Friday, 10 February 2012

Crafting A Proper Apology Policy When Your Blog Really Steps In It - DailyBlogTips

Crafting A Proper Apology Policy When Your Blog Really Steps In It - DailyBlogTips

Crafting A Proper Apology Policy When Your Blog Really Steps In It

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 05:21 AM PST


You really stepped in it this time. Perhaps you were late for your daily blog post and you ran it without obtaining double verification for a specific fact which turned out to be wrong; or maybe you went off on a tirade against an industry personality or a particularly grating commenter and crossed the line; or perhaps you typo'd your $100 prize for your email newsletter contest and set it at $100,000.

No matter what you've done wrong, it's now time to apologize: quickly, thoroughly, and profusely. Here's how to do that.

1. Send the apology email to your entire list

Your email newsletter subscribers have provided you with their trust and confidence so if you have done anything at all to violate that covenant, it's imperative that everyone receive the apology email. Whatever you do, don't ever limit your apology email to the segment that has been affected.

If you sent the "$100,000 instead of $100 grand prize" email only to your readers in Wyoming, or to those over 55 years of age, or to those who have clicked more often on your blogs about white truffle recipes than sea cucumbers… it's not sufficient to just send that grouping the apology email as you can bet that these subscribers are chatting on their social networks about your gaffe.

Be upfront, transparent, and accept your responsibilities in front of all your email newsletter subscribers to properly portray your penitence.

2. Be clear & right up front

The place to plunk a retraction or apology is not in 6.5 point narrow type buried at the bottom of your email newsletter in light beige against a medium beige background. An apology requires a specific email with the word Apology prominently featured throughout the email: on the headline, in the subheads, bolded and italicized if possible throughout the text, and most importantly in your subject line and preheader.

This way your subscriber will be able to comprehend that this is an apology email even before they open it. If you didn't want to suffer the embarrassment, you shouldn't have made the mistake in the first place.

3. Start writing checks

If you used your reputation as an honest and decent blogger to inadvertently send your email newsletter subscribers to a phishing site, or a scam e-commerce operation which took their money and sent them a box of bricks, you will have to raid the piggy bank and offer compensation along with your apology.

If the amount lost by your subscribers is relatively small, offer to compensate them fully and start writing checks. If the amounts are larger and compensating your readers in full would send you to the poorhouse, offer a token cash compensation and follow through by championing and shepherding their claims through the processes with the Attorney General, postal inspectors, or any other form of law enforcement that can help.

4. Get that two-way conversation flowing

An apology email is no time to hide behind a noreply@ return address or only direct the affected email newsletter subscribers to place a comment on your blog which you're moderating and have no intention of having appear anyway. Encourage your readers to contact you directly and make sure that you respond thoroughly and promptly to each and every query.

On your social media presences, don't try to skirt the issue, point fingers, or make repeated and shallow claims of your innocence, but own up to what you've done, take a deep breath, and plunge right into posting about the error. Your social networking apologies have to be as coherent, swift, and repentant as those incorporated into your email newsletter.

Make sure that you go into the process in full understanding that you are going to catch heat and that there will be some who will toss every expletive in the book at you. Put a bag of ice on your head to cool it off before crafting each reply with the maximum compunction and complete courtesy.

No one likes to apologize for their wrongs, but in the blogging business you are your reputation. A proper apology policy will help your readers regain trust in your work.

Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.

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Original Post: Crafting A Proper Apology Policy When Your Blog Really Steps In It

PHP Tutorial For Beginners – Part 1

Posted: 09 Feb 2012 02:45 PM PST


When I asked in the past if our readers would be interested in learning some programming concepts the vast majority said yes, especially if the concepts were focused around the PHP language. Recently I started playing around with PHP myself, so I decided to create a series of tutorials sharing the stuff. If you like this first part please let me know so I keep more coming.

What’s PHP, and why should I care?

PHP is a programming language that was developed to to produce dynamic web pages. Technically speaking it’s a server-side scripting language. Server-side means that it works on the server, as opposed to stuff that runs on the client (i.e., the browser), like JavaScript or Java applets. Scripting means that PHP is an interpreted language used mostly to create dynamic web pages, as opposed to a compiled language like C or C++ which are used to create complete applications. Other scripting languages popular in web development are Perl, Python and Ruby

Speaking of which, why should you learn PHP and not one of those other scripting languages I mentioned? There are three main reasons:

1. PHP is the only language that was specifically designed to create dynamic web pages, as such you’ll find that it’s much easier to get started and to accomplish basic tasks (e.g., to parse data from web forms, to send emails, to manage cookies and so on) with PHP.

