Jan
28
SMTP Servers and other thoughts
January 28, 2010 | 1 Comment
Well a month has passed since my last post here and I am still at home waiting to find my next contract assignment, but strangely enough I have not been sat idle in front of the television.
In between working the phones trying to sort out resumes and interviews; I have been doing a lot of programming, and also a fair bit of web design; something I have not done for quite a while and something which to be frank is not my strong suite.
My wife asked me to build her a web site for a particular project she has been working on and I found some software that could be customised that was written in PHP and MySQL. Customising it involved finding and modifying a suitable “skin” which is something I did a few years back for my Wordpress sites.
Having adopted the “try it and see” method of css editing, I was getting very frustrated at my lack of progress when I smartened up and tried to see if I could find a specialised CSS Editor to save the hassle of doing it in Notepad.
Fortunately for me, I found a demo copy of Stylizer which was just the ticket as it allows the user to modify the CSS elements of a website on the fly and immediately see the results then and there. It was so good that I fully intend to purchase the professional version Stylizer Ultimate.
Another problem I had to tackle was email. The site needed to be able to send out emails to members. In the past, I have had absolutely zero success at configuring SMTP; which I am sure says a lot about my technical abilities!
Once again, the gods of Open Source smiled upon me because I found a really good Open Source SMTP Server for Windows called hMailServer which did the trick. After a day or so of searching Google for hints, wrestling with my ISP, my Domain provider and my own internal Server settings, I finally got it all working!
So, who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks?
