November 26, 2007 by David.

Just ran across Toolmonger, a blog on tools. Fun for any guy - or gal - who loves tools. Believe me, I’m tool-lovin’ guy. I hit this site when looking up some info on Vaughn’s new S2 hammer design.

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November 25, 2007 by David.

ATOMdesign was asked by Vaughan & Bushnell to re-imagine the classic hammer and the S2 is what they came up with.

ATOMdesign didn’t take the challenge lightly. They not only delivered a revolutionary new hammer design but secured a U.S. utility Patent with 27 claims! The Split-Head hammer offers many new features never seen before in the industry such as integrated overstrike plates, modular head construction, and elastomeric shockgaskets just to name a few.

The 18″ and 18 oz S2 hammer has a hickory handle and includes popular features on other Vaughan hammers, such as precision balance and a Headstart® Magnetic Nail Holder.

The S2 was deemed aesthetic and practical enough to win a Best of Category award in International Design Magazine’s 53rd annual Product Design Competition. It also snagged a Bronze Award in the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) sponsored by BusinessWeek.

Testers say this beast can drive a nail with just two strikes. Personally, that doesn’t seem anything new to me. Back in my 20’s working on a framing crew, that’s what every framer was doing who was worth his salt (In fact, it was driving a nail with ONE strike that made a realframer). Then again, we all used Vaughn hammers - just not such a spiffy design. …still, don’t put up any money betting against a nail gun.

I’m going to have to add this to my hammer collection, which includes two Stiletto titanium head hammers, one with an aluminum handle (which is anything but shock absorbing but tougher then hell). Dang fun stuff, say I.

The Vaughn S2 is available at Amazon and other outlets.

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November 24, 2007 by David.

The rear swingarm on a HD bagger isn’t the most stable thing in the world. Glide-Pro has an improved pivot shaft to tighten things up. Stronger, more heat resistant metal (yes, it gets so hot you can’t handle it) and polyurethane bushings replace the stock rubber bushings. Reportedly a big improvement, although I haven’t put one on my bike yet. Runs $400.

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November 20, 2007 by David.

There are only two magazines dedicated to baggers that I know of.  I subscribe to Hot Bike Bagger, but they don’t have a website for the magazine. There is also American Bagger Magazine, which I may try a subscription to after my Hot Bike Bagger runs out.

American Iron Magazine is what I like best, though. It isn’t dedicated to baggers but they cover a lot of them and I like their hop up and other technical articles. I’ve had a subscription to it for years and it keeps getting fatter and fatter, dang near a book every month. Their subscription revenue must be doing well.

Now get out there and customize something!

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November 15, 2007 by David.

How about cruising across America, coast to coast, at the break neck speed of 20-25 mph? Yep. On horseback. I like this article on the cross country cowboy by CNN. Maybe because I had horses growing up. Probably doesn’t hurt that right now I’m on 48 acres with four horses and a dog, all surrounded by rice fields. Fun stuff.

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November 7, 2007 by David.

Previously I posted a review of Mailloop 7.0by IMC. That was when I first started using it. Well, what with how much I’m moving around right now, I need an autoresponder that resides on a server somewhere rather than my own PC. Between that need and my continued frustrations with the product, I took up a new search. Frankly, I did a more thorough search this time and found some interesting stuff. This post discusses Mailloop, GetResponse, Constant Contact, and Aweber.

I ended up signing up with GetResponse. I can’t believe the difference in products. It is like comparing a sophisticated (and functioning!) professionally developed software package to some high school kid’s school project. Really.

Here are some of the high points on why GetResponse is far better than Mailloop:

