should not be forgotten as the two minor things (.mailfilter permissions and ownership) we just discussed (along with not reading logs) cost me a considerable amount of time.

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Now, just log in to some other email account and send yourself a few test messages. Send 1 or 2 to the old address and 1 or 2 to the new address. For the ones you send to the old address, you should receive your autoreply in response relatively quickly. For the ones you send to the new address, you shouldn’t receive the autoreply. Also, log in to your “new” email account and make sure that all of your test messages came through regardless of what address they were sent to.

Ideally, all tests were successful and everything worked as intended. If something doesn’t work right, never underestimate the power of a .log (which for me is /var/log/mail.log) and go from there.

I hope this post was helpful to someone besides myself, but even if it’s not, I’m sure I will be referring back to it at least a couple of times in the future so it’s not a total waste.

However, while working on this, things were not going as smoothly as they should have. I’m sure this is partially due to my never having done this before, but it still shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did. There was one particular part of the process that did not seem to be working right and I couldn’t for the life of me seem to figure out why it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.

After reading through tons of documentation on the subject, and running multiple Google searches during which I wasn’t even exactly sure what I was searching for, I was at a loss for what to do. By some random chance, one of my searches led me to a forum discussion and one of the entries made reference to the mail.log file. At this point a light bulb came on in my head. Duh! Of course, I should look in the log and see exactly what (if anything) is going on that my changes are not having any effect!

Now, I already knew about log files and have used them many times in the past to help troubleshoot and solve issues, but for some reason I never thought to check it this time around, perhaps because I’d never made use of this particular one before. So, after opening mail.log and going directly to the end of the file, I found an error message. I was happy to see this. Most people (myself included) don’t like error messages because we don’t like getting errors and they mean something is wrong. In this case, I was glad to see them because I already knew something was wrong but now I could figure out what and knew what I was looking for.

From here I was able to Google the error message, find a couple of notes on the topic, and implement a fix. Then, test, check for success and the go to the log to find the next error message and repeat. While there were a few other forces at work that slowed my success, I’m sure that I would have saved a fair amount of time had I remembered to look in the logs.

So, those files that you see from time to time that have that .log extension, they really are useful! Don’t forget about them when you’re trying to do, fix, or troubleshoot something. If it weren’t for that file, I would still be trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do and working on getting that to work with no idea where to look or what to try next.

Top Commentators

There was a major improvement in the number of comments since last month (almost 3 times as many!) so thank you all. I’m only filling 8 of the 10 spots that I allow in this post this month because there was a 5 way tie for 9th place and I didn’t want to expand the list to 13. My apologies to those who commented and aren’t linked to here, but leave a few more comments this month and make the list next time around.

Dennis Edell - 19 comments
Andrea - 19 comments
Martin - 17 comments
Tammy - 11 comments
Derek - 9 comments
Roman @ FinancialJesus.com - 6 comments
The Blogger Source - 3 comments
Mitch - 3 comments

Thanks you guys for sharing your thoughts on my site here. For those of you who didn’t get the free link this month, you can see how easy it is to get so try for next month!

Advertisers

PerformancingAds hasn’t necessarily been performing for me, but I’ll leave them there for a bit longer yet. The system seems to be working to the point that my site is actually showing some exchange ads and I like the variety in banners that is provided by the system. The one drawback I notice from time to time is that they seem to kill my page’s load time. I haven’t had any complaints yet, so I think I’ll leave it for a while longer to see if I can get anyone to purchase

Also, Dennis has decided to start advertising and promoting his personal site and in doing so has acquired a 125×125 in the rotation for those top 4 spots.

Goals For 2009

I’ve had some moderately mixed results in my progress towards my goals for the year. My readership has increased so that’s a positive improvement. Feedburner reports that “on average” I have 33 subscribers and Analytics shows 1,015 visits (which divided by 30 = right around 34 per day) so there has been some improvement since the beginning of the year. This is as much your doing as mine, so thank you all!

I had 22 posts in January which means I’m well on my way to my goal of 250. 22 x 12 = 264 so as long as I keep going at about the same rate I did in January I should be just fine. I know I slowed down a bit towards the end of the month, but I’m trying to budget my time a bit better to be sure and have posts as well as trying to write a post as soon as I get the idea rather than jot the idea down and try to write it later.

In regards to the rest of my goals, I have come up with and began some preliminary work on a new site. I mentioned this previously, but haven’t really done much since then. I was hoping to get a bunch done over the weekend, but that didn’t quite happen…at all. I’ve also done a little bit of research and additional planning (nothing too intense, but more along the lines of keeping track of the little thoughts I have) regarding the additional personal sites I am planning. As far as the income is concerned, I still have a very long way to go before I reach $200 per month, but to be fair, I really haven’t been focusing on that a whole lot yet this year either.

Thanks to all of you for making January an outstanding month and let’s make February even better!