The goal of mod_pagespeed is to automate optimization processes by integrating them into an Apache 2.x module. I’ll go through the process of installing and configuring this module below.

Determine the architecture

To my understanding, MediaTemple (dv)’s are all 32-bit architecture as of the writing of this article. To verify, run the following command:

$ uname -p

The command will likely result in ‘i686’ (i386, i486 and i586 also signify a 32-bit kernel). If you see ‘x86_64’, you are running an 64-bit architecture and you will need to use a different RPM.

Download and install RPM

You will need to be logged into your system as root and have yum installed. The following commands with download the correct RPM and install the module to your system:

$ yum install at
$ wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-pagespeed-beta_current_i386.rpm
$ rpm -i mod-pagespeed-*.rpm

Configuration

The configuration file can be found at /etc/httpd/conf.d/pagespeed.conf. There is great documentation on the individual settings on the Google Code page. The configuration lets you enable/disable certain optimizations as well as set thresholds on when to optimize a file.

I hope this is helpful for other MediaTemple (dv) folks out there. We saw the average page load taking roughly 20% of the time as compared to pre-installation. Amazing!

Update: MediaTemple has a great installation tutorial on their wiki worth checking out.

Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of Jonathan’s series entitled “Custom Post Types & PHPurchase: Best Cart Ever”. It’s guaranteed you’ll learn something.

1. They are self hosted solutions

In my experience, self hosting email marketing rarely works out well. Most hosting providers have tight limits on how many emails can be sent per hour from a given domain. A somewhat average limit of 300 emails/hour implies that it would take nearly 17 hours to email a list of 5,000 addresses. While that could be acceptable in certain circumstances, it is less than ideal for a big marketing push or product launch. Hit 10,000+ addresses and you are talking in days, not hours. No good for my clients!

2. They have clunky and non-intuitive interfaces

I’m a big supporters of open source software, but have yet to see an open source email marketing tool that has been as slick as the likes of Campaign Monitor or MailChimp. When passing off open source software to a client, pray they are somewhat technology proficient or you’ll have a support nightmare on your hands. The best client interface we’ve seen to date is poMMo, but it still leaves much to be desired.

3. They lack crucial features for professional use

To be usable by a business with any sizable email address list, an email marketing tool has a few “must-have” features:

• Email throttling
• Intuitive and simple administration interface
• Elegant WYSIWYG email editor (with the ability to hand-edit HTML if necessary)
• Automated bounce handling
• Comprehensive analytical tools to measure campaign success

4. There is no strong community

Unlike many other great open source projects, we’ve found much to be desired in the communities for the top open source email solutions. This makes support and bug fixes a disaster zone.

Conclusion

It’s my opinion that most clients that are serious about doing email marketing should be ready to pay for it. The added benefits of using a high quality tool are well worth the price. My favorite? Campaign Monitor by a mile.

Up until last week, I was really pretty disappointed with many of the open source email marketing software options. In the past I have implemented GNU Mailman as well as PHPMailer-ML for my clients, but each of these has their major downfalls. Mailman just feels way too bulky, takes too much hand editing for configuration, and is a beast for client training. PHPMailer-ML was simple to configure, but had a pretty clunky interface. I also ran into some issues with the database connection being dropped while sending leaving us no clue where it left off. So the search for a great free email marketing solution continued. Enter poMMo.

poMMo is very easy to configure and has a decent looking, easy-to-use interface. There is one configuration file that really only required MySQL database connection information and the system is off and running. It self-installs and does it in a way that it could be run “out-of the box”. Of course I do customize the HTML emails for my customers, but that was just as easy with its email template feature.

Here are some of the features I like about poMMo:

• Email throttling (by total emails sent and by destination domain)
• Auto generated HTML subscription forms
• Custom field collection (First Name, Last Name, City, State, etc.)
• Groups for mailing a subset of the full subscriber list
• HTML and Text-Only email options
• Email history stored as HTML pages for archiving. This is great for mail reader issues with HTML.

Known Issues and Desired Features

• There is an issue with the admin interface in Firefox where the body of the content falls below the sidebar. This is just a small CSS issue that can be fixed with some slight tweaking.
• The system is set up to have an email address that receives bounces, but there is no automated bounce processor. It would be nice if it could automatically unsubscribe invalid addresses after a set number of bounces.
• When composing emails, poMMo uses FCKeditor to allow for advance editing. The software doesn’t display the ‘Source’ button to view the email as HTML. This would be nice for advanced users that want to hand manipulate their email’s HTML. Just a small hang up.

Update: I have been using poMMo for a solid month now with one of our clients and unfortunately can no longer recommend it as a high-quality piece of email marketing software. It appears to have been out of active development for some time (Latest release was Apr 03 2008) and while there is a community around poMMo, it’s limited in its ability to support issues.

Update: There has been new development activity on poMMo by a group of developers. Although I can’t speak to what their plans are with the software, they are taking suggestions. Check out the project on github.