Unsubscribe Me — How To Do It Better

Posted in blogging on 02.05.06@676 by pjh

Today I unsubscribed from two newsletters. It’s an interesting experience because even getting off of a list is part of your relationship with a company. Here’s how the two lists differed in getting me off.

Chatty and Unbranded

The first one was a very chatty unsubscribe. The unsubscribe me link opened an email, to be sent to a particular machine-processed address. That’s ok, but the subject and body were blank. So, liking the company but wanting off the list, I told them why I was leaving. How valuable is that? Extremely. You want your customers to complain, or you don’t learn anything about your business. I don’t think that anyone will ever see my comments, though.

This automated unsubscribe led me through a weird dance — first it sent me a mail to confirm that I really wanted to unsubscribe. Ok, so I click on the link to confirm, and it takes me to an unbranded web page telling me that I’ve been taken off the list. Then I receive another email confirming my confirmation. Brother, that ain’t marketing. Three emails and a web page, none of them working on our relationship, however tenuous.

Succinct and Welcoming

The second unsubscribe couldn’t have been more different. The unsubscribe me link went directly to a branded web page that thanked me, confirmed that I was off the list, and solicited my opinion on how they could improve. It even had a if you keep getting mail from us emergency removal link that may well have a human on the other end.

Even if I never do business with this company, I’ll remember them fondly should they ever come up in conversation. Indeed, it’s this second process that prompted this post — I don’t want to forget to be just as good, if not better, than company #2.

There’s always a flaw

There’s a flaw, though. Company #2 encourages me to forward their newsletter to all of my friends. What if one of them clicks on the unsubscribe me link? Where the first scenario I got too many emails, the second one could have done with a single email to confirm that it was really me who requested deletion. Otherwise I might inadvertently lose what I think of as a valuable resource.

Woohoo! There is life on the web

Posted in blogging on 23.02.06@933 by pjh

I checked my referrer logs today and discovered that it’s not just the robots and search-engine crawlers that know about my site. I’ve had visitors. That’s not a typo, it’s in the plural. So here’s a warm HELLO to both of you and any who follow.

Admittedly, you were very odd visitors and I don’t reckon you’ll be back, but you’re the first, and will always be special to me.

From Slovakia with Love

Visitor #1 hails from that most central of Slavic European countries. You were searching google.sk for information on kraw maga, that very practical Israeli martial art. I’ve been practicing krav maga for about nine months, and it’s been great for my general fitness and streetwiseness.

I don’t expect to ever get into a fight, but it’s a good confidence booster for those nights that you’re coming home a little later than usual. I recommend it to everyone, especially if you can find a good instructor who’s more interested in the practical side than in strictly following the curriculum.

This was an odd googling, since I couldn’t replicate it. Also, until this page, kraw maga didn’t appear anywhere. Perhaps google is doing some automated anglicizing of slavic search terms. Even then though, I shouldn’t rank anywhere for ‘krav maga’.

From Canada, looking for somebody else

Visitor #2 came from my very plain home page. They got there by google.ca, searching for someone named ‘Phil’, which clearly isn’t me. Leastwise, they’re not anyone who knows me well, since I always go by ‘Philip’ and try to educate the Neanderthals who truncate names in an effort to be chummy.

Trying the search myself though reveals that I’m not alone with that name. Most of the links that actually contain the whole name ‘Phil Hellyer‘ are Australian. There’s a cheesecake recipe, a couple of links for the Bluegrass restaurant in Alice Springs, and a couple for the Mount Dare homestead.

I ranked 3rd, after the cheesecake and a spurious link about the Canadian politician, Paul Hellyer (no relation), despite not having the distinct word ‘Phil’ on my home page. Clearly google knows something about forming diminutives, unless it’s part of its general spelling-fixer. That’s a pretty good ranking for something approximating my own name without having quotes around it. If they’d spelled me correctly, I’d have been number one.

