I don't hide the fact that I am impressed by some marketing techniques. I also don't hide the fact that other marketers are really clueless.Today's marketing email gone wrong comes courtesy of Corgi. I bought some really nice scale cars from Corgi around Christmas and get their email newsletter regularly every Friday.Today's newsletter has plenty of calls to action, which is … [Read more...] about Corgi Email Marketing Failure
Stupid Names Are Go
Maybe it all started being "cool" or "hip" or something to use silly names for companies or products, but when a product has a reasonably sane name, why on earth would you change it?OpenAds have decided that using a logical name simply isn't good enough. OpenAds was descriptive and quite clear. Sure it may have taken a while to get used to the change from PhpAdsNew, but the … [Read more...] about Stupid Names Are Go
Bad Weeks Get Me Down
This week has been one of those weeks that I'd like to forget in many regards.Our offices were without power due to electricians (again!). Of course this time not only did we lose power, we also lost office equipment (you can see a nice pile of it here). We'll be able to get replacements, but it's a real pain in the neck and if we didn't have friendly suppliers it would have … [Read more...] about Bad Weeks Get Me Down
Geek Humour
XKCD comes up with some cartoons that are just too funny.Today's is a case in point: … [Read more...] about Geek Humour
XML vs CSV
I'm currently working on a new project in the evenings and weekends that involves playing with merchant datafeeds.The big lesson I've learnt in the last 48 hours is that XML is a pig to work with.The data from merchant X weighs in at 84 megs as a CSV. If you grab the same data as XML you end up with a massive 261 megs. Sure, hard drives are cheap, but the server load goes … [Read more...] about XML vs CSV