June 23, 2016

I Would Vote For Bernie Sanders If He’d Promise to Ban Popups on the Web

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<rant>I had a slight meltdown about an hour ago when a little ScreenTip® showed up in Excel. It was covering something I needed to see and I couldn’t get rid of it and I’d finally had enough. I started pounding the keyboard and yelling and just generally scaring the hell out of the cats. This is probably a sign that I need to restart my meds,1 but it’s also a sign that I’m so sick and tired of the endless crap that pops up on my computer that I feel like screaming sometimes. Seriously, does every goddam page on the internet have to feature some kind of popup either when I land or when I leave or when I mouse over the wrong thing or whatever? Can’t I just read in peace? For a few minutes at least? Please?</rant>

The answer is no, of course. And surely one of the most hated popups on the internet is the omnipresent ForeSee survey popup. And just to piss me off even more, check out the gloriously buzzword-laden gobbledegook they serve up on their “About Us” page:

As a pioneer in customer experience analytics, ForeSee continuously measures satisfaction with the customer experience and delivers powerful insights on where organizations should prioritize improvements for maximum impact. ForeSee applies its trusted technology across channels and customer touch points, including websites, contact centers, retail stores, mobile and tablet sites and apps and social media initiatives. Executives and managers confidently prioritize efforts that achieve business goals because ForeSee’s proven methodology is predictive of customer loyalty, purchase behavior, future financial success and even stock prices.

Jesus Christ. Is there anyone left in the tech industry who can write in ordinary English? And more to the point, is there some cookie or something I can install that will prevent all ForeSee popups from ever sullying my screen ever again?</rant for real this time>

1Unfortunately, this is not a joke. My med-free experiment doesn’t seem to be working well. It’s probably time to start up the Effexor again.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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