Wildbit

Last week we launched our new bounces UI for Postmark. We significantly cleaned up the delivery issues page trying to both give you a better tool for visualizing bounces and spam complaints and introduce our new features: tags, bounce dumps, inactive bounces. We are proud with the user interface, but having a UI is not always the best thing you can do. What if you had in mind a different way to visualize delivery issues? What if you want to tightly integrate your application with Postmark and fetch and display bounces directly in your dashboard instead of requiring users to use the Postmark UI? Now you can do that!

I was excited and eager to try HTML5 in a real project for a long time, so when Gilbert redesigned the Beanstalk landing site I was fully armed for coding it. The web doesn’t need one more HTML5 overview, so this post will focus on 5 things I liked the most during the project.

Phew, that was a busy several weeks. We have been hard at work improving the way we handle bounces on Postmark. The newest additions to our service are support for tagging emails and disabling delivery to addresses that do not want your email.
Tagging
How many times have you wanted to tag your outgoing email and check [...]

Wait, Github? That’s right, we use Github. While some people think that Github is a competitor, we feel our goals and mission are quite different. Beanstalk, which is now offering Git support, is fully focused on private team collaboration around version control. Github, on the other hand, has taken social coding to an entirely new level, using Git as an excellent technical solution to the problem. We use Github for this exact reason, opening up our code to a large community to help others and improve the tools.

You might have noticed by now, but we gave Beanstalk’s landing site a new, fresh look. While we were always very happy with the identity itself (logotype, colors, etc.), the landing site got cluttered over time because we added several elements (like customer logos) which weren’t really planned right from the beginning.

You might have been one of the “lucky” few that tried to pass a comma separated list of email in the To field of a Postmark message just to get back the “Multiple recipients not supported” error. Or maybe you are one of the guys that have been wondering “How come they don’t support Cc?” [...]

After Ilya presenting pretty-diff gem, this Friday it is my turn to share another gem we chose to extract from Beanstalk.

Shellshot – Deal With System Commands the Right Way

First of all, let me warn you. Issuing system calls is usually the worst way to deal with a certain problem. Executable locations vary from platform to platform. Eventual errors are hard to track. Stuck processes are hard to kill. Parameters should be escaped properly. Chances are someone from the community implemented what you need as a gem. If you really need the performance, drop to C even.