Credit where it's due

On Friday I added surveys to this website. You can now answer a few questions on a page here, and I get an email with your answers.

Woohoo, I hear you say. That may not sound like much. But this is a site I run myself. It’s not a page on Facebook. Not Substack. And adding anything new to it has often felt like standing at the foot of a small Himalaya. I wouldn’t have known where to start. I’d have assumed it meant days of work, and probably getting help from somebody – not wanting to impose on them, and not wanting to pay much for it either.

It’s only now it’s finished that I realise how long I’ve gone without asking people questions this way. And I love the idea of it. I ask a question, and the people who want to answer, answer. If they’re not interested in the topic, they don’t, and that’s fine.

The easy alternative was Google Forms, a free tool lots of people use for surveys. It’s free in the way most of Google is free: the answers live on Google’s computers, not mine. I did once think Google was marvellous. Over the years it has become obvious that it’s a data-harvesting megacorp. Why should I send my readers over there, so that I can download their answers and bring them back here? It felt wrong. I’ve talked before about posting on my own site first, and this is the same idea. Now the questions and the answers live here, on the same site as everything else.

What I wanted was to talk directly with the people who read my newsletter. Lately I’ve been moving away from trying to reach as many people as possible online, and towards smaller conversations that go both ways. There’s Unoffice Hours, a free one-to-one slot anyone can book on a Tuesday. And a new thing, interviews done entirely by voice message. And there are the parcels, with a handwritten note, that I send to people who mostly don’t know me. The surveys belong with those.

I linked to the first survey, about the place where you work, in yesterday’s newsletter. And people replied. I can’t quite believe that people will bother with all the clicking through and the typing, but they did, and it feels like such a warm thing to do. There were little details that amused me, and things that were touching.

My email list is small enough that I’m in no danger of being overwhelmed. Each reply arrives in my ordinary inbox, and each one makes me smile.

One person hinted at some family difficulties, and left no name and no email address. I don’t know who they are. I feel for them, and I hope things get better.

Most websites furtively record something about everyone who visits, which is why so many of them greet you with a pop-up about cookies. This form records nothing about you except what you typed. I have no idea who that person is – with the family difficulties – and that is what made it possible for them to say it, and for me to hear it.

I don’t love anonymity – I’d much rather know who I’m talking to – but I’m glad people have the choice. I feel clean, and pleased, and proud that I set it up this way.

The bit that went wrong

The way the surveys are set up, every time someone fills one in, my website automatically sends me an email with their answers. That’s the part that didn’t work. At first I assumed I’d set it up wrong. The answers were being saved, but the emails never arrived. Somewhere between my website and my inbox, security checks that exist to stop spam and forgeries were blocking every one of them.

I was baffled for a while, and tried all the wrong things. Then I emailed the company that hosts my website, and that’s when things started to be resolved. Their replies gave me something to go on, and at that point I brought in the AI assistant I’ll come to below, to track forensically what was going wrong.

The short version: every email carries a few lines of addressing at the top – who it’s from, who to reply to – that most of us never see. One of those lines was being run into the next. To the security checks, that looked like a forgery, so they refused to send it.

It turned out not to be my mistake at all. And what I want to write about is who found that out, because it wasn’t me either.

Credit where it’s due

Curtis, the Support Team Lead at Krystal, the company that hosts this site, went into the records of what their mail server had done and found the warning that pointed at the cause.

This site runs on free software called Textpattern. It’s kept going by a small community of people around the world who give their time to it.

One of them, Michael Beer in Switzerland, had hit exactly the same problem in August. He wrote it up so clearly that the fix was right there.

Stef Dawson, one of the people who keep Textpattern alive, made the fix a fortnight later. It hasn’t reached the version you can download yet, so I made the same one-line change on my own site. When the first email with someone’s answers landed in my inbox this morning, I felt an enormous wave of happiness.

Because the Textpattern community is small, names kept coming up along the way of people I have a real connection with, and that was pleasing.

Stef has helped me a lot over the years, most recently in March, when he helped me set up the shop on this site and patiently answered my emails while I worked out what I actually needed from a shop, got the install wrong, and learned what a Stock Keeping Unit is.

Julian overhauled the whole site in 2022, so that it could do things that had been impossible before.

Stef and Julian I have only met on Zoom so far. Pete Cooper I worked with for a long time only virtually. To me, he was Mr Textpattern for years, and at a time when I knew how to post words and pictures and little else, he taught me a lot. Then I learned that he lived in a village on the Cornish coast where my family often went on holiday, and I met him at last, for coffee by the beach. One time he took us to a pizza place that only the locals knew.

And Claude

I have mixed feelings about this part. I couldn’t have done any of it without Claude, the AI assistant I wrote about recently. I’m not going to pretend I did it myself. I couldn’t have.

I still haven’t got used to it. I sit at my computer with a browser open and Claude beside it, and watch it go in and fill in lines of code here and there in front of my eyes. Then it asks me whether I could press Save to confirm it’s all right. I find that amusing and remarkable.

But part of why I’m writing this is that I don’t want anyone to think it can all be done with AI alone. Everything Claude did was based on what real human beings had done. Curtis read the log. Michael found the fault. Stef wrote the fix. Pete and Julian built what I was fixing.

What an AI can’t supply is what real people have lived, and made, and given away.

I often think that people who don’t have a website couldn’t care less about any of this. To me it’s a huge part of how I express myself – it’s why I’m blogging again. I love playing around with it. I believe almost anybody could set up a website of their own quite quickly, and I think it would be a great idea if they did. I know most people don’t believe that’s for them. What a shame.

So this post is about the joy of owning my own small corner of the internet. And it’s a thank you to the people who made that possible – and to the people who used it to answer my questions.

Which brings me to a new one. Do you have a corner of the internet of your own? And if not, what’s stopped you? I’d love to know. Leave your name, or don’t. If you have a website, tell me where it is, and I’ll go and have a look.

None of the questions are compulsory. This form keeps nothing about you except what you type.

If you do have a site, what do you like about it (and what's the address)?
If you don't have one, what stopped you?
Your name, if you'd like to leave it
Your email, only if you would like a reply