Tools that Work for Me

Being the "Chief Butcher" at SpamButcher really boils down to two things:

- Making sure the product up to snuff
- Making the sure website is also, well, up to snuff

Needless to say, I have hundreds of minions working under me to help insure the two tasks listed above are fully executed.

If the website isn't working right, we won't get potential customers visiting, downloading and hopefully purchasing.

If the application doesn't work well, it doesn't matter how many people visit the website and download; they won't purchase. When SpamButcher's anti-spam email filter has been performing at its best, sales have been strongest.

So, this page is about giving props (as in "proper respect") to other companies that produce good products that make my life easier.

None of these products are free - but they all do offer free trial or limited-functionality versions. Trialware is a great business model. If you're confident in your product, letting the customer have an extended test-drive is a win-win.

Weblog Expert is an excellent log analysis tool for Windows. They want $75 for the full version, but they also have a free "light" version (the free version has full functionality for a limited trialware period).

The light version lacks some of the more advanced tracking options - but for a lot of webmasters, it's probably adequate. The product works a lot like Webtrends for about 10% of the cost and setup complexity. It also just seems to be painfully well written code.

I examined roughly half-a-dozen different network / server monitoring tools before deciding on IP Check by Paessler. I can't figure out how large a company Paessler is, but at $150 their product under-prices most other similar tools. Yes, there are cheaper applications, but they all fell short of my needs in some respect.

IP Check lets you easily monitor any number of services running on your server. If something fails, you can configure it to send you email, execute batch files, etc. Personally, I have it configured to automatically re-point DNS entries for www.spambutcher.com to a backup server in case of failure.

It also features a nice little desktop monitor that sits on your taskbar (this was a feature missing in most other inexpensive products). You can readily see if something is amiss with your server without having to check a website, or launch an application.

The SpamButcher anti-spam filtering tool itself uses Setup2Go as an installer / uninstaller. Simply, said the application works quite well. Software authors can easily configure what files need to be deployed, what registry entries need to be configured and any other settings need to be tweaked in order to setup their application. At $29 for a single license, it's kind of a no-brainer.

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