The link we sent to nowhere
We send one short email when a new guide goes up. For a stretch this month the link in three of them, all our Finnish guides, pointed at a page that was not there. We found it by reading our own send log, not from a complaint, fixed the address the emails are built from, and stopped the list from mailing a Finnish guide to someone who never asked for one. The deeper lesson is the one we are now building toward: a guide about one country should reach the people who live there.
Every time a new guide goes up, we send one short email to say so. This month, for a stretch of days, three of those emails carried a link to a page that was not there. All three were our Finnish guides. Anyone who clicked landed on a dead end instead of the guide we had just written.
No one told us. We were reading our own record of what we had sent, checking it after a related fix, and there it was in plain rows: three guides, three dates, the wrong address on every one.
The cause was drift. Our Finnish guides live at one address on the site; the list the email is built from had been writing a slightly different one, and nothing checked that the two still agreed. A small gap between what we meant and what we sent, of exactly the kind we tell you to look for in a contractor’s quote.
We fixed the address the emails are built from, so the link now points where the guide actually is. And we stopped the same list from sending a Finnish guide to a reader who never asked to hear about one.
The miss pointed at something better, which we are now building toward. A guide about Finland should reach the people whose houses are in Finland. A guide that holds true everywhere should reach everyone. The next one will land with the people whose home it is actually about.