Anyone for Pizza(.com)?

Sometimes the world of domain names makes me pause. At the moment you can bid on the prime, top level domain Pizza.com (no link, it doesn’t need any help) over at Great Domains. There’s four days left on the bidding and currently it stands at $2,505,000 – yep, a smidge over $2.5 million. Nice.

Where is this going to finish up? I reckon somewhere between $7-9million as it is the most amazing opportunity to own a the piece of internet real estate for a vertical that has regular repeat business in the millions each day. Hungry? Go to Pizza.com and order from your best local pizza place (or whichever local pizza place is paying the most to be there). Easy to remember. Does what it says on the can. The price will be driven up not only from entrepreneurs who can see the dollars (and pounds, and euros) just waiting to be earned, but also from the big pizza players wanting to expand their web footprint and save themselves some serious adword dollars. On that note, maybe Google should be trying to buy it themselves to ensure competitive adwords stay at top dollar for them, but I guess they can just cream the money from everyone else as they struggle to compete with the ‘go to’ direct navigation site for pizza. Now where did I put my wallet?

Addendum: Pizza.com finally sold for $2.6 million, so my estimate was a little high! To be honest I feel like that is still somewhat of a bargain given the amount of pizza that is consumed globally every day.

CSS Learning: Link Rollover not working in IE 5

A random CSS thing: there are many reasons why rollover image replacement fails to work in IE, when it works fine in Firefox et al, however I just found a new one; if you forget to put the HREF into the anchor link (<a&rt;) then both Firefox & IE render the link correctly – but Firefox will activate the :hover state and IE won’t. Simply putting the HREF back in again makes it work.

In this case you could argue that Firefox is at fault, as a link without a destination isn’t a link. Either way it was a waste of time finding it.

Rails: Action Mailer ‘302 found’ error

I’ve just been banging my head against an issue with my Rails Action Mailer (action_mailer) not sending emails. I know the application used to work, but thought the upgrade to the latest Rails had scuppered it. Every time I’d try and send an email the server console churns and then simply says: 302 Found.

So I turned on the full debugging in my config file (config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true) and this meant I got a time out error shown. Pinging my mail server gave a rapid response, so that was obviously not the problem.

Turned out it was simply that my local host blocks port 25, the standard SMTP port – forcing you to use their local SMTP for all outbound mail. Simple. I used this handy guide to connecting to SMTP from the command line over Telnet to help identify that port 25 was blocked. [ADDENDUM: If you need to authorize yourself on your telnet server then read this to find out how, and this to learn about base 64 encoding on the command line].

Luckily my host provides an alternate SMTP port number for just such an eventuality, but otherwise it means you have to set up your local development SMTP to match your local ISP information.