Occasionally, we receive requests for instructions on how to export a group of contacts from your email address book to MailChimp. If you take the time to clean up your address book and avoid a full address book dump, you can import your list safely. We’ve already got a few KB articles that explain how to export contacts from Outlook, Apple’s Address Book and Entourage. But if your list lives in Apple’s Address Book, Chimport might be for you and it’s available on the Mac App Store for free.
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Chimpsterous adds a new "Newsletter" page.

Last week, Federico announced a nice integration for posting a newsletter button to your Tumblr blog. If you have a Posterous site, I’d like to introduce you to Chimpsterous. Chimpsterous mimics MailChimp’s Embedded Signup Form feature and makes it easy for you to add a subscribe form to your Posterous site.

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We just launched a totally new Golden Monkeys mobile app, and it’s available now on the iPhone app store and the Android Market. Our Mobile Lab, API and UX teams collaborated heavily on this iteration, so it’s got some major improvements over the previous version (namely, really powerful search and deep integration into “MailChimp Proper”).

For those of you who don’t know, Golden Monkeys is a simple little app for stat freaks that sends real time push alerts whenever VIPs (we call them “golden monkeys” here at MailChimp) open and click your emails (you can read the original blog post about it here).

Here’s a breakdown of what’s new…

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So a designer walks into a bar with a bunch of browsers and the bartender asks, “Where’s that blue guy?” The designer LOLz and responds, “Who? Internet Explorer? We left him ’round the corner.”

Of all the web design tasks that CSS3 makes easier, rounded corners are probably the most ubiquitous. They’re used all over MailChimp.com and inside the app as well. In the past, there were plenty of novel and somewhat spiffy methods for softening corners on the web but none of these were as straightforward and easy to implement as the standardized “border-radius” property that we’ve all come to know and love.

Last week I got into an interesting conversation with some of the DesignLab guys about the pros and cons of using CSS for rounded corners. It all started when Ron pointed out the newly redesigned signup form at tumblr.com. (Screenshot on the right.) “Those inputs are just so pretty. Look at those corners!” So look we did, hoping to find some magic formula for producing gorgeous corners and noticed that their pretty inputs relied on a background image applied to a wrapper div.

There’s really nothing wrong with using a background image. In fact, an image has the luring benefit of visual consistency across all browsers. Meanwhile border-radius is completely ignored by IE8 and below. To me though, rounded corners are merely a textural enhancement, so leaving them off in IE has never been a deal breaker.

As we talked more I learned that it wasn’t IE’s complete lack of support that bothered the designers. Instead it was the inconsistent “crunchieness” of the corners in the various browsers when combined with other CSS effects. I was surprised to learn that they even had an untested theory that odd numbered radius values looked best. To me, that meant it was time for some experiments. Read More

For those who don’t like videos: AlterEgo provides an easy way for consumer web applications to extend their security just a little bit beyond the standard username/password combo.  Unlike more traditional two-factor authentication solutions, AlterEgo is designed to be simple, easy, and free for both users and applications.  Using AlterEgo, you add an additional layer of security to your accounts by generating simple one-time codes that must be entered before allowing login into an application.

Presuming that you don’t use the same credentials for AlterEgo that you use for your protected account (and ideally access them from different machines), it makes attacks on your account harder – not impossible, just a bit harder.

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