2. Most hosting plans these days already come with PHP installed, so you won’t need to worry about getting the PHP interpreter up and running. You just need to create your scripts and away you go.

3. There’s a huge community of PHP users as well as a huge number of important online projects running on PHP (e.g., WordPress, vBulletin). So you’ll be able to find help as well as examples.

Now don’t get the wrong idea. I am not saying PHP is better than the other languages. Ruby from what I heard is a fantastic language as well, and the Ruby on Rails framework is one of the most advanced these days. Same goes for Python, which I used when I was starting to code a couple of years ago and I still love it due to its simplicity and efficiency.

All I am saying is that PHP is the easier one to get started, and if you just want to implement some basic online projects it will probably be all you need to learn.

Running Your PHP Programs

Before you can run your PHP scripts you need install the PHP interpreter on your machine. If you are using Windows check the installation manual here. If you are running Linux all you have to do is to type the following on the terminal:

sudo apt-get install php5

And they say it’s complicated to do things on Linux…

If you have a hosting plan it’s very likely that your server already has a PHP interpreter installed, so you can also run your scripts online. In this case you just need to upload a file with the .php extension via ftp and then browse to that file with your browser.

If you are running your scripts on your Linux machine then save your file as .php and then run it as:

php file.php

Windows users can check how to run PHP scripts here.

Your First Program: Hello World

The first program that you’ll run on probably all languages you learn is a simple one to display the “Hello World” message on the screen. In PHP it looks like this:

<?php
echo "Hello World";
?>

Every PHP script starts with <?php and ends with ?>. Echo is a language construct used to output strings. Notice that every statement in PHP must end with a semicolon. If you forget it your scripts won’t run.

PHP Strings

A string is nothing more than a series of characters, and it’s one of PHP’s eight primitive types (I’ll cover the remaining ones later on).

Since web pages involve mostly text you’ll be using PHP strings a lot.

Strings in PHP can be represented with either single or double quotation marks. So “Hello World” is pretty much equivalent to ‘Hello World’. There are two main differences, though, explained later on.

Before explaining the differences we need to talk about escape sequences. A escape sequence is a combination of characters to produce another one in special circumstances). For example, let’s say you want to print the follow sentence with a PHP script: “This is Peter’s car.”

If you write your script like this:

<?php
echo 'This is Peter's car';
?>

You’ll get an error, because the PHP interpreter will assume that the string finished right after Peter. If you want to make that apostrophe part of the string you need to use the escape sequence \’ (most escape sequences begin with a backslash).

<?php
echo 'This is Peter\'s car';
?>

The code above works fine. An alternative is to alternate double with single quotation marks. So:

<?php
echo "This is Peter's car";
?>

would also work, as would this:

<?php
echo 'The "Lord of the Rings" book is very long.';
?>

Other common escape sequences are \n to add a newline, \t to add a tab and \\ for the backslash itself. In fact from now on I’ll add the \n escape sequence to the end of all strings to make sure we print a newline after them, which makes reading the output easier.

Now this is the first difference between the types of strings: strings with single quotation marks only support the \’ escape sequence, while strings with double quotation marks support all of them.

The second difference is that strings with double quotation marks expand variables inside it. I’ll explain variables below and then return to this point.

PHP Variables

A variable can be seen as a container for some data. Variables in PHP start with the $ sign. Check the following script:

<?php
$x = 10;
$y = 20;
echo $x + $y;
?>

We basically created two variables, assigned a value to each of them, and then printed the sum on the screen.

PHP is a dynamically typed language, which means that it’s variables don’t have any specific type. This means that the same variable can start holding an integer, and later on you can make it hold a string, for example.

Mixing Variables and Strings

As I mentioned before, double quoted strings expand variables inside them. Take a look at the code below:

<?php
$var = "World";
echo "Hello $var\n";
?>

The output is “Hello World”, because the variable gets expanded inside the string. Even variables holding integers will be expanded on the string.

String Concatenation

Another important point is string concatenation. Often times you’ll need to concatenate strings together, and the easiest way of doing it is with a dot. For instance:

<?php
echo "Hello" . "World\n";
?>

Or:

<?php
$x = 10;
$y = 20;
echo $x + $y . "\n";
?>

The above code first adds x with y, then converts the result into a string, and then concatenate it with the “\n” string, effectively printing out 30 with a newline after it.

PHP comes with a huge amount of built-in string functions. You can check all them on the official PHP manual. For instance, there are functions to find the length of a string, to search for specific characters inside it, and pretty much anything else you might need.

On the next part of this tutorial I’ll talk about operators and control flow mechanisms.

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Original Post: PHP Tutorial For Beginners – Part 1
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