This link has been bookmarked by 5 people . It was first bookmarked on 08 May 2007, by Orlin Monad.
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20 Mar 08
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09 Jul 07
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08 May 07
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Account Management - To aide support, account management is crucial. The idea is that a customer can be viewed, and in one glance their support, billing, and usage history can be seen. Given that information, the support admin can then fix outdated databases, upgrade, downgrade, cancel, refund, and perform any other task with one click.
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Stat Tracking - You make what you measure
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Attracting Users - Word of mouth is great, but how else can we get users to our site? Whether the method is advertising, referral programs, SEO, conferences or promotions, tracking performance must be in place. And once a user gets to the site, it is important to know what makes them signup, and what makes them leave.
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Inactive Accounts - So a ton of people sign up for a free account. Great! But eventually they become a burden when they start to take up server resources. To remedy this, we flagged any free account with no entries or logins in the past 3 months as inactive. At first, we were going to simply delete these accounts, but that wasn’t good enough. We wanted people to be able to restore their accounts, so we had to work out a way to programmatically back up their information. Once that was completed, what would the user see when they logged on, and how would their account get restored. The site had to be visually modified, and a one click restore had to be added to the account manager.
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Documentation - This is something we’re still trying to figure out how to handle properly. In addition to trying to stay up with the text and videos of the actual documentation, we have to figure out and track how to move users with questions from within the program to the actual documentation. The ultimate goal being to reduce support tickets to 0.
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Rewriting Code - Yes, almost 85% of our code has been rewritten since launch, and the other 15% will follow shortly. There are multiple reasons for this, but the main three are for scaling, optimization, and preparation for an API.
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For inactive accounts, the method will change greatly based on your setup. For us, we have a master table with all accounts, so we had to add a 1 or 0 column to it showing if it is inactive or not. Then, we had to create a file structure to store our backups in. In some cases you can do a mysqldump for the rets of the data, and in others you might have to run queries to build a custom sql backup file. The goal is to store all customer information in an SQL backup file, so that is where the difference will be per application. Then for the restore, all missing tables are recreated, and then the batch file is executed again, and the customer is flagegd as active again.
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