Blog by Stephen R. Owens

The funniest Deepwater Horizon BP spill video I've seen, as of the date of this post.

Newsletter Made Simple (NMS) for CMS Made Simple (CMSMS) is an easy to use bulk mailer, which I have been using for a few years now. In this blog post I will explain some of the functionality problems I have come across and the solutions I use to make NMS my bulk mailer of choice.

I have tired other bulk mailing programs, such as the very popular phpList, but it's nice to just have a native bulk mailer inside the content management system (CMS). A big thank you to lemkepf, calguy1000, and nuno for developing the NMS code. It just needed a few tweaks.

I have been asked many times about how to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to upload and download files in Windows. Here are four simple steps that can be used with Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP to transfer files via FTP. These steps use the windows native FTP capabilities, which means you don't have to download or install anything.

Just finished watching Paranormal Activity, which has been proclaimed to be, "one of the scariest movies of all time."

I just released a simple PHP script, which is easy to modify and well commented, that sends the results of a MySQL query as a CSV formatted email attachment. The CSV is properly formatted so it can be opened by Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc. It can be found under the code section: "Email MySQL Query Results as a CSV File Attachment". I have released it under the GNU GPL free software license, giving you room to modify it to meet your needs.

The news as of late has made a big deal about the amendments to the FTC's Endorsement Guides, as can be read in this cNet News article, with the news media focusing the one aspect of the changes and how it affects freebies for Bloggers who write reviews. Most of these reporters have missed a bigger point. The Endorsement Guides affects more than just Blogs. The actual scope of the new amendments could also carry over to boards and forums, social networking sites, Twitter, consumer product reviews left on eCommcerce sites, and for that matter any emerging communication technology.

I have been reading ATLAND (http://www.realmofatland.com) for years now, and I highly recommend it. New strips are released every Thursday. Each episode is filled with lowbrow PG-13 humor.

MC SpandX delivers a funny video portraying the conflict between road bikers and hipster fixie crowd. Now that I know some road bikers and some fixie hipsters, I find this video extremely funny.

I opened a new Code section on my site today, which will contain free software licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0.

To kick it off I am releasing the CMSMS Shop Skin Helper. This tool will create cached skin files based upon a CMS Made Simple template. The tutorial included in download provides a walk-through for skinning an osCommerce / Zen Cart installation on the same server as CMS Made Simple. This PHP code is not dependent upon CMS Made Simple, so it could be used to skin all kinds of things.

President Obama said a lot of great things that I really liked in his Health Care Marketing Conference last night (July 22, 2009). I am all for the reforms he talked about. You can watch it here on hulu. The problem is we have no idea what is actually in this health care reform bill.

Senator Tom Coburn has proposed an amendment in the Senate Health Committee that would require members of Congress to switch from their current health insurance plans to any government provided insurance scheme that's created as part of proposed health care legislation. They voted 12-11 for it. This means close to half of the Senators on the committee decided that the health care plan they are cooking up, which is good enough for us the people of our great country, is definately not good enough for them. Help us put the entire Congress on the spot.