Firstly, a cow who can high kick. Whats great about this is when the cow does a Bruce Lee style dance after the man hits the ground…

followed by some really bad martial arts actors auditioning for parts. I cannot work out if they are for real, its still worth watching. :D

[youtube]Wnjb8Hx76u8&NR=1[/youtube]

Update - I was asked about which PHP scripts I use to send email via Google’s SMTP server. The most popular (or well known) one is PHPMailer, problem is that it doesn’t support TLS authentication. SwiftMailer does all that PHPMailer does with the added benefit of sending emails through Google.

You may already know that you can send emails from web forms using Google Applications SMTP server, which is really handy if you have your own VPS as a way of preserving resources such as memory and disk space when installing your own mail server and spam filtering software.

A minor problem with this is when sending emails from web forms using them as the SMTP server.

When emails pass through their SMTP server, the from and reply-to addresses are rewritten to the default one for that account. So if the default account is someone@somewhere.com and the generated email from your php script sets the from address to donotreply@mywebsite.com. By the time it appears in your Gmail inbox, the from address would have been replaced with someone@somewhere.com. This becomes a problem when downloading emails, Google POP server does not allow the download of emails where the from address is the same as the default account address. Bugger! (They do not make this very clear, tut tut)

The only way round this is to change the default email address for the account. But if you have several sites with several from addresses then this is not a viable solution.

A way to download emails via POP is to prefix your username with “recent:” like so:

recent:someone@somewhere.com

This works OK for me, but some people have had this download all emails, including junk. So test before committing to this.

When planning the structure of this site one of the features that was automatically included was a portfolio which needed to showcase my body of work. I began with making a list of all sites I had worked on along with brief notes on my involvement.

Eventually, the portfolio section was completed along with the rest of the site and was published live on the internet. Fine, job done. What’s next I thought.

A short while later I had an enquiry for work, prior to parting with project details they wanted to go through my portfolio. I promptly sent a link to my portfolio page. Some days later they called to discuss the work and my previous projects came up during the discussion. They went through the bits that they liked and asked how I went about developing the slick flash interface, but I didn’t? They then asked about the really nice looking designs and animation and asked again about my involvement, again, I wasn’t involved. The conversation fell silent.

Caller: “So what did you do then?”
Me: “All the server side scripting and database development”
Caller: “Can I see any of what you did?”
Me: “Um…”

Therein lies the problem, as a server side developer discussing my portfolio with potential clients, it is difficult getting across what part I played in the construction of the site. As developers, we do all the work which happens behind the flash movie, or the posh slick design. This isn’t to say we cannot develop in Flash, or design but for these projects our role was that of a server side developer. Trying to get this point across is a constant issue and one I expect will never go away.

How do you showcase your work? List technical details? That would just blind them with science and scare prospective clients away. A friend suggested screenshots. Of what? A web form and its subsequent thank your for submitting your details page? Quite often, our work sits behind a login screen, so demoing is not an option. You could create a demo on your site, again, what will it show?

Hopefully, as clients become more aware of what’s involved, which to be fair is happening, we can all expect to face this again and again.