Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

PHP has been my world for many years and recently I've begun branching out. After playing around with the likes of Python, Ruby, and NodeJS; they are all just tools that you can use to get the job done.

That said, there are much better tools than others for specific tasks. And I were to suggest a language that you should start learning in regards to web development, I would probably not recommend PHP. The language has hit a bit of a slow trough as they (the PHP gods) decide on an appropriate roadmap going forward. PHP will be around for a long, long time so there's not much worry of it becoming legacy too quickly.

But other languages are much better maintained and have more activity in the community. (My current favorite being Python.)

Regarding your problem at hand, PHP can do this quite simply and the only resource you'll need would be http://php.net/mail/. That said, I wouldn't use this for high volume traffic as the mail implementation in PHP is not efficient. (Read the notes on that link.)

Email on the internet is a bit tricky, especially when ensuring your message is delivered appropriately, well-formatted, readable in both text and HTML, etc. And as soon as you start hitting these problem, it's a much more efficient use of your time to go with these services over rolling your own.

This is just one person's opinion who ended up using a perl script to handle mailing functionality instead of PHP's native function in a PHP app he wrote. blush

- First thing I can tell you is that when you redirect to Paypal, you don't redirect to a localized version of Paypal. I was sent to the German version, for example. Probably going to turn off many of your visitors who aren't German-speaking.

- Second, WHY are you asking for Paypal credentials if you're not asking for money. To most people, the perception is Paypal == monetary_transaction. Even if they COULD read what the paypal page was saying, they'll see the Paypal domain and instantly click away. And let's assume that they even see that you're not charging anything, this is still a huge obstacle (30-seconds of diversion is HUGE!) in the way of letting potential customer actually understand what your product does. I say, let your users kick the tires without any barriers. If you're really solving a need, people will give you their money.

- Which brings me to my next point... what does your product do? I can't tell? Do you take short-linked RSS feeds and make full-text RSS feeds out of them? Do you take full-text feeds and perform extraction on them? All of that text to the right of your signup form should say simply:

"We make RSS feeds easily readable."

I'm instantly turned off when you say anything like "...tool that tries, and usually succeeds in, separating actual content from other web page elements such as...blahblahblah". There's no confidence in your product and you take too long to get the meat of it.

- Your text is not given any room to breathe. With your text living on top of each other, it makes it difficult for your readers to scan your page for content important to them. (And believe me, they aren't reading it...they're scanning it.) Consider using a CSS framework that will add rhythm and spacing to your text. http://blueprintcss.org or http://960.gs are both decent at what they do and will give you a great foundation to start (even if you have no design skills).

Please take my criticism with a grain of salt. Hope it helps. :)

Here's more communities which I failed to mention originally:

- Mobile Miami Monday (http://momomiami.com/)

- Barcamp Miami (http://barcampmiami.org/)

- Social Media Club (http://smcsf.org/)

- The LaunchPad (http://thelaunchpad.org)

I have 2 questions:

1) If you are being overwhelmed by the amount of books you are being suggested by mentors, entrepreneurs and others, how do you tackle this information overload so that you only read and implement the ones which would have the most impact in your life ?

2) What would you do if you had recent failure and now you don't have enough clarity about goals, life direction and the skills you wanna learn to succeed ? I'm 22/non-technical and got little bit of savings from sales commission I earned through online stuff after dropping out from my undergrad program. The money that I made from online sales was higher than the money I could had made from the job in next 10-12 yrs after getting my undergrad degree. So that sales thing is now busted and I was naive enough to believe that the sales gig would last long but it lasted only 1.5 yrs. I had no team at the time, didn't knew much about marketing, startups etc. It was just self employed thing. I'm living in asia. Although I could still start that sales thing again cuz now I know alot more, but it would be just like a commission you get. Should I work on some other idea/startup or get some skills before I do something. Right now I know little bit of sales/marketing. What do you suggest ?