Published May 3, 2007

Thank you for mangling the two fundraising e-mails that I tried to send out to my contact list. I’m glad that you ensured that I didn’t look too polished to the many people who I asked for donations, although I’ll admit that I’m not quite sure why. Anyway, I appreciate that raising money for breast cancer research shouldn’t be too trivial a task.

However, I am a little baffled as to how you ended up with some of the issues in your Web site. I used to design and code Web applications myself, back in the early aughts, and I have to admit that pretty much all of the problems I see on your site now had been solved back then. I guess I’d assumed that coding standards move forwards, not backwards. I apologize for that — like they say, assuming just makes an ass of you and me.

Maybe a bit more you in this case.

Like, for instance, when I leave a fundraising page open for a while, and then come back to it later? How my session — the way that the Web site knows I’m me — expires, and then you throw up a page of Cold Fusion errors? I thought we had all agreed that, when a session expired, we could just send everyone back to the “please log in” page.

And, to go back to the e-mails, how they look nothing like the “preview” function? I thought we’d agreed to run the “preview” function through the same code that output the final product, just without doing some critical task — like, in this case, sending the e-mail. Since my e-mail recipients got something different than I sent for two separate e-mails, I guess I’ll have to assume that you’re using completely different code to create the preview and the final e-mail. That probably makes the preview more like a “guess” than a preview, huh? Oh well, I’m sure it’s close enough — goodness knows, nobody needs to send a relatively exact fundraising e-mail out. Certainly, you don’t need to spend time and money testing the e-mail functionality.

I will freely admit that I probably caused some of the mungedness by composing my e-mails in Word and then cutting-and-pasting the contents into the browser; I probably got some weird characters in there. Actually, characters are funny things, as you may have discovered if you ever post comments on this site and see some of your characters get munged, so it’s not entirely trivial. Although, again, I guess I thought someone would’ve tested the “compose in Word” case and discovered that it caused problems, especially because it’s been easy to simply replace Word’s funny characters — smart quotes, em dashes, etc. — since about 2000.

Although, I’ll admit that’s a lot of testing. You probably could’ve unloaded some of that testing on to me, by letting me send test mails to myself. None of those ever went through, though. Hmm, speaking of which, makes me wonder what of my other e-mails went through. Ah well, that’s another thing that’s not so important to fundraising — actually getting the messages through. It’s the effort that counts, after all.

Anyway, I really mostly mean to apologize to you for being angry at you and saying bad things about you. In fact, you’ve done me a great favor by pumping up my self-esteem. After all, I built more complex Web applications in 4-6 weeks by myself, in 2001-3, using much lower-tech tools. I guess I musta been quite something. Either that, or you’re a really, really awful site that’s probably costing breast cancer research money right now.

2 Comments

Kintera’s fundraising sites are butt-ugly, but at least they do work…

I don’t mind ugly nearly as much as I mind broken. I mean, seriously, all of this site’s problems are solved problems. We know how to do them. There are trivially-available best practices to do them. Who lets the kind of product still exist?