One of our first supporters, 37 Signals mentioned Nourish in Signal vs. Noise and the Basecamp product blog. We were also pleased to find ourselves mentioned on Emily Chang’s eHub as well as on Killer Startups. RSS Ray, an Internet radio show with a focus on RSS marketing featured Nourish in an interview with founders Matt Browne and Chris Abad in a recent broadcast. Nourish also received a plug from Smashing Design Magazine in an article on user interface best practices. And of course a special thanks goes out to digital-telepathy for promoting Nourish on it’s blog and throughout their network.

Of the 1,000 users already signed up and making use of Nourish, Homegain Real Estate Blog has already made Nourish an essential part of their marketing strategy . When asked if they would recommend Nourish to other marketers, Jessica, Homegain’s Marketing Communications Manager replied, “Definitely, it eases tasks that I used to have to do manually and lightens my personal work load. It’s automated, done well, has customized functionality, and lets the visitors subscribe to the newsletter.”

With the future of RSS to email communication bright (NBC recently purchased competitor SendMeRSS.com, formerly Rmail), Nourish is poised to be an industry leader in connecting RSS publishers to readers with unprecedented accessibility. Integral Impressions co-founder Chris Abad speculated, “Nourish will be widely known as the quickest and easiest way for bloggers to provide an email newsletter to their readers. It will be the popular standard in the industry for converting an RSS to email.”

In the coming months, as we continue to build on Nourish and expand its possibilities, we hope that we will continue to see the amount of support and enthusiasm we’ve enjoyed with its launch. To that end- you can follow the latest news on Nourish by following our Twitter site.

“v=spf1 include:nouri.sh ?all”

Need more information? There’s an SPF creating wizard here and a rather technical syntax overview here.

If all this technical talk has you bewildered we’re available for consulting, or you can ask in the forum.

UPDATE: we altered the headers in the mailings we send, and there’s now no need for you to add your own SPF records. Mail servers will now just look to make sure that the mail is sent via nouri.sh, and SPF and DomainKeys will always pass.

There is something quick and simple you can do on your end to instantly decrease the likelihood that your email will arrive to your recipient as SPAM. You can setup an SPF Record on any domain you use to send email from, and allow our server smtp1.nouri.sh.

Without getting into all the technical details, you’re basically telling the rest of the Internet that it’s okay for email from your domain to be sent out by our servers.

I quick wizard can be found here. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

UPDATE: we altered the headers in the mailings we send, and there’s now no need for you to add your own SPF records. Mail servers will now just look to make sure that the mail is sent via nouri.sh, and SPF and DomainKeys will always pass.

If you have followed our blog, you know we recently launched an RSS to email service called Nourish. Because 37 Signals builds every product they have with RSS feeds, it makes Nourish a perfect vehicle to deliver updates for our clients automatically.

Here is how we have ‘mashed up’ Nourish + Basecamp to provide a better service for our clients who don’t regularly subscribe to RSS feeds. Follow these simple steps:

1. Sign up for a free Nourish account.
2. Set up a campaign called Basecamp Updates
3. Grab the RSS feed from Basecamp
4. Make a list of people who should get the updates
5. Set the delivery for daily (you can do weekly or monthly)

Now our clients get updates daily with what items have been completed. No more emails asking, “Is this done yet?”. Can you digg it?

We hope you find the Nourish + Basecamp mashup useful. We are always interested in creative ways our clients use our products. If you are using Nourish to in a unique way, we’d love to hear about it. Submit your Nourish Mashup today!

Even though we’ve launched, this is only the beginning. We may take a little bit just to catch our breath (and possibly catch up on a little bit of sleep), but things will move pretty quickly after that. Stay tuned to our blog for the latest updates regarding Nourish, as well as our other awesome projects.

[project]+[user]@[account_name].ticketi.sh

Let me take a minute to explain this one. Every project in Ticketish has its own unique email address to automatically accept tickets via email. For example, our Ticketish support email address is:

ticketish@integralimpressions.ticketi.sh

To have Ticketish auto-assign the ticket, simply use Plus Addressing. Add a plus sign after the name of the project, followed by the name of the user you want the ticket to be assigned to. If I wanted to send in a Ticketish support request, and have it assign to myself, I’d send an email to:

ticketish+cabad@integralimpressions.ticketi.sh

Enjoy, and keep that feedback coming in.