Polished writing—for what purpose?

Posted in blogging on 06.02.06@645 by pjh

It’s a very strange thing, the balance between posting interesting things quickly and getting the writing to a certain level of polish. The stated reason for this blog is to record interesting things for myself, to act as my memory and commentary. That reason requires no more polish in the writing than is required for later comprehension. At the same time, this is a public record, visible by any who care to read it. In writing for you, polish is essential. Where then is the balance in the writing from the reason and purpose of this blog?

It must be for me, because if it isn’t there is no passion, no feeling, no interest, no posts. It must be for you, because otherwise there is no impetus, no pressure, no polish. There must be a balance in a semi-polished informal style of writing that serves both purposes. I don’t know what the end result will be, but I cannot have a series of posts that are unfinished and unpublishable. Everything must be made publishable quickly—to delay is to have a reason to delay and an expectation of improved quality.

Without that expectation, there is no profit in delay. So publish, and be damned! Relax, write, say nothing that you’ll be ashamed of later, and publish. Worry more about polish when there is an audience to care. Which they mightn’t. The reader may care more for the style as it was when first read, than any ideal reached for thereafter.

Screwing up with Googlebot

Posted in blogging on 26.01.06@340 by pjh

Yesterday I had a heart-stopping experience with my site and the googlebot. I’d just signed up with google sitemaps and had been crawled. Then I realized that although my blog homepage was reachable, none of the article pages were. Neither was robots.txt, and I wasn’t sure whether a 403 Forbidden on that would be treated as a missing file or a deny *.

Happily, it’s treated as a missing file, so googlebot cheerfully crawled all of my site that it could see. Unfortunately, that’s only the home page — everything else came up with a 500 Server Error.

Luckily it was easy to fix. I’d recently rearranged my [VirtualHost][] settings and not thoroughly tested. All of the pages that I visit regularly — the home page and the admin/edit pages — were working fine. Apologies to anyone who got errors because of it.

Google cheerfully accepts a plain text sitemap, so after fixing the problem, I quickly created a short list of key URLs, uploaded it to the site, and told google about it. Not too long later (I hope) google will come along and revisit all of my pages based on that list.

Even easier, as I found out this evening, is to use Foo’s great WordPress plugin to generate a new sitemap with every post. Very easy to install, just a single .php in your plugins directory. Configuration is on the Options > Sitemaps page.

One word of caution: remember that page weightings are relative. This means that it’s only your rankings that count, so use low rankings to emphasize the high ones. The 1 you put against your home page is only meaningful because other pages have lower priority. Don’t be afraid to let unpopular posts have a low priority like 0.1 — it’s the overall effect you’re after.

How to Choose Blog Categories

Posted in blogging on 05.01.06@783 by pjh

Clearly I don’t know the answer to this one yet, as this is still early days for the blog. What I’ll do is list the categories that I anticipate having.

  • blogging - that’s this category, about the blog itself and blogging in general
  • osx - I’ve recently acquired a computer and yes, it’s a mac. So I’ll continue poking under the hood and reporting back on the coolness and frustrations of it all. This will also serve as a reference so that I don’t have to chase all over the interweb when I forget how I did something.
  • geekery - I’m thinking of getting a whole (albeit virtual) server and configuring it from scratch. You could follow along.
  • food - mmm, both cooking and eating
  • money - business, finance, investing, and building wealth. Time to share what I’ve learned, and to help you (and me, too) along a path to a better life.
  • jfdi - How I get stuff done, things I’ve tried that didn’t work, motivation.
  • evolution - how to build a better you, while I’m building a better me.

Each of these might spin off into a separate blog, depending on our collective enthusiasm for the topic. In fact, that’s why I intend to have only one category for each post.

Note that categories are separate from tags. I intend these categories to form a neat partition of the posts, meaning that no single post is in more than one category, and that every post has a category. This will make it easier if I decide to redirect them to their own blog later on.

« Previous entries