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.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Notes about an email asking to change a link

I receive email from time to time informing me of broken links on my blog. The good thing—they let me know of broken links. The indifferent thing—given enough time, most links break (despite Tim's advice) so that's expected. The bad thing—the people who send such email don't bother to actually read the page in question and are really here to leech from my Google Page Rank (for the record—3).

So it was very refreshing to see the following email:

From
"Amanda Tracy" <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To
sean@conman.org
Subject
Broken Link on boston.conman.org/2002/06/02.1
Date
Wed, 19 Feb 2014 14:58:09 -0700

Good Afternoon Sean!

I wanted to let you know that I really love your post about helping your friend “F” move out of his parent's house and into a town home! My favorite part was when you mentioned what it was like when F's dad was trying to clean off the furniture. That was hilarious!

When reading, I noticed that one of the links is incorrect. The link labeled “U-Haul” is currently taking readers to “u-haul.com”, but the correct domain is “uhaul.com”. I was wondering if it isn't too much to ask, that we fix the link to “uhaul.com”?

Thank you for taking the time to read through this email, I look forward to reading more of your blog posts!

Amanda Tracy
U-Haul International | Online Marketing and Strategy
Web Analyst
XXXXXXXXXXXX X XXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Not only was Amanda polite and to the point, she actually read the post in question!

Incredible!

With an email like that, of course it wasn't too much to ask to fix the link. And thank you, Amanda, for bringing the broken link to my attention.

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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

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