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A double opt-in email mailing list... Freeware Version 1.2 Description Features • Email collection box can be added to any website. • Surfers will then get a confirmation screen. • They'll also get an email asking them to confirm their subscription. • There's an admin area where you can manage emails and send out the ezines. • Password protected admin area. • Secure email list - not accessible to anyone but you. • 100% fully automated subscribe AND unsubscribe. • Every part of the script is customizable. • Test mode - send yourself the email to check it's OK. • HTML or plain text with links options. Working Example Here's the webpage with the email collection box on it. Example Add in your own email if you like - and see how it works. Now look at the admin page: Example Type in user as the username, and pass as the password. From this page, you delete emails or send out the newsletter / ezine to your subscribers. Make the ezine in a text editor or something first and then, when you're happy with it, copy and paste it into this box. Download & Installation Download the latest version HERE. 1) Download the file to your hard disk. 2) Create a folder on your hard disk and unzip the files into it. You should have the following files: admin.php confirm.php email.php email_admin.php email_list.txt send.php settings.php test.html unsubscribe.php 3) Create a folder in FTP where the script can run from in one of your domain names. In the example, my folder was: http://www.tomsnewbiebooster.com/resources/easy-mailing-list/ 4) Upload email_list.txt to your server. This must go anywhere EXCEPT in a domain name. It must go in your webspace's root - that would be ideal. Anywhere on your server where people can NOT access it in a web browser. Eg. /home/htdocs/users/tarmstro/tarmstro/email_list.txt Would be FINE! :-) /home/htdocs/users/tarmstro/tarmstro/tomsnewbiebooster.com/email_list.txt Would not be fine. We don't want people to be able to read our emails and use them for themselves. This would not please our subscribers - and we want to look after them! 5) Open up settings.php in a plain text editor and follow the instructions there. There are 7 steps to getting it working properly. 6) CH MOD email_list.txt to 777 7) Wherever you want the email collection box to appear on your website, paste the following code: <!-- START EASY EMAIL LIST CODE HERE --> <form action="http://www.tomsnewbiebooster.com/resources/easy-mailing-list/email.php" method=get> <FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica" SIZE=4>Hey - wanna join a special FREE email and get porn goodies?</FONT> <BR><BR> Your email: <input type=text size=30 name=email> <input type=submit value="Subscribe"> </form> <!-- END EASY EMAIL LIST CODE HERE --> Version Updates Version 1.1 I added two new features in this update: 1) A test mode. When the test mode box is checked (ticked) it will send the email out to only YOU. This lets you see that your email will appear the way you want it to. You can go back and make changes if needs be. 2) HTML email mode. This allows you to send out HTML emails - webpages AS the emails. Just use the regular HTML tags and link to images that are stored on your server. You can send out any kind of HTML email you want to here. Upgrading from an older version... 1) Download this file send1-1.zip. 2) Upload send.php over the older version. NOTE: If you have not yet installed this script, and are setting it up for the first time - the latest version of this file is in the main download link above. You do NOT need to bother with this upgrade or the above 2 instructions. Version 1.2 Added a feature to the admin area where duplicate email addresses are automatically cleaned out from the database. The script will tell you when it has removed duplicate emails from your mailing list. This gets around the problem where surfers would receive duplicate newsletters had they accidentally added their email more than once. Upgrading from an older version... 1) Download this file duplicates.zip. 2) Upload admin.php over the older version. NOTE: If you have not yet installed this script, and are setting it up for the first time - the latest version of this file is in the main download link above. You do NOT need to bother with this upgrade or the above 2 instructions. Flash email collection box This is not so much an update, as something which some of you may enjoy using. Vicki posted an interesting problem on TNB which was - is there a way to keep the surfers on your page rather than send them away to a 'thank you' page? I thought about this for a while, considered a Javascript solution, but finally decided to give Flash a go. I thought this would be the ideal thing to use because a flash movie is contained within the webpage. So long as I could get the flash movie to send information to the mailing list script, it should work. The result was pretty interesting. Flash email collection box example: You should see that you stay on the same page - and the thank you message is displayed within the box itself. ;-) Setting this up on your webspace 1) Follow the setup procedure above if you have not installed Easy Mailing List yet. It's exactly the same. This flash thingie is just an add on which we bolt on once the script is set up. 2) Next up, download this file: flash-email-box.zip. This is the .swf file which is the new email collection box. 3) And upload flash-email-box.swf to the easy-mailing-list folder. 4) Wherever you want the email collection box to appear, place the following code: <!-- START EASY EMAIL LIST CODE HERE --> <OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" WIDTH="400" HEIGHT="30" id="flash-email-box" ALIGN=""> <PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="flash-email-box.swf"> <PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=best> <PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#999999> <EMBED src="flash-email-box.swf" quality=best bgcolor=#999999 WIDTH="400" HEIGHT="30" NAME="flash-email-box" ALIGN="" TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></EMBED> </OBJECT> <!-- END EASY EMAIL LIST CODE HERE --> Flash email collection box UPDATE This update only applies to those who would like to use the Flash email collection box in conjunction with SSI. If you do not plan to use SSI and the Flash email collection box, please skip this section. We hit problems with the script when it was placed in a central SSI folder and then other pages across multiple domains tried to access it. The problem was that the Flash file (.swf file) used relative paths to the email.php script. So when it was places with SSI onto another domain name - it 'lost' the email.php file and didn't know where it was. This posed a problem. I needed to find a way to tell the .swf file where email.php was - WITHOUT getting everyone to open up the flash file and add in the path manually. The first solution I tried was to use an external settings file which would tell the flash file where email.php was stored on the server. But of course when the .swf file was called with SSI - the settings.txt file was also lost. Then I discovered that you could pass information into a .swf file from the chunk of code which you use to EMBED the Flash file into your HTML page. This was a breakthrough as I had no idea this was possible. I can think of a lot of other uses for this... SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE YOU!? The upshot of it all is that there was a pretty easy fix for this problem. Take a look at this page: Example This is a regular HTML page with the following SSI call on it: <!--#include virtual="/ssi/email-collection/001.txt" --> To explain this - I have a central /ssi/ folder on my server. All domain names have access to this. I created a folder in there called email-collection, and then there's the 001.txt file which contains the code that SSI inserts. This will be familiar to most people who are using SSI and central folders to serve up goodies across their pages. This is something you'll be able to set up pretty easily. So that leaves with two important players left to deal with: The new .swf file, and the code that needs to go in 001.txt - or whatever you name the text file to be included on all your pages. To make this a bit easier, I've made the following generator which will save some headaches editing the rather cumbersome EMBED code. You should now leave this page and follow the instructions there. ;-) GENERATE THE CODE AND FILE REQUIRED HERE As always, give me a shout if you have problems and I'll check them out. Enter Tom's Newbie Booster here More tips, scripts and help... |