Geek Week: Crushworthy Apps

Smultron
I talked about this elsewhere, but it really is the simplest, most intuitive and easy to dive-into html editor out there. And it’s FREE. I never buy stuff unless it’s overwhelmingly great/useful. I would absolutely pay for this, however, if it cost anything. As is, I will be donating at an appropriate price-point for what I believe this software is worth.

Take everything you love about HTML-Kit. Now imagine what that would be like on a mac platform – simple, elegant, efficient and maybe stripped down of a few features you don’t use/need. That’s Smultron. Forget crush, I’m in love with this app.

Billing Manager
Okay, this is a great resource if you do freelance work or you’re a small business. Again, totally awesome service, yet FREE! They hitch is that they charge for credit card transactions – but you have an option not to offer that service to your clients, which means that unless you do accept credit cards, it won’t cost you a dime. Bonus. And the cc charge is minor, if I’m not mistaken.

What’s cool is how easy and useful this thing is. It exports as pdf. It saves commonly used fields (chosen by you). So many features to save you time and energy. Very nice.

I haven’t extensively used/tested Billing Manager, but I likely will.

Google Applications
Again, great for small (and big) businesses – but there’s one really neat feature bundled in with the free package:

You can tie your server email address to a gmail account built for that email address. Let me rephrase that.

Say you have your own domain, right? And you have an email address at that domain, like you@yourdomain.com. If you’re anything like me, you like the email address, but not the webmail or email software you have to use with it. You CAN forward your email to your gmail account, but that means your server still has to bounce the mail through – meaning you can collect a LOT of spam server side, and it’s just not as efficient.

Solution? Use gmail to reroute your MX records through gmail servers and get your mail through a special account set up there. Decent amount of space, and you don’t have to worry about server side clean up.

Open SPF
For a while I’ve had a problem with spoofing. Namely, users spoofing my server email to send spam/fraudulent emails. If you look into the email, it shows clearly that my server didn’t send the email. But it appears in people’s inboxes as coming from my email address/server. How do I stop this?

Tie your SPF records to your unique IP Address(es) to make it a lot harder for spammers to spoof it. Protect your domain, your business, your reputation and your contacts. Higher end servers do this automatically, but it’s always real friggin’ useful to know how to do it yourself so that you don’t have to pay for it.

Use at your own risk: i haven’t tested out open spf, but from the first glance, it looks like it sets up an spf for you if your server/cpanel isn’t doing it already (or letting you futz with it).

Super useful.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment