A couple of weeks ago I blogged about setting up a PO Box and adding postal mail to the ways you can contact me. I went for a “pay as you go” PO Box because I didn’t know if anybody would actually use it, but I’ve already received two delightful postcards and I couldn’t be more thrilled.
The first postcard came from Florence, whom I’d met on a forum where I’d helped them repair a troublesome RSS feed1.
The second postcard was from Rhys, whose guestbook I dropped a comment into after spotting that his 50 Before I’m 50 list contained a wish to learn a “genuinely cool magic trick”, for which I had a suggestion2.
The PO Box worked very well: I’m using UK Postbox principally because of their “pay as you go” rate (with a free tier in case you don’t receive any mail at all, which I figured was a risk) but I was later pleased to discover they’re a nice company in other ways, too. They scan the outside/one side of my mail as it arrives and I can optionally pay to scan the whole thing and/or to bundle and forward it on to me3.
I’ve started a new page to collect all the cards, including a (hopefully pretty-accessible) CSS-powered interactive “flipper” so you can turn them over, and I’m hopeful that I might attract a few more as time goes on. Getting physical mail from “Internet friends” helps make the digital world feel a little bit smaller, and I love it.
(If you’d like to send me a postcard too, I’d be so very grateful!)
Footnotes
1 Florence’s RSS feed was missing a <![CDATA[ ... ]]> block around some
embedded HTML, which was causing the HTML to be evaluated “as if” it were XML, which – not being XHTML – it failed to do.
2 My suggestion was a variation of Derek Dingle’s Too Many Cards that I’ve been performing all over the place: it’s an immensely satisfying trick to perform, requiring a challenging but achievable set of sleights and suitable to do without preparation and using a borrowed deck, which is pretty much the gold standard in card magic.
3 I’ve opted to have it forwarded: I’m wondering if I can combine all the postcards I get into a single poster frame or something: maybe a double-sided one so the whole thing can be flipped to show the text, not just the fronts?
