The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Monday, June 16, 2003

If you are going to send unsolcited email, at least make an attempt like this fellow …

From: Richard Williams <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To: sean@conman.org
Subject: Proposal for The Boston Diaries
Date: 16 Jun 2003 17:54:01 +0530
X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.2.4

Dear Sean,

It was a pleasure visiting your website The Boston Diaries. The layout of the site is very attractive and the navigation simple. “The pathetic warbling car alarm” is a very interesting posting. The background makes a good contrast with the site design. I am sure the site will attract lots of traffic and hence I would like to extend an offer to you.

I work in the marketing department of XXXXXXXX ( XXXXXXXX is a professional web hosting and web design provider currently servicing over 60,000 customers) and if you would be interested in trying our services, I can offer you a full year of hosting for your site (http://boston.conman.org/) completely free of charge.

I am simply amazed.

No “add 3″ to your mortgage” pitches. No shilling for “Get your diploma in breast augmentation!” Not even a “No doctor needed to get your Visa Card up” hardline sell (ahem). As far as unsolicited emails go, this is probably the best one I've seen. Highly targeted, person obviously looked at my site (how ever briefly) and more to the point—personal!

I'm very impressed.

Not impressed enough to actually take them up on their offer. As I wrote to Richard, it would be very hard to beat the current deal I'm receiving on colocation of my own server, not to mention the fact that the version of Apache I'm running includes a custom Apache module I wrote. Sorry Richard.

A+ on the attempt though.

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[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

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You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

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