• You can allow the subscriber to select whether they want eMail, web page, or RSS feed delivery. (Granted, I haven’t tested this feature yet, but it is “supposed” to work.)
• The subscriber can click a link and get the next eMail immediately if they want to. Say you have a five part mini-course and you have a person who really likes your stuff. Why make them wait? Take advantage of their interest by allowing them to speed up the sequence if they want. (This one I have tested and it is slick.)
• You can copy previous campaigns to build new ones. Mailloop you have to start every campaign, autoresponder, newsletter, etc from scratch. Very handy to have.
• Both products allow custom fields to be added to web signup forms. Mailloop, however, requires you know Perl scripting and how to build HTML webforms. GetResponse you just fill in a field name and it takes care of everything. Couldn’t be simpler.
• Mailloop can’t do popups or pop-overs; GetResponse can. Granted, I hate them and don’t ever expect to use them, but it is one more missing Mailloop feature.
• GetResponse’s subscriber management is much more sophisticated and automated, plus you don’t have to do all the manual purges and combines that Mailloop makes you do. Unsubscriptions are automated. Mailloop they are automated to an extent, but you still end up with a lot more manual functions dealing with unsubscribe requests in Mailloop.
• GetResponse allows you to track if someone clicks through and/or bought an item. This tracking feature also allows you to automatically move someone to a new campaign if they bought something. Mailloop can’t do any tracking. If you don’t want someone who bought a product to keep receiving eMails promoting it, you have to manually track and move that person yourself using cumbersome tools and procedures.
• When you are building eMails, GetResponse has a button to copy from HTML to text or visa versa. In addition, you can click a button and it will automatically wrap text to a given line length - a process you have to do manually, line by line, in Mailloop. Well, after you manually did a copy and paste between the messages.
• There are over 150 nice templates to use in GetResponse. Mailloop has a couple dozen, basically color variations on about three layouts, plus they GetResponse’s templates are much more sophisticated.
• Mailloop can fill in field from a file, like put in a person’s name for you automatically. The trouble is Mailloop doesn’t have a default value when a field is blank, so if the first name is missing you end up with something like “Dear,”. Not only can the field be blank because it wasn’t filled in by the subscriber, one of the methods of processing subscription requests does not fill in the field values other than the eMail address (below you can find another bug that absolutely nothing gets filled in - a blank record is created). GetResponse allows you to specify a default value so for a blank first name you get something like “Dear Friend,”.
• Mailloop doesn’t break add proper upper/lower case to name fields if it isn’t entered that way. GetResponse does.
• Mailloop can’t handle a subscriber who wants back into a newsletter after they have unsubscribed. Ok, I do exaggerate a tad. Technically you can take out an eMail that has unsubscribed to a newsletter. You have to dig until you find one of the many .csv files that contains the eMail for that campaign and take it out with a text editor or Excel. Like the average user is going to do that - even if he or she did have the knowledge to do it (no, Mailloop doesn’t explain any of this file manipulation - you are completely on your own). GetResponse just allows someone to say they want to sign up again and that is that. You don’t have to do anything.
• This point is something that, granted, really needs an ASP model like GetResponse to be able to do, but I really like that to unsubscribe a person is taken to a webpage instead of sending an eMail. From the webpage they can choose from all the campaigns they want to unsubscribe from. Plus, Mailloop will only unsubscribe the eMail address the person is sending their request from. Not everyone sends an unsubscribe request from the eMail your crap is going to. Myself, I signup under eMails that only receive, via a forward, so would have to set up an account in Outlook just to send an eMail to unsubscribe. The harder you make it to unsubscribe the more likely you are to get spam complaints.
• A problem I have encountered with Mailloop is that it sometimes looses track of what message to send and sends ones it already sent.  For instance, I’ve had numerous times where in a five message sequence, it resent eMails two through five when it was supposed to send the fifth. One point where it should have sent out four messages, it sent fifteen. Not a good way to avoid spam complaints. So far in my testing and live accounts in GetResponse I haven’t encountered a similar problem.
• I got GetResponse up and working the first day I used it. Spent maybe six hours going through the tutorials and setting up my first auto-responder campaign - which worked flawlessly the first time I tested it, by the way. Mailloop I have spent days and days trying to get to work. It didn’t help that there are bugs and I had to figure out workarounds to get it to function at all, but even if there weren’t bugs, it still would have been substantially more time involved setting it up.

Now, here is the REAL item that FLUNKS Mailloop (in case the above wasn’t enough). It can’t do double opt-in from a webform. Yes, I know all their literature says it can. The software is built to do it. However, it has a bug in the webform that is supplied that doesn’t fill in the subscriber’s “from” eMail. Mailloop needs that field to process a double opt-in.

