The great thing about the POP mail protocol is that it is a well-documented open standard, making writing a mail client to collect mail from a POP box a relatively painless process. Armed with basic knowledge of POP, or SMTP it is possible to write proxies which do a variety of useful things, such filter out spam or junk mail, or provide an e-mail answering machine service. Unfortunately, in trying to write a standalone client for Hotmail, the world’s most popular web-based mailing system, the fact that no POP gateway exists rapidly becomes a problem.
Hey, Client, This Is Me!
In a crowded market, clients will be seeking personality as they read what you’ve written — they’ll click right past pages that feel “been there, read that.” They’re looking for a voice that says, “Hey, client, this is me!”
Beware the Difficult Client
Most clients are a pleasure to work with. The pains in the derriere are also, when you have enough experience to recognize the type.
I’ve listed several “difficult” types below, so that you can arm yourself against them.
The major weapon in your armory is THE CONTRACT. Always have a contract, no exceptions. Be especially wary of the prospective client who says: “A contract? This will take you what, an hour? Surely you don’t expect a contract for an hour’s work?” (See “The Spider” below.)
Web Content Case Study … And How A Unique, “Client Centric” Focus Sets One Melbourne Real Estate Agency Apart!
We recently “re-engineered the content and design of a website for Gardner+Lang ( www.gal.com.au ), a leading commercial real estate consultancy in Melbourne, and the result is a site that is quite different from most commercial agency sites.
Bringing SQL Server Data into Client as XML Data Islands
One of the most frustrating things to me is seeing developers doing new things, but in “old” ways. A classic example is one you may have seen yourself: Here we have a sophisticated client – side application that runs in Internet Explorer, we use XML Data Islands and XSLT transforms and parameters, templates, and we even use XMLHTTP from the client. And along with this we may have page upon page that needs to get a recordset from SQL Server – sometimes many recordsets, and bring them into the page as XML so we can do all our “new kind of cool stuff” with it. Well, that’s great.