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TweetBeeper.com – A Free Email to Direct Message Service (and Email to SMS too)

I just uploaded Tweet Beeper to Google App Engine. It’s a simple application that receives an email, and then converts the subject line into a twitter direct message (which in turn can be an SMS sent to the recipients phone). A little whimsical, I know, but the weather was fairly average here this weekend!

TweetBeeper in 1 Minute

How do I use it? Easy!

  1. Follow @TweetBeeper on Twitter.
  2. Send a subject-line email to:
    your-twitter-id [at] tweetbeeper.appspotmail.com

What can it do?

  1. Cron Job Output to Direct Messages
  2. Webstore monitor failures to SMS
  3. Magento Sale notification emails (or any store)
  4. … and any other situations where email to SMS would be handy

TweetBeeper.com - Email to twitter Direct Message service

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Magento Backups: How To Ensure Your Data Is Safe with Magento Cloud Backup

This is a blog post about Magento backups, how you can do them by default in Magento and how a new extension I have made called Cloud Backup will help to make them automatically and send them offsite to Amazon’s S3 storage service – increasing the chance you’ll have a recent backup if (when) bad things happen to your store or server. I’d like your help beta testing this new extension, and this post will hopefully convince you why that’s mutually beneficial for us. The extension is still pending on Magento Connect so give it a whirl, I’ll update this post with the link shortly, or for those that are particularly keen to test it, you can download the release directly and install it manually.
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Improved Custom Magento Order Number Functionality for SetStartOrderNumber extension – v0.3

Well, I said if I got 100 downloads of my latest Magento extension to set custom starting order numbers I’d make some improvements to it, and sure enough it happened. So here are the improvements. Please note I did not actually do the one improvement I promised I’d do, but I did a bunch of others that I hope make up for my laziness. You can get the updated version on Magento connect or download it directly.

In version 0.3 you can now:

  1. Hopefully avoid the Update before Save fiasco
  2. Disable the padding on the order number, invoice number etc
  3. Disable the prefix so that your numbers are treated in their entirety by the increment logic (and possibly the padding logic)
  4. Set a custom increment amount to trick your nosey competitors into thinking you do 1000 orders a day!

If you happen to be reading this JT, I skipped v0.2, but I’ll circle back around for the cron increment functionality you suggested at 300 downloads, promise!

As always please give this extension a try in a dev environment first, it’s still being actively developed and I consider it beta. Despite that I am using it myself on several production stores.

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Magento and Google Analytics – Use ‘First Touch’ Tracking To See How Your Customers First Visit Your Store

At the recent Auckland Magento Meetup I had the privilege of seeing Mark Hammersley’s presentation on email marketing – Mark’s a fascinating guy and a real expert, I highly recommend checking out his site. One of the things that came up during his presentation was the idea of first touch tracking your visits, particularly in the sense that if they first come to you because of an email, and you build a relationship with them and they eventually buy from you – knowing if it was an email and which one brought them to the store in the first place is very valuable information.

Magento does not track this out of the box and neither does Google Analytics, however with a simple customization it can be added to the store. This blog post will run through how I added it to two of our new World Wide Access stores, <plug> Cariboo Cribs – which sells cribs and cots to the UK and soon to the USA – and Dominion New Zealand – which sells high quality sheepskin coats and boots (think New Zealand made Ugg).</plug>

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Latest version of SMTP Pro Finally Uploaded to Magento Connect

Geez it’s been a long time coming thanks to Invalid package.xml format errors and duplicate maintainers and goodness-knows-what else. You can finally get the latest version of SMTP Pro – 1.3.4 – even though it’s identical to 1.3. (thank Magento Connect…).

For those who want to install the Magento extension manually (and if you are engineering Magento you probably should) – you can get version 1.3.4 of SMTP Pro here.

If you read my last post on the improvements, you’ll know that it has some great new features for sending, and logging email in Magento using either SMTP or Gmail/Google Apps. So please give it a try and let me know what you think.