Are you having problems getting email sent from you WordPress blog?

One of the features that I really like is being able to get emails when new comments are posted. I also use the Contact Form 7 plugin which needs to send mail.

The Problem

I recently switched web hosts to Webfaction. They’ve been great — what I think you should be able to expect out of shared hosting.  The only problem is that they don’t support PHP’s mail function. They claim it’s to reduce spam — mail() can be used to send email defining the from address as whatever you want without having to authenticate. It can be very convenient, but it’s really not the ideal way to send mail using PHP anyway. WordPress does it because it’s pretty rare to find a server that doesn’t support it and the alternatives are too commonly uninstalled.

The Solution

To fix this issue we need to find a way to take the email that WordPress wants to send and send them through Pear’s mail function. Pear is a PHP framework much like zend is to PHP or jQuery is to Javascript. The mail function in particular lets us send mail similar to the way the regular mail function does, but we have to authenticate through an SMTP server.

I found a couple of plugins, but decided to use WP-Mail-SMTP.

Since we need to authenticate, there has to be a real email address that the emails are coming from. I setup wordpress [at] mydomain because that’s where the emails would normally come from if you didn’t have this issue. Since I’m using Google Apps for my email I used the author’s instructions for configuring the plugin for Google Apps and it worked perfectly:

Mailer: SMTP
SMTP Host: smtp.gmail.com
SMTP Port: 465
Encryption: SSL
Authentication: Yes
Username: your full gmail address
Password: your mail password

Hopefully this helps. I’m sure there could be other causes to why your  mail isn’t sending, but this is what worked for me. Before you try this, try checking if your host supports PHP’s mail function. If not, this will probably fix it — as long as they support Pear. If they don’t support PHP’s mail function, they most likely support Pear for the same reasons listed here.

A little over a year ago I did a post about forwarding your godaddy email to gmail. This worked great for me for about a year, but I recently discovered that you can setup Google Apps for free on your domain and this is much easier to manage. I’m not going to document the process here, since their documentation is pretty easy to follow. It’s pretty much just a bunch of MX records to setup in your DNS.

Once you’re all setup, managing the whole system is super easy. Every account can have gmail, google calendar, google docs and google sites. Once you’ve got the email account setup you can forward to another email address if you want, or just use the inbox that they give you.

It sounds rediculous, but I think I’m going to start using tumblr. No, no, it’s not going to replace anything on this site. This will be in addition to the nothing that I already do here. Told ya it sounded ridiculous.

I think it was when I was on @garyvee’s website one day when I decided to sign up for an account. The idea of different post-types is something that I tried to start on my blog awhile back with asides(which I’ve since ditched) and image galleries(which I’m currently working on), except on Tumblr it’s built in and not some crazy theme hack.

I’ve been curious about Tumblr for a long time. As soon as I saw the interface I loved it. As soon as I saw that you could set it up with a custom URL, for free, I was hooked. It’s ridiculously customizable with some good looking templates right off the line.

Integrating it.

I knew there had to be some way to integrate this into my site without imposing on the WordPress blog. I had no idea how I would generate enough content for my main blog and a tumbleblog, but now it seems quite obvious. I don’t need to generate anymore content than I already am. This is the place to share some of the content that I stumble across on the web, but don’t want to clog up my blog with. The youtube videos, the digg stories, the music — it can all go here — in one, centralized location.

I think back to when I started using Pownce. It was a cool service, but I didn’t really know what to use it for until I saw people sharing videos and music. Then I realized what a great tool it could be. I’ve been looking for a replacement ever since they sold to Six Apart on December 15th last year(2008). This is what Tumblr will be for me, but better. I’d also like to save all my tweets here and who knows what else so that they can be archived and searchable. Right now the twitter feed and the vimeo vids are set to automatically post, but I will definiltly be posting as I browse the web.

Have you ever had the problem of having a little extra space under images on your website? This has been driving me crazy since I started the FancyFlickr plugin and noticed a little extra space under all of the images on my site.

The problem is that by default the bottom of images are lined up with the baseline of the text — which means the bottom of most letters, but there is still that small space for the bottoms of letters like p and q.

By default vertical-align is set to baseline. All you have to do to fix the problem is set

a img { vertical-align: bottom; }

Viola! Problem solved.