a blog reminder service

I was a amused to find that Brompt is listed as #60 under Blog Setup Tools on the misspelled www.wordpres.co.uk/ ("Wordpres" is missing the second "s"). Even Cyber Squatters know a good service when they see it.

I set those links above to rel=nofollow because, despite them promoting Brompt.com, I think that cyber squatting is a pernicious practice and prevents people from getting to the pages they want.

Just ran across a tip for using Brompt.com on the E-Marketing Masterclass Blog on a post called Adding a “How To” into your e-newsletter.

Problem: you need to create content for next month’s e-newsletter, but somehow time just seems to have slipped by. It’s now too late to do anything, so you have no option but to cancel the forthcoming issue. Bad for readers, bad for sales.

Solution: Set up a free nagging service online and remind yourself when you need to make a start on each issue, ahead of time. Set it up once only.

http://www.hassleme.co.uk will send you your own reminder e-mails at ’semi-unpredictable intervals’. You can add in your colleagues if you like, so the whole team gets nagged at once.

http://brompt.com will do the same for you if your e-newsletter runs off your latest blog post (like this e-Masterclass does here at TMB from my e-Masterclass blog). It sees if you have not posted for a while and nags you. Excellent!

So chalk up another great use for Brompt: reminding people to write their e-newsletter.

Thanks to the helpful advice of Cheryl, I added some additional text to the Brompt Signup page. Now beneath the submit form it says:

After submitting, you'll receive a confirmation email with a unique URL from which you can edit or delete your reminder at anytime.

I don't want people to think that the service can't be turned off or modified. How obnoxious would that be? Very.

As of my writing this Brompt has just hit 100 reminders sent during its lifetime. To be honest, the majority of them are for my poor blogging: I'm getting lots of nags. But regardless:

100 reminders. Woot.

I tried looking up what color to use for a 100 year anniversary and got nothing. So we'll just color this one awesome.

I spent the afternoon today putting together a simple Statistics Page for Brompt. I'm actually pretty happy with it---not to mention I'm able to keep the mind-alteringly green theme going strong.

The chart on the stats page uses the Google Charts API, via a Drupal module called Charts (simply enough). I actually had to hack on it a bit since the module was strongly genericized (with a lean feature set) and I wanted to make a very clean looking, Google-Analytics-style chart, which meant adding in a lot of little code for things like axis labels, grids and color-fills. Stuff like this:

Fun huh? In the end I probably could have just written a completely generic array parser that would format generic keys and values into the proper API URL for Google Charts to gnaw on. Something for another day, I guess.

I put Brompt on Digg this afternoon. So far it's off to an inauspicious start. Oh well... This way we can be a Cinderella Story. And who doesn't like Cinderella? (other than her stepmother and step-sisters, of course)

April 1st isn't the most auspicious launch date, but I'm happy to be getting Brompt up and live and running. It works!

Thank you Morgan for your help in debugging, and Corinne, for the copy-editing.

There is still lot's to add, but fhew, nice.