Tracking is a king in mISV business.
When somebody downloads a file from your website you must log the event. Therefore, you must invoke a script (e.g. download.php) on your server that will write the info about the event in a file or database and then will redirect the visitor to the actual binary file.
In the same time, using script as a download link is not practical because many software archives do not allow links to php/pl/cgi pages, only to the exe or zip.
To overcome this you may use .htaccess file for redirection.
If you use http://www.site.com/download/abcmaker.zip as a public download link then the sample string for .htaccess can be:
Redirect /download/abcmaker.zip http://www.site.com/download/download.php?product=abcmaker
and the download.php must contain something like:
<?
...
//logging info to file or db
...
header("Location: /download/abcmaker_1421.zip"); //link to real file
?>
As you see this approach allows also to change the actual file name on the server while all incoming links may still point to http://www.site.com/download/abcmaker.zip
There are many situations when you have an application but there is no help file with it, and you have no time to write complete documentation yourself. At the same time you have no budget to hire a professional technical writer who can do this tedious work for you. The situations come up fairly often and the cost-effective approach is best.
Read our new white papers: Writing Cost-Effective Documentation for Software Systems
This is truth!
First of all they tell you about weak sides of your software and business. So, you know what must be improved and polished. Second, angry users can become the most loyal ones.
Surprised?
In psychology, this is called “Pendulum effect” - it’s much easier to move the pendulum to the right if it’s on the left rather than in the bottom. Often it’s easier to turn the negative emotions into positive than to turn no emotions into positive.
Sometimes, an initially angry user whom you help polite and quickly to resolve his problem will become more loyal to your software or service than an average user. The emotional people often express their emotions on public forums or blogs. Turn their negative emotions into positive one and such users will be good word-of-mouth conductors.
For many years in software development and product support business I tried this technique many times and this really works.
