Viewing profile — tomwalsham

I'm in the 'sooner rather than later' camp, and have one more key driver. Insurance. As soon as human drivers are provably poorer than automated drivers, the cost to insure a meat …

You just literally described trains and buses. Don't assume the form of the vehicle remains the intimate 3-across sedan style.

The best way to improve email delivery is to understand that email addresses represent humans. Address validation and long-term deliverability is primarily a problem of social engi…

This is definitely good email sender behaviour, but I would hesitate to purely put this down to the altruistic notion of 'keeping your inbox tidy' - Inbox Zero is a problem fairly …

I always like Eric Ries' take on this. You can test the theory: If you have one 'great' idea, chances are you have more. Take your _second_ best idea and do all you can to get some…

I would add one additional point of caution: The Rails community seems unusually keen on the 'curl example.org/script | sh' as an installation method (see Pow.cx etc.). I'd usually…

At PostageApp.com we focus on transactional emails, which these days are moving heavily towards HTML email as a standard now that deliverability is much more focused on IP reputati…

Just as a reference point, this brought to mind an old app (in the desktop sense) from 2001 - http://www.16color.com/ The site is still up, and they claim 40,000 movies were create…

My personal favourite quick-fix (which doesn't stand up to targeted attacks, but is a very effective band-aid), is to put the following : Then disallow any form submissions server-…

These sorts of issues (primarily related to auxiliary functions in grep, sed, etc) can cause portability issues when developing locally for linux systems, but no worse thanks, say,…

A nice visible reason why the Rails/Node/OSX FOSS community really need to stop doing the following sort of thing for their installations (seen most recently on yeoman.io, but comm…

Primarily because the Web is a Pull medium, whereas email is Push. To get my eyeballs on the web you first have to trick me into going to your location. To get my eyeballs on Email…

There's an interesting disconnect between the public perception of email transmission and the reality, even from technically savvy observers. The view you're espousing of the 'basi…

This is a great overview for people looking to run their own servers, with one of the clearest explanations of DKIM and SPF I've seen. Awesome. As a counterpoint, I'd like to add t…

I completely agree. These days there's very little wrong with sending HTML-based transactional email provided you've covered your bases on all other potential flags and send as mul…

It was my first association as well, but I assumed it was used in a jokey linkbait fashion, rather than trying to trade off the reputation of McColo ;) Always great to see new tool…

Some stream of consciousness thoughts on the history of internet communities, particularly those centred around tech. Usenet had immense value in well defined subgroups prior to th…

Speaking of weirdly complex, I've always been a fan of the totally deadpan delivery of the 'Straight Line Tutorial' [gimp lacks a 'line' or 'shape' tool] http://www.gimp.org/tutori…

Sending HTML-only email is still a large spam flag, even at major ISPs, independent of the concerns about client compatibility. At PostageApp our solution to the problem is a templ…

Email deliverability these days is heavily based on sending IP reputation, to a lesser extent domain reputation, and finally content. Once you have ticked the core boxes of complia…

This strikes me as somewhat of an edge case - to add a full rules engine for what is essentially a very app-specific set of behaviours. One main reason the application is the best …

Can you comment on the status of Priceonomics (YC) in this context? They're building a rich interface on top of CL listings data, presumably using 3Taps to get the volume of data w…

While I like the idea, I feel the dollar sign is a poor choice of character. There are plenty of free chars that wouldn't expect to cause conflicts with things like sass, or appear…

The representation of this move as a gateway for 'glory hunters' or wantrepreneurs is surely at odds with the intentions or the likely implementation (not that many of the applicat…

While many jurisdictions hold the same, that 'facts' can't be subject to copyright, there is often a (lobbied for) grey area surrounding compilations of facts. The usual suspects i…