Dear Lovely Simplerista,

It's funny how we (read: I) sometimes overcomplicate things.

Last year at Wisdom 2.0, I met the founder of MaestroConference, Brian Burt, again. We'd met at Wisdom 2.0 two years before, so it was good to see him again. We talked about how our products might integrate and benefit from each other. And one thing he asked about last year was tagging: Does Simplero do tagging. The answer then was no. He said "Why not, that's easy". I agreed, but there were some other things that had higher priority.

This year at Wisdom 2.0 I didn't meat Brian, but I remembered our conversation, and it bothered me that the answer was still no.

I'd gotten started on the segmentation feature on the way over (the ability to define arbitrary groups of contacts, eg. people who live in this city and have clicked this link in this email, and then obviously do stuff with them). That's not an easy feature to implement. But I realized that tagging can do a lot of what most people want. And tagging, like Brian said, is pretty easy to implement.

So I went ahead and did it, right then and there. I think I started on the feature Saturday and had it done by end of day Sunday. There were still a few rough edges to smooth out, and I got them done Monday.

I wanted to deploy tags before sending this newsletter, but I ran into a problem. In order to deploy this feature, I need to make a data model change to one of our tables that has about 150 million rows. That's a lot of rows. Making a change to that big a table could on the old database version we were running (MariaDB 5.5) take the entire service down for hours. Thankfully, I figured out a way to make the new database version (MariaDB 10.0) do it on the fly.

And that's when I realized that I had unintentionally deployed our new server using the old version of the database. So now I'm going to have to upgrade to the latest version first. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be something I can just do in-place, at least not without risk, and I'm not willing to take that risk. And while we're at it, I really would like to use a new database infrastructure that lets us replicate the database so that if one goes down, the service still keeps running (it's called Galera Cluster).

So deployment of the tagging feature is going to take a few more days as I get this set up.

But it's interesting how you can sit on something for so long, and when you finally decide to chew it off, it's way easier than you thought.

New features in Simplero

I've added a "Do Not Contact" feature for contacts. We need this because we'll soon introduce the ability to send emails to tags or segments, and since these are not something people will have the option of unsubscribing form, we'll need to make sure they can still choose to opt-out of those emails. Hence the "nuclear" option. Here's a guide that explains how it works.

Tagging is on its way, but not quite ready to be deployed. I'm hoping to get the database changes completed this weekend.

I've made some changes to the downloads for invoices that should make it easier to reconcile your accounts, especially with Stripe.

When you click a broadcast or auto-response and go to view everyone who clicked or opened or bounced, etc., you can now download that list. It's a poor man's solution to let you email the people who opened a certain email. I know it's far from perfect. We'll get there. Shortly.

Random Links from around the Interwebs

Elon Musk bought the James Bond convertible Lotus car/submarine, and now it's become an easter egg in the Tesla.

Duet turns your iPad into a second display for your Mac. So incredibly useful, especially when programming.

Bruce Schneier is my go-to expert when it comes to computer security. He's smart. This article is spot-on.

Have a great week.

Much love,
-Calvin