Archive for 20130325-Mon

Useful Microsoft Tool for Creating SPF Records

Microsoft has a useful tool for creating SPF records.

It also queries the domain that you put in and nicely formats the results.

Of course, most of us are just “dig text domain” from the CLI or Cygwin on Windows, but it’s nice to have another method as well.

UPDATE There are also some helpful comments from HostGator.

Basecamp Pricing Suprise!

Just yesterday (IIRC, this week at least) I was looking over Basecamp’s pricing and plotting to downgrade. They offered a starter plan for $30/month, and we are still paying $50/month. With Trello’s rapid rise to basic usability (you see I’m not exactly throwing out the praising superlatives in all directions) I thought I could easily prune my active Basecamp project list down.

I got back to that task today, and then went to re-price Basecamp’s service, and this is what I saw:

Basecamp Suprises

Now, “a dollar a day” is substantially similar to $30/month, but I must say it was surprising to see it! The last three times I have looked at this page, albeit over the course of 2-3 years, it has been different each time.

And the second part of the surprise is that while it says “switch packages or cancel anytime,” there isn’t actually a downgrade option on my “upgrade” page:

Basecamp Suprise 2

***UPDATE 20130325***

But of course the support is superb:

Basecamp Support

Our First Implementation of SNI

We just implemented our first SSL domain to use SNI — which allows multiple websites to have independent SSL certificates yet share the same ipv4 address. This paves the way for us to coalesce several servers, and allows us to eliminate the multiple-ip-address fees for a bunch of clients.

Let us know if you get an error message on our own SSL cert, apparently Internet Explorer 8 and below on XP will, but every other major browser and user base will not: https://yourcomputergenius.com

Read more on SNI: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

Open X Onramp Closes Down

Wow, we’ve been busy with so much else this came in under the radar:  Important Update Re Termination Of Onramp Service

It looks like it’s true, OpenX’s Onramp services is no more… and we have slightly less than 24 hours to get our data out. We have setup Onramp services for a number of clients, but have always been less then impressed. It was supposed to be an improvement over self-hosted OpenX installations, where staying on top of security updates was a nightmare.

Now we are looking for other options, mostly for single publishers managing various direct and automated ads on their own website or small network of websites.

There are a number of promising options out there, we’ll keep you posted on what we find.