My IMC mentor put me at the “top” of the Mailloop support queue (which meant it took a mere seven days for them to contact me). I explained the problem and my work around that I used so at least I could subscribe someone without double opt-in and he told me that was exactly what I needed to do, that the software just “didn’t” fill in the from eMail address and that I shouldn’t expect it to. He didn’t care that therefore the double opt-in feature couldn’t work. Here is a quote from one of his eMails:

“The program is advertised in the sales copy to have double optin features, but it doesn’t work with setting up a custom rule to collect opt-ins from a webform unfortunately. We would like to add this functionality in the program at a future date and it’s on the list of things to do for sure.”

After several eMails, I did get an explanation of how I could change the webform to fill in the “from” field, with the caveat that would disable Mailloop’s rule processing function since the eMail address was no longer in the body of the eMail.

This one issue alone is enough for me and I’d think most other people to reject Mailloop if they they knew about it.

If you pre-purchase the maintenance (which you definitely should do if you get Mailloop), Mailloop will set you back roughly five hundred bucks. GetResponse plans start at $18/month (for 10,000 subscribers). That means I could have used GetResponse for over two year before it cost me more (well, unless I go over 10,000 subscribers - a nice problem to have…).

Before closing, let me point out one other considerable shortcoming of another eMail campaign program. Constant Contact does not have ANY autoresponder features. If all you want is to key in eMail addresses for a newsletter, it works fine and is a nice product, but if you want people to fill in a webform and automatically get something back, it won’t do it. I saw a number of large companies that send me stuff use them so I signed up for their free trial and that was when I realized it didn’t autorespond. I just assumed any large eMail campaign company would. At least they have a simple trial subscription. Gotta give them credit for that. They don’t even ask for a charge card.

One other plus for Constant Contact is you can bundle a survey package with your eMail campaigns.  A nice feature, but I plan to use SurveyMonkey.com.

This post probably sounds like I’m trying to “sell” GetResponse. That actually isn’t my intent. Now that I have used both packages I am able to directly contrast the two and there certainly is plenty to contrast! So, in the order of fairness, here are some of my concerns with GetResponse:

In my research I did encounter one person who complained that once they signed up for GetResponse their eMail account got tons of junk eMail. My experience doesn’t back that up. First, I haven’t gotten any junk eMail. There are a few things you should pay attention to, however. First is, entering your eMail on the home page signs you up to get promotional eMails. You just have to pay attention. I did that by mistake but then immediately requested to be unsubscribed and was dropped before any eMails started coming. Second, when you do sign up for their service, you have the option to get promotional eMails or not. Again, pay attention.

When you sign up for GetResponse, they have a “risk free” two weeks. That means you can get a full refund within two weeks. It doesn’t mean you get to try the service without paying for two weeks. Did I mention, “Pay Attention”?

You can have your own custom landing pages that subscribers are sent to after various actions they take or you can use the default GetResponse page. Those pages have a fair amount of ads on them for other people trying to build subscriber lists. However, you can easily defeat this even if you don’t want to build your own landing pages by checking a box that disables advertisements. When I first saw the ads I was a little miffed, but then I found the box to eliminate them - now that I’m ok with. If you don’t care, they have an additional revenue stream, but if you don’t want it you can easily and quickly defeat it. If only more companies would have business practices like that.

You can load your own eMail addresses into GetResponse either manually or with an upload. However, you can’t add those addresses unless you also send those people another eMail asking them to confirm their subscription. There are check boxes to choose whether or not to send confirmations to adds, but anything I tried you get an error message forcing you to send confirmations. I realize this is a way for GetResponse to protect their name from spam, but it sure is inconvenient for an “honest” person who already has a list with another provider that has had double opt-in already done.

While personally I have only tried three eMail automation software packages, I do think GetResponse is in the top couple. From my research, it seems that at the price point and feature list I’m looking for, GetResponse and Aweber appear to be the top two contenders. I decided to go with GetResponse for two reasons. One is that GetResponse has two features Aweber doesn’t that I really liked (the first two bullet points at the beginning of this post), and second, I read enough bad press on Aweber’s ethics that I wasn’t real anxious to jump on their bandwagon.

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