After procrastinating since pretty much the moment I launched this here bloggy thing, I finally went out and got me a domain… www.spaghettitesting.ca (with or without the “www,” it’s your choice). What pushed me to finally act?
Saw this post from Etienne over at Contrarian Thinking – The Best Access to 66,000 Public Servants $17,21 Can buy!
After almost a year of exchanging emails and regularly leaving comments on our respective blogs, last Week I finally had a chance to meet in person Nick and Mike, two authors of CPSRenewal.ca.
In the course of the conversation, they gave me their advice on how to reach more public servants. Currently, an estimated 43% of the 263,000 federal public can’t access my blog, compared to about 18% for theirs. Although we used the same platform (Blogger), Nick and Mike bought their own domain name, and as a result many departmental filters don’t block access to their blog.
Ouroboros, a common symbol of self-referentiality
To be honest, it’s not something that I’d given much thought to. After all, I’ve never had any issues with getting access to subdomains on blogger.com, wordpress.com and the like. But I’d never thought of testing this out with my potential readers in other federal departments and agencies. So this data point helped me overcome a self-referential mental model. Good lesson, especially for someone who professes to be aware of this kind of problem in designing web sites.
So, props to Etienne and Nick and Mike – the wonks showing the flacks how things *really* work.
Aside: through the magic of domain mapping, you can still get here by the old spaghettitesting.wordpress.com domain. Also, none of the old links to this blog will break. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.
What's a spaghetti test?
