Michiel van Vlaardingen

In October 2013  PayPal changed a bit of their server infrastructure. They announced it well, with multiple warnings about requiring the Host: header to be sent with verification requests.

Now suddenly my PHP IPN scripts did not work anymore, data was coming in but nothing got verified.

Checking the response quickly points out that PayPal is now redirecting requests to use HTTPS, but our old scripts are still based on years old example code using fsockopen on port 80.  fsockopen doesn’t know about HTTP redirects.

So, to get your PHP PayPal IPN notifications working again, you should replace the fsockopen line with:

$fp = fsockopen('ssl://www.paypal.com', 443, $errno, $errstr, 30);

Update: A few days later things stopped working again… it seems PayPal now adds a newline character behind the VERIFIED response, messing up the sample script. This can be resolved by replacing:

$res = fgets ($fp, 1024);

with

$res = trim(fgets ($fp, 1024));

For the past two years, I’ve been working on one of our products: Observu,  a site and server monitoring platform.   The last year we’ve applied it to our existing sites and customers and now we feel it’s ready for others to see and use as well. It took a bit longer than anticipated, due to other projects and responsibilities taking up time, but we’ve always kept determined to get Observu ready to launch.

If you are interested in improving your availability, response times and quality of service in general, check it out at http://observu.com/

I definitely do not feel like we are done now, having it out in the open now is just the start to find out which direction we should go.  We’ve got so many ideas, but we can’t execute all of them right away. Your feedback will be greatly appreciated and help us guide further development.

It has been common practice for years now for startups to blog about their new product and its development. It’s one of the key methods to keep your future customers informed. However, as soon as you find yourself in the situation to blog it can’t hurt to have some inspiration.

First, I’ve selected blogs that seem to post regularly and have some traction. The blogs I choose are: kissmetrics, pingdom, flattr and joelonsoftware. After some reading I extracted the following topics from these blogs.

• Press coverage, if you’re product was reviewed in a paper on an important blog, this can validate your product in the eye of the reader. You are not just an anonymous product, but a serious contender.
• Jobs, listing job openings shows that you are growing, this can be interpreted as a sign of success, people don’t want to buy from someone that is loosing.
• Important News, besides the obvious point of informing your users, posting news on your blog will also provide reference for those interested in spreading your news even further.
  
• Development Progress, especially if there is not much happening on the outside, it’s good to show that you are still committed to the product. People hate to invest effort in something that’s dieing.
• Development process/tools, if your target audience is also in the developers arena, blogging about the process and tools can be the start of a relationship. You’re not just a company trying to sell them something, you are a colleague, with the same problems and challenges. JoelOnSoftware mainly focuses on this and is great at it.
• Niche Related Articles, becoming a resource for your potential customers, without directly selling your product by posting articles related to your product niche is a great way to gain a bigger audience. Kissmetrics does this exceptionally well.
• The same goes for Best practices/tutorials. Especially if they become easier by using your product, but do not require it.
• Infographics are very effective link-bait, again Kissmetrics is very strong in this area.
• Reports/Research based on your data or questionnaires may get you press coverage when executed correctly. Pingdom is regularly featured in mainstream newspapers as a source. A very smart form of promotion.
• Industry News could also widen your reach, but it will probably require a very very persistent approach to become an authority in your niche.
• Repost stuff from the internet is a very common tactic often in the form of round ups like: “the best 5 SEO tools” or “10 must visit design resources”
• Interviews can come in a lot of different ways, you might interview your team members, important customers or an industry bigshot.  Of course the latter is more likely to get you some extra audience.

I hope this listing will inspire you to post more regularly, it certainly inspired me.

For Observu implementation we are using Pivotal Tracker to keep track of features and progress. I’ve posted a full review on our Observu Blog. To summarize:  the idea of having a single ordered list of features instead of just a bunch with priorities is amazing. It gives you so much more information and forces you to make decisions on what really needs to happen and what needs to happen first.

If you start a new product/website/service  it’s wise to know your competitors.  Find out what they offer at what price and quality. There is nothing wrong with that.

However,  it’s easy to fall in a different trap: get the feeling that you need the same features as your competitors have.  This leads to three problems:   you loose the big picture,  the grown feature set feels like a burden and you’ll get a me-too product.

Instead of focusing on features,  focus on marketing and positioning. Are there gaps?  Untargeted niches,  untried approaches? Only after that,  look for those key features that will attract those customers you want.