Goats: The Spam

Keep in mind that these are HTML-based emails; if your email program doesn't support HTML, you won't be able to read the strip.

Oh sure, completely ignore the vast quantity of time and resources I donated to assist in this effort. Why, if I had charged you my usual rates for consulting work, it would have come to, umm... $1.39. Oh. Never mind.
 

In Response to zamphir (#2584):

I guess I should mention that Jeff was responsible for pointing out that there was a perl module [cpan.org] which would do most of the hard work for me, and that therefore I should just get up off my lazy ass and implement the damn thing already.

Better? :)

In Response to jon (#2578):

Personal self interest here.....if your paying customers no longer have to visit the site, how is that going to effect your web traffic? How will your advertisers react?

In Response to Sunday (#2588):

Well, the "paying" customers already have the option to view the site without banner ads, so even if we do visit the site, we don't necessarily have to see the ads. But I suspect most of us do, just because we want to support Goats in perpetuity, and I suspect most of us will continue to visit the site for similar reasons.

Or at least until Jon Phillip and co. moon the White House.

In Response to jgarcia (#2592):

thats an interesting point.

Will Jon and Phillip be able to update goats.com from 'federal-rape-you-in-the-ass-prison'?

If so, I'm not sure I want to donate to the cause.

In Response to phillip (#2585):

akk!

I know i'm a tech-head....and i work miracles with web pages (if you want proof just ask).....but don't scare me with pages like that!

I'm barely getting a grip on php, admining a server w/ perl is still way beyond me

8)

In Response to Sunday (#2588):

Other people have already answered this question properly, but let me add that an email reminder that the site exists will likely lead to additional traffic, since people will (hopefully) click through from the email to read news, discuss in forums, and see new premium content.

But really, the traffic numbers are less important to us than providing a quality service to the people who are directly helping to support the site. The money they're paying more than makes up for the lost ad impressions.

In Response to jon (#2578):

You know, the other side of all of this is the busy technical execs like, um - some people I know. They don't always have time to get on the web and laugh until they can't breathe like they did when they worked for a dying company whose CEO destroyed in 18 months what it took his father 30 years to build. Now that they have a real job, these technical exec types can't always make it out to the land of Goats.

Now, thanks to this wonderful new invention, they can read these wonderful strips from the comfort of their other massive amounts of email, and not fall behind.

I, for one, love this idea. It also makes my own little promotion of this site here in the land of the stinky wild onion (or as we Americans call it - Chicago) much more affective and deadly. With one SWOOP of the mouse, I can infect the minds of all of my semi-like minded friends who would benefit from this mind-destructive web portal.

Keep up the good work, and congrats on the 100 members, which I'm sure is much higher now! With my luck, I'm probably number 97.530363, which is roughly Pi to the 4th power - similar to the 1st (4th) book of Goats.

In Response to jasonakai (#2602):

It is also more Effective - Im not sure how affected it is....

In Response to Dynedain (#2593):

There's no guarantee that they'll go to federal-rape-you-in-the-ass-prison.

If they're careful, they might only go to the District's local-we-kill-whitey-after-we-rape-him-in-the-ass- prison.

And Phillip's "naturalized" citizen status isn't going to help either. (Although how anyone could mistake Phillip for "natural" I can't imagine).

In Response to Dynedain (#2595):

If you think CPAN is scary...
A) You're not the tech-head you think you are
B) Try reading sendmail.cf sometime, you won't sleep for a week.

In Response to zamphir (#2605):

i understand how to program at a conceptual level....but being that I was an architecture student, not a CS major, I have very little training in actual programming and system design.

currently the extent of my programming skills are limited to HTML (yes you can write an application strictly in HTML, although it is an absolute pain in the ass and near imposssible) and with that Javascript, VisualBasic (in ASP pages), BASIC, and PHP.

I'm leaarning....really I am....but when it comes to anything at the system level, I'm wandering around with enough knowledge to understand things that get thrown my way, but not enough to actually do anything useful.

In Response to Dynedain (#2616):

yes you can write an application strictly in HTML

No, you can't. HTML is not Turing complete, or anything like. It has no variables, loops, or conditionals.

I wonder what you do mean?

Cheers,
Graham

In Response to albionsoft (#2624):

you can use sepearte HTML pages as loops and conditions

Like I said, its not easy, and there's no point in doing it, but it is possible.

Way back when I only knew BASIC and HTML, I figured out a way that I could write a timeclock programs using HTML. I never got around to doing it, and I'm glad I didn't.

In Response to Dynedain (#2635):

when I say timeclock program I mean a kind of thing like time puchcards that people use at factories to clock their hours.

Don't ask me how I figured I'd do it....for the life of me I can't remember anymore....it would have been a very convoluted solution anyways.

In Response to Dynedain (#2635):

Well, let's be technical, shall we?
[open pedant mode]

HTTP is a stateless protocol. That means that you get one response for one request, and there's no correlation between one request and the next.

HTML itself is a markup language (HyperText Markup Language, get it?). That means that all it does is specify formatting for text.

Now, it is entirely possible to build a webserver environment that creates and maintains a correlation between one request and the next (a session), and that adds additional functionality to the formatting (for instance allowing you to specify a structure that loops over a result set and pretifies it).

But that doesn't mean you've created a stateful HTTP process or written a program in HTML.

It appears like one, but technically it isn't.

[close pedant mode]

In Response to Dynedain (#2635):

Okay, fair enough you can create crude loops and conditions by this means. But you still have no state. Therefore not Turing complete.

Your timeclock CANNOT be written in HTML - there is no way to record the information. What you could do is use the log files of the web server to record the requests made, and use that to extract the times, but that has little to do with HTML itself.

In Response to jon (#2578):

Phillip, it would also be pretty handy if you could send out a mail with the daily ask the animals column....

Would it be possible to have an option that allowed you to only get the special sunday ones (if you're a subscriber)? just curious....