As you will be aware, we are very excited about our self serve email application launching this week.  It’s essentially a do it yourself system where you add your email list, choose a template, add content and send! It has some tracking too so you can see open rates and clicks.

W are pricing it at $5 per campaign, plus $0.01 per email sent. So if you’ve got 1,000 emails to send, it’ll cost you $15.

We’re not going to be charging for a few months as we are looking to invite people to use the system for free to help us test it out and make sure it’s running smoothly. We successfully sent out 600 emails the other day for a client, and while it works beautifully, there are a few things we need to do to make it more usable.

If you are interested in using the system, I have taken down the sign up link so please email russ @ junctionj.com and I’ll give you the secret sign up link!

image copyright Jo Smith – junctionjimage.com

I had an issue today that led me to learn something new and useful.

While working on the self serve app, I discovered in testing that the import function was not working. My developer was offline and I thought I’d take a look at it. I am not a coder, and have no grid for php, but I had something to go on. I had origionally outsourced the development of the app to Charthouse, and they had completed the code work, but it wasn’t designed. So I know that when we got the code, the import component worked. In adding the design or something, perhaps the code had been mistakenly broken.

I thought I’d compare the two files. So I printed both files off to see if I could make any sense of them, see a glaring error. I quickly realized that doing a manual check like that would take ages and be prone to error. So after quick research online, I discovered that google docs can do it simply!

Here’s how to compare any two documents. Create a new google doc. Copy and paste the code (or text) into the new doc. Save it. Then copy the text from the file you want to compare, and save again. Then go to file > see revision history. Check the 2 boxes next to the 2 recent revisions, and click the ‘compare checked’ link. Google docs shows you the differences!

How easy is that! Probably works for spreadies too, but I didn’t try that.