Subject: articles about how to create a web page for sampa.com
I'm assuming that sampa.com (Create a Website for Free) is your site.
I'm doing research for a company that will be writing an article about how to create a web page. This company is considering featuring your site in this article. If your company is selected, they would place the article on their popular, online publication.
I would need to hear from you soon if you're interested in being featured. You can either reply to this email or call 877-838-9862. Leave a message and I'll forward it to them so they can return you call.
Thanks,
Jennifer
ECyberScreen
6245 Bristol Parkway, Suite #101
Culver City, CA 90230-6983
877-838-9862
I looks like spam. They extracted key phrases from the page (or a search engine, maybe del.icio.us?), to make it look very appealing and send an email to press@[domain]. I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty sure they will charge a PR fee, or publication fee or some other scam like that.
Over the past two years I received dozens of press emails and they never look like that. Usually a reporter says that he is going to do a story about X and he is interested in knowing if what we are doing fits into that. They always, always say who they are (I can find them on the web) and which publication they work for.
No, you have not gone crazy. They did appear on the blog.
I tried to use Sampa's "Post by Email" feature to forward a funny email I've received to my blog. Turn out there was two bugs that preventing it from happening.
First, it was not necessarily a bug, but the content of the email was not properly formatted HTML, so the system rejected it. More on this later.
Second bug was that the email came with a bunch of pictures. When you send an email to Sampa with a bunch of pictures, the pictures are saved automatically to an album (that you choose), and then the blog post is created. So, the pictures were saved, but once the system tried to save the blog post it failed because of the invalid content. The bug here is that we should validate the content before we save the pictures.
About that first bug, it happens because Outlook/Word generate an amazingly junk HTML. Sampa doesn't like that because it would litter the users website. I create a "WordCleanup" method to take care of that, but apparently it is not working well. I'll investigate more and put a fix soon.
This week has been completely out of the ordinary for me. First, this is my son's transition week into a daycare. He is 1 year old, and 4 out of 5 mornings I had to take him there and stay anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours there. A few days I had to pick him up as well, early. Which left me working less than 6 hours per day.
Then, on Tuesday morning I came across a customer complaint about a layout issue. Heck, I've made a major fix for a bug last week, what it could be? The fix broke his layout. Turns out that I was a deadlock with the current layout design. There were two scenarios that could not co-exist. Either one worked, or the other. This is a clear sign of poor design, since there was no way to fix in the implementation.
So I decided to bite the bullet. I had been planning on re-designing that feature anyway, and took a deep breadth and coded non stop for six hours. Finished the feature and started testing it. The problem with changes on layout features is that you cannot automate the test because it requires you to look at a page to see if it is ok. With more than 30 variations on Columns Layout, it took me more 6 hours just to do basic testing. I end up working until 10PM.
Then, the rest of the week I was working on a feature to make it easier for users to invite others to see their site, or the new content on their site, in a semi-automated way. The problem with that is Norton Anti-Virus is a pain in the ass. This application hooks into the SMTP port and does some stupid things, and I can't send emails from my computer. I tried to disable that feature with no luck.
Now, I decided I had enough distractions trying to get my Dev machine to send email so I'm un-installing Norton Anti-Virus (Protection Center) and installing some other product, I'm leaning towards CA's eTrust.
I've been contacted by O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV). They are coming to Seattle to look for a few good Startups to invest. Check out their website for what kind of investment they usually make.
If you are interest, feel free to contact them directly or shoot me an email and I'll forward to them.
I've been giving a very short talk (5 minutes) at Ignite Seattle on February 13th. My talk, so far, will be about tracking errors on AJAX-based sites. Very geek!
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September, 2007