greg smart

I was recently reading a Josh Jones blog post about web hosting and the challenges of providing free email services. This is an issue we know all too well here at Pleth, LLC. He states:

Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple” old email.

And that’s kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features.

They’ve been conditioned by Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail to give email no value. I mean, everybody gives it away for free… nobody gives (real) web hosting away for free.

And yet, in the end, the only thing (sadly?) that actually ends up getting used, is that “no-value” email! If a web server with maybe 750 customer sites on it were to go down for even as long as five hours, we’d probably get two angry messages about it. But if email goes down for the same number of customers for just five minutes we’ll have already received 50!

As I write this post I am listening to my partner in the other room supporting an email customer via telephone. There is nothing wrong with her email, just her Outlook client and/or her network. But customers do not appreciate the differences in things like Plethware, Business Class Email Services and third party email clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc…). We definitely can’t tell them to call Microsoft.

First of all I want to state that there is no such thing as free email service. Just the costs of servers, security and support are weighty. Hosting companies typically absorb these costs elsewhere, but they are not insignificant. Most large, free email services support their free services through activities like ad sales. At Pleth, LLC we do not believe that this is appropriate for most small to mid-level businesses. So, what’s a web hosting company to do?

Plethware

You find a solution. One that makes good business sense and one that makes sense to any customer willing to listen.

For Pleth, LLC that solution is Plethware. Not 2 years ago we faced the same issue that Josh Jones is describing at Dreamhost. Are we going to tell our customers to go to a free email service? No. That doesn’t make sense, especially for the businesses we deal with on a day to day basis.

The problem with pushing customers to a third-party, free email service is that there is no quality control on our side. There is literally, no control at all. You, quite simply, are at the mercy of the email provider. They are free to advertise as they see fit and have no motivation to provide timely, human assistance to help you work through your email-related issues. And why should your shouts for assistance have any preference to them? After all, it’s a free service.

Serious businesses should not trust a priority function like email to a free service. These people deserve a stable email platform coupled with attentive support on the part of their web host. It has been our experience that companies who have experienced the rocky road of email service appreciate Business Class Email Hosting even though it does have an associated cost. At Pleth, LLC we have found our solution: Plethware.

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I was in the middle of my ritual, afternoon walk today when I saw something inspirational. As I rounded the corner of one of the shaded streets in my neighborhood I discovered two girls of five or six years riding in a plastic, motorized car. Now this wasn’t any motorized car, it was a white replica of a Ford Mustang that possessed two pink racing stripes which followed the contour of the car from stem to stern. I’m almost certain that the striping streamlined that car just enough to add a few extra horsepower, making those trips up and down the driveway a little more memorable to the riders.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is the third passenger. Seated between them, perched on it’s tail fin, rode a pink, inflatable dolphin. The dolphin was twice the height of each of the girls and occupied enough space in the small vehicle that it’s presence would surely have been an irritant had it not been a full participant in this early summertime activity.

As I approached and began to consider the trio they lurched forward from the top of the driveway and picked up speed. In the course of a few seconds they had spanned the length of the drive and were quickly reaching the edge of the road. The driver was obviously an experienced motorist because as they were reaching the end of their short journey she sharply turned the steering wheel causing the back end of the car to start sliding around deftly. In a snap the ‘Stang’ and it’s three passengers were fully turned about and were now facing up the driveway. As I chuckled to myself I almost missed ‘It’.

‘It’ was the tacit glance the girls shared prior to returning, full throttle, to their starting position. In that instant I realized I was witnessing a rare moment of pure joy and camaraderie.

As I go through my days I hope that I remember to enjoy myself as much as these girls. Life should be no more complex than this, we should all be lucky enough to have someone to share time and experiences with and always, always keep a pink dolphin handy.

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This is a follow up post from “Using jCarousel with MODx“. Thanks to BobRay and smashingred over in the MODx forums for their help on this.

What we have done is taken a site utilizing a custom MODx snippet, coupled with the jQuery, jCarousel photo gallery script and created a photo gallery that should require a minimal skill level to manage.

The Challenge

As mentioned in my previous post I was able to take MODx and jCarousel and produce an easy to use photo gallery that only needed images and an unordered list to populate the script content. Once the initial phase of the site build was complete, I realized that by creating a MODx snippet we could dynamically create this unordered list by only placing and removing images in a specific directory. In my opinion this would further simplify the process for adding and removing images from the gallery.

The Solution

A MODx snippet was created (Here is the snippet code.). In order to replicate this just create a snippet in MODx named ‘directory’ and then call it in where you want the gallery placed as [!directory? &Location=`yourdirectory`!]. Now the assumption here is that you are working with images inside of the ‘assets/images’ directory of Modx. Of course the jCarousel code is necessary as well. You can see the gallery snippet in action here.

NOTE: There is a slightly different jCarousel version for placement of multiple carousels on a single page.

More Possibilities

We are looking at the possibility of using this for more than just image galleries. This would likely require more extensive work with the snippet and would include the use of another snippet variable to denote the type and location of the document directory in question.

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