Matthew Lang

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This week I had something of an issue involving my email and a feature in my CRM that I wanted to use. Here's the gist of the problem.

For each client email I receive I want to send a copy of it to my CRM so that it's easier to find in my CRM rather than filtering through my email for it.

Sounds easy right?

Prior to starting to use this feature I had started using Airmail for my email. It's a lovely app to use and has many great features. There was nothing there that I had to use, I just wanted to give it a try. No harm in that. When it came to forwarding my emails to my CRM I had two problems.

1. I couldn't find the ability in Airmail to automatically forward emails to my CRM. Not a big problem, but manually forwarding email takes time.
2. My CRM didn't recognise the emails that I was forwarding.

The first problem I could live with for a while, but the fact that my CRM didn't recognise my emails wasn't a problem with the CRM (although they are working on a fix to resolve it), it was a problem with the way Airmail formats an email when you forward it.

Now to resolve this I did contact the my CRM's support people and the knew of the problem right away and they offered a number of solutions if I wanted to keep on using Airmail. It involved a bit more cut and paste than I wanted to do though.

Just as an experiment though I forwarded the same email from Apple's own email client, Mail, and guess what? It worked. It just worked. No copy and pasting or changing preferences. It just worked.

Right so if that works what are the chances of being able to automatically forward an email from Mail to my CRM when it hits my inbox. Guess what? It does!

The thing to remember is that I've used Mail for the last three years. I only switched to Airmail out of curiosity. I've switched back to Mail and despite paying a small amount for Airmail, I might go back and use it again if it's updated so that I can use it to forward emails to my CRM. It's a nice email client, and others might have better success with it than me, but not that I see that Mail does everything I need I've switched back.

I only started writing about this little change in tools after reading Patrick Rhone's article on proven tools.

When it comes to the things I use, especially those I rely on every day, I want to use only things that have been prove as much as possible. Proven to work. Proven to last. Proven over time and use.

— Proven by Patrick Rhone

Go on read it, it's worth your time.

And the next time you decide to switch away from something that's been proven to work for you. Take a few minutes and think if it's worth the time doing.

Special thanks to the support staff of Highrise (the CRM in question), who answered my support query in the stupid hours of the morning in the US. Excellent service and excellent support. Thanks Highrise!

Love the colour!

via 8bar Bikes, original source

Feedbin just won the Internet. Email newsletters direct to your Feedbin.

What a great feature!

We've all seen them. People showing off their GoPro footage of a mountain bike run down the alps, snowboarding down the Rockies or even those crazy people that enjoy free climbing tall structures.

For me though, this is the best use yet of a GoPro.

I'll be surprised if this is as big a thing as Facebook.

I can thing of a few things off the bat that I would take issue with:

• Does the app silence notifications when I'm not supposed to be working?
• Does it do something better than any other business communication platform?
• If the company I worked for did use it, do I get a company phone to install it on?

At DigitalBothy the choice of communication is primarily the phone, then email and finally Slack.

Facebook at Work? No thanks.

And so is productivity revision time with Nicholas Bate.

Pushing words out even when I don’t have a lot of things I think others will care about is a growing thing. I’m happy that I’m writing what’s real in my little world.

— Writing Every Day by Jamiee Newbury

I need to get back on track with posting daily. Even if it is just a few brief words.

Belt drive fixie. That's a first for here (I think!).

via Bellitanner Bikes

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I was still using Feedbin as my goto RSS Reader. Well it seems that's not the only product I'm still using after three years.

Gauges is my choice of analytics tool since moving away from Google. It might not be as feature rich as Google Analytics has but it definitely suits my needs and is probably a better fit for most people that want to measure traffic on their sites.

Why the move to Gauges?

When I wanted to go Google-free I tried to find feasible alternatives to all the Google products I was using. At the time I needed an analytics tool to replace Google Analytics. To be honest I only used it for the pageview count for my blog. I had no interest in using the search, e-commerce or other advanced features. I just wanted to track page views and visitors. One service that caught my eye was Github's Gauges service.

What has changed since moving?

I've been using Gauges ever since that day. Gauges itself has changed hands and is now owned by Expected Behaviour, but the service itself still remains fault-less and reliable. I don't think Gauges received any updates during its time owned by Github but since changing hands, the service has received a steady stream of improvements. The latest being the mobile and tablet support. The is a stand out feature for me. I like having apps on my phone but for things that I check on a less than frequent basis when I'm away from my desk I'd rather use the browser.

Another plus for me is the Gauges API. When I used Jekyll for blogging, I used a script and Gauges API to pull the top content for the month and add it to my blog during the generation process. The API is easy to use and well documented. Even though Gauges has a limited set of data for views and visitors across different time periods in their web client, you can quickly get the API to return the data you need.

I'm also using a Slack bot that can fetch the stats for my websites. I had been using the Gauges daily summary email for this but I've been trying to curb the amount of email I get on a daily basis and instead I'm funnelling content like this through a private Slack channel. I just put the Gauges bot command in and the bot returns the views and visitors for each of my sites for today or yesterday. Handy for when I want a basic overview of the past day's activity.

Recommended?

Would I recommend Gauges? Definitely.

Not only do I get all the essentials like page views, visitors and referring links but there's also development tools that allow you to analyse what percentage of browsers using your site support different features.

Sure Gauges doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Google Analytics has, but for me Gauges has just the right amount of feature for tracking visitors to my websites without making it too difficult. Right now I'm running four websites with Gauges, two blogs and two products, and it more than covers all my needs.