Tom Harrington has written a couple articles recently about running a customer mailing list for an indie software business.

Running a customer mailing list

Return of the mailing list

The second one’s ominous title has to do with the fact that Harrington’s hosting provider, pair Networks, has a restrictive policy about using their servers to send out large quantities of email. Tom’s “solved” the problem by signing up for another account at TextDrive, which is more relaxed about the behavior.

It’s amazing how common it is for Pair customer’s (myself included) to be simultaneously ecstatic about the company’s well-deserved reputation for stability, while also perennially bummed about the failure of the company to support some “basic” functionality that is taken for granted on other hosts.

Perhaps that’s why they named the company “pair.” You’ll need to pair it up with another shared hosting provider if you want to run your own mailing list, run Django or Ruby on Rails, host a Subversion repository, use your database to expose usage statistics to users, and any number of other useful web developer inclinations you might have.

This is why Red Sweater runs as a sort of chimera, distributed between DreamHost and pair. I realize that pair’s stability is in some significant sense due to their strict use policies, but in some cases the decisions seem to be more political or inertial than technical.

If some hosting provider can strike a balance between DreamHost’s reputation for indulgence and pair’s reputation for stability, it will be a force to be contended with.

Two of my independent software developer friends (on non-Mac platforms they’d probably be called competitors) have released substantially new versions of their products today! It’s probably hard for non-developers to appreciate just how much work goes into even a modest set of improvements.

Software is hard work. And the hard work isn’t all in the functionality, but in the fine-tuning. Woodworkers will appreciate that the amount of time spent sanding, shellacing, etc. often far outpaces the time spent crudely cutting out the shape of an object.

LicenseKeeper 1.2 is an unbelievable streamlined way of keeping track of all the software licenses you’ve purchased. For most of us I expect our current solution is a dedicated email folder, at best. License Keeper takes all the work, and stress, out of managing your software assets.

Hazel 2 is a full-time housekeeper for the files on your Mac. What if you could be a slob about files and just drop them wherever you please, cluttering up your desktop and clogging your home directory with hundreds of downloads, notes, and temporary files? Well, most of us already are slobs in this way, but Hazel makes it incredibly easy to let your computer keep itself tidy!

Let’s give Jon and Paul a big hand by downloading and trying out their latest masterpieces!

While I was at WWDC this year, Scott McNulty and Victor Agreda from TUAW caught up with me. Scott and I had a nice chat while Victor manned the camera.

I think it turned out pretty well. We spent a good portion of the time talking about and showing off Black Ink. So if you’ve been curious about the Mac’s premier crossword-solving application, but haven’t gotten around to trying it, maybe you’ll be interested in seeing a video demo of it!

Although I’m still hard at work on 2.0, I haven’t forgotten about MarsEdit 1.2! I’ve been collecting smaller fixes that will be welcomed my many users.

MarsEdit 1.2.1 changes:

• For new weblogs, set default comment status to “Open”
• Sort Technorati Tags alphabetically in dialog
• Fix a bug that could cause “Edit With External Editor” to get stuck editing
• Fix appearance of text “#extended#” in the preview
• Blogger Specific
  • Fix issue with authenticating Blogger when user has google hosted account
  • Fix a “phantom category” bug with Blogger blogs that have no categories