So after much anticipation, I no longer have to respond to the question “When is Nourish going to launch?” with “Soon.” We have a launch date: November 26, 2007. That right, you heard it here first. Barring any sort of natural disaster, catastrophic emergency, or apocalypse, we will be launching Nourish a week from tomorrow.

For those of you who want to get a Nourish account as soon as they are available, be sure to leave us your email address. We’ll shoot you an email as soon as we launch.

These screencasts are quick video clips which help illustrate some of the most important tasks you’ll need to understand to manage your landing pages in Outlandish. If you’re having trouble watching the screencasts, make sure you have the latest version of Flash installed.

• Create new users
• Delete users
• Edit users other than themselves
• Create new projects
• Edit projects
• Delete projects

This was one of those simple things that was overlooked simply because we never had a need ourselves to restrict users. However, as more and more companies use Ticketish, this is becoming an important feature.

The first user for all existing accounts have automatically been made an administrator. If you want other users to have admin access, an administrator will need to go to “Administration,” the “Users” tab, and click on the user you want to grant admin access to.

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about this.

Please take some time to check out our app, Nourish. You can vote for us in 3 easy steps:

1. Preview Nourish
2. Create a Rails Rumble Account
3. Vote for Us Here

Voting takes place over the next 2 weeks and ends 10/1/07. We would
really appreciate your vote!

To help us get the word out, please also Digg Nourish.

What’s Nourish?

Nourish is a simple web application which allows you to take any RSS feed from content you publish (like a blog), and convert it into an automated email newsletter your readers can subscribe to.

So please help us out be voting for us. Obviously we want you to try, and like, our app… but that’s not required to vote for us. =) As a thank you, we’ll have a special promotional offer to all accounts created during the voting process once the app actually launches (we’ll be launching this as our next product once the contest ends).

If you’re not familiar with Ticketish, here’s the elevator pitch: “Ticketish is a system for managing help tickets. With an emphasis on more benefit, and less mess, Ticketish is perfect for small to medium-sized teams who need something that will get the job done and get out of the way.” For more information, you can check out the original announcement, or visit the website.

One important bit that I’d like to add. We decided to offer free accounts to people who have minimal ticket tracking needs, or just want to take Ticketish for a test drive. Free accounts allow you to create a single project, 3 users, and an unlimited number of clients… so come and get ‘em!

No Software Required

Most image editing tools like Photoshop, iPhoto, and Aperture are too big for the simple task of cropping a photo. EasyCropper is just the opposite; it was designed to work on all platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux), with no installation, and for no cost or subscription of any kind.

Very Easy

EasyCropper is simple to use for any skill level and will cut cropping time in 1/2 for simple uses such as personal websites, social networking websites, real estate listing photos, and many more uses we are excited to see people explore.

Why EasyCropper

Integral Impressions developed EasyCropper to work in conjunction with our CMS and landing page software. We’ve found croppers built into most CMS’s weren’t robust enough and stand alone photo software applications were way too big of task for the average cropping job. We met the need of our users by creating a simple web based tool that gives you surprising flexibility when cropping images.

Your Feedback is Welcome

We’ve decided to release this as a standalone application because we feel its useful to many web and desktop publishers. We welcome feedback and feature requests in our forum. If you notice a bug, please submit a ticket. We look forward to hearing from you and please subscribe to our blog to stay updated with Integral Impressions.

We’ve specialized in Ruby on Rails web development for some time now, and have always deployed as well as run our own applications. Anyone who’s ever tackled Rails deployment and hosting will tell you it’s a tricky thing. We’ve tried a lot of different methods over the past year or so, and have built up what we feel is a pretty solid infrastructure for hosting Rails applications. After looking back at all the struggles we went through with Rails hosting, we figured we could offer our expertise up to other people and save them the headache.

