Stories

I am doing a lot of research around using social tools in event and conference planning right now. I am researching usage of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social tools in event presentation and speaking at the moment. Planning, preparation and then ultimately presenting a session or Read more →

I strongly believe in the cloud, and more specifically in Amazon's approach to cloud computing. I constantly battle people on my decision to use the cloud for my core IT infrastructure. It allows me to scale my infrastructure as needed and gave a completely new face to my IT strategy and operat...

I was really excited when I got this email response on my ticket from Amazon Web Services: We've reached out to the Amazon EC2 team and here are the next steps. In order for us to proceed, we'll need to setup DNS Read more →

I woke up one morning and got an email from a project manager. The original email from a client had a returned email with the following email server response: Remote server replied: 550 5.7.1 ... Mail from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx blocked using Trend Micro RBL+. Please see http://www.mail-abuse.com/cgi-bin/lookup?ip_address=xx.xxx.xxx.xxx We were black liste...

Sending large amounts of email and ensuring they get received requires a lot of work and you need to make sure your mail framework is setup correctly and is healthy. This takes a lot of work and maintenance. First off I reserve 11 IP addresses with Amazon Web Services. I reserve these 11 IP addresses and never let them back into the general po...

I needed to send a large amounts of email. We are talking 500,000 to 1 million emails in each send. These are emails being sent to encourage event attendance or interaction, so they need to go out quickly. The powers that be wanted to have emails go out in 24 hours. In the past we would send emails and then sit and watch servers for 24-72 hours, with constant server restarts and other problems. I came up with a new base configuration that involved using a single blast server f...

Amazon is a great place to really take care of business when it comes to IT. First order of business at my new job last year was to take care of a really troubling "hostage" situation with their current server co-location contract. My boss said, "move us to the cloud". I had used Amazon Web Services before, I thought I should check out other providers as well. So I toured a handful of cloud providers, but ended up back with Amazon Web Services. They just offered the computing and stor...

I really like this contact information on this site I was researching tonight. The colors don't really appeal to me. It is the fact that their contact information is clearly: Available on every page at the bottom. Provides Email, Phone, Twitter, Instant Message Links newsletter information Links to blog These are all mission critical ways of staying in touch with customers. Users should never have to search around a si...

While playing around with Google Fusion Tables tonight I came across the Open Data Kit (ODK). Open Data Kit (ODK) is a suite of tools to help organizations collect, aggregate and visualize their data. The project's goals are to make open-source and standards-based tools which are easy to try, easy to use, easy to modify and easy to scale. The project consists of: Read more →

I am doing a lot of research in applications and tools that are available out there for the event and conference industry. I am always evaluating broad categories of event technology, but recently I am focusing on: Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Google Wave There are ...

A while back Google released Fusion Tables allowing you to aggregate data from many data sources. Today they released an API for Google Fusion Tables. Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload data, share and mark up your data with collaborators, merge data from multiple tables, and create ...

I have been doing some research on different ways to use Google Wave. Case studies, industry applications, clients, server, and any way I can come at it. One thing I am really noticing is heavy discussion around using Google Wave in education. Lots of information. Here is a good one: Google Wave Use Cases: Education

We were trying to finish up a major email blast tonight and all of a sudden our main blast server stopped working. Then I immediately got a flood of email alerts saying all of our live servers were down. I submitted a trouble ticket to Amazon EC2. I have Gold Support package lately with all the email issues we have been having. I looked at their AWS Status Page and it reported nothing. Then shortly after I submitted my ticket...

I have been going round and round with Amazon Web Services EC2 and Trend Micro MAPS for about 2 weeks now about the entire Amazon IP address block being black listed. Finally got some action out of Amazon. They are going to add PTR records for all of the Amazon EC2 IP addresses that we lease. Great news for legitimizing my usage of Amazon Web Services EC2 for our email infrastructure.

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