August 21, 2002
It makes me feel so dirty.
If you know me even slightly, you are likely to be familiar with my fervent opinions regarding the creeping evil of HTML email and the sanctity of plain text messages. Well, sometimes you need to bend with the wind. Not only did I break down and agree to send out a HTML-formatted email to a bunch of overwise nice folks who visited our site, but I have to admit that it was a fairly effective piece of marketing fluff. I even tagged the links in the email with soft identifier codes so that we could get a simplistic, yet useful click-through conversion rate. We would have got a simplistic, yet useful click-through conversion rate that is, if the stupid IIS server logs actually included CGI arguments as part of the request data. Oh, the identifier codes are buried in the logs files all right, but as a component of the local referrer data — not the actual page requests. This makes for a much more entertaining experience when extracting out the useful bits of information. I’m sure there is something deep in the bowels of Microsoft’s IIS documentation that will explain why this is so and how to fix it, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to burn an afternoon futzing around with a bunch of configuration settings stuffed into an endless summer of tabbed dialogs. Feh.
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