The reason why I like this service offering so much is because it works great for small to medium-sized applications. There are some really good options out there for running very large, heavy-traffic Rails applications. However, for the most part they’re just overkill for the other guys. Good examples of “the other guys” are your company website, professional blog, or bootstrapped web application that’s just getting started.

For details on what our service includes as well as plan pricing, visit our managed Rails hosting page.

We’ve put a ton of time and effort into making sure Integral Billing is easy to use, efficient, and secure. By using this one application for all of our billing needs, we insure the same high-quality experience for all of our customers.

How does it affect me?

If you already had billing services set up with us, your payment information was automatically migrated over to Integral Billing. You should have received an email with your new login information. Hang on to that, but otherwise you’re set. You’ll only need to login to Integral Billing if you want to change your billing details, view your billing history, or upgrade/downgrade/cancel your account.

For some of you who have non-paying services with us (i.e. a free trial with Outlandish), you’ll find a link under your Account tab which will take you to Integral Billing, where you upgrade your account.

What if I’m confused?

As always, we’re here to answer any questions you may have. You can contact us by email, or drop in on our public chat room. If you just want to drop in and say hi, the door’s open for that as well. We look forward to hearing from you.

I like to believe that we’re not so different from everyone else out there. What I mean is, the problems that we face every day, other people probably face as well. The solutions that we come up with for those problems, will probably also work for other people. With this idea in mind, we’ve decided to make take these solutions and make them available to our peers, in hopes that our solutions to our problems will work as solutions for other people’s problems as well. Some of these we will be able to offer for free (though still mostly undocumented, we’ve had a public subversion repository of Rails plugins for some time now). Others, will be fee-based.

Simple support ticket tracking

As we continue to expand both our product and service line, we found a need to track one-off support tickets in a very simple and unobtrusive way. We needed something centralized that we would be able to integrate into our various products and services well. Ticketish is the answer to that problem for us.

Highlights

Without getting into every little detail, there are a few key points that we find particularly useful for our needs:

• Multiple Projects – You can setup multiple projects under one account and see all your pending or active tickets at a glance. Each project has it’s own public support form and unique URL.
• Comment Threads – Each ticket has a comment thread so you can track communications back and forth regarding a specific issue.
• Attachments – Attachments are very useful for sending over a screenshot of that IE6 bug that just won’t seem to go away.
• Email Integration – Each project has its own unique email address. Both new tickets and comments to existing tickets can be created using this email address. This works especially well for existing systems (i.e. Exception Notifier) which already use email to send notifications.
• RSS Feeds – There are RSS feeds for just about everything, so you can track pending tickets, or tickets assigned to you, without littering your inbox.
• Public Interface – Each ticket has a public URL so the client can easily stay updated on the progress of their support request.

Private Beta

We’ve been using Ticketish internally for several months, but have had to make several modifications to allow other people to use it as well (multiple accounts, billing system, etc.). These new additions should be wrapped up shortly. At which time, we’ll be opening up a private beta. We are looking for people who are willing to put the system into use and get us some really good feedback. If you would like to participate in our private beta, please leave us your email address.

Signing up for a free trial should take less than a minute, and you can easily have your landing page up and running within 5 minutes. We encourage everyone to set aside a little bit of time and take Outlandish for a spin. If have any questions, or just want to tell us what a great job we did, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Apple puts together product guides by industry to help Mac users adapt to “the switch.” They help guide professionals, like Realtors, to find the best software that works with their new machine. Apple mentioned they wanted to include us in the selection of companies promoting Real Estate software that works on a Mac.

What this means for Outlandish is an endorsement from someone we hold the highest respects for in our industry, it means better exposure in the Mac community, and it also means more people will hear about Outlandish.

Feel free to view the Real Estate Tools guide on the Apple website or go directly to the Outlandish promo page and be sure to try our product.

One of our main goals for this upgrade was to improve many of the common workflows by redesigning the dashboard and enhancing the navigation. Along with the added efficiency of the user interface, our system became dramatically faster. Creating accounts, viewing stats, and deleting campaigns are now more responsive than ever.

I would like to recognize our team for working hard to get this upgrade to the Outlandish user base as quickly as they did. Thanks guys for your help making this product what it is!