EE in the Wild: Jackass Letters

Last week I received a mention on Twitter that thanked this site for the motivation to upgrade their site to the latest version of ExpressionEngine. I hadn’t heard of the site before and was intrigued. It’s called Jackass Letters. Written and run by Christopher L. Jorgensen, Jackass Letters (JL) archives letters Christopher writes to companies and notable people and also posts the replies he gets.

Here’s the idea in a nut:

Jackass Letters is dedicated to examining correspondence with real people and companies. It is equal parts spoof, satire, parody and criticism. New letters are generally published once a week.

Is my motivation greed? Am I just clamoring after free stuff? No. Free stuff is cool, but I enjoy the process, enjoy the responses more than any of the swag. Daily I made the trip to my mail box only to see it stuffed with junk mail and bills. Now I look forward to getting mail again!

I started clicking around the site, reading letters, laughing and generally amusing myself with the responses from some of the companies Christopher contacted. JL is a utilitarian site that is solely focused on publishing letters and the replies.

You could see this as a meaningless endeavor. I could understand why. I see it as a fun experiment that captures a snapshot of the corporate culture and humor of some of the biggest names in the world. From Best Buy to Budweiser, Apple to the AARP, and Nike to Nissan, Christopher has written dozens and dozens of letters and eagerly awaited a response. He’s reviving the dying art of writing a letter.

I asked Christopher if he would do an interview with EE Insider so we can learn more about the site.

EE Insider: When did you start the site?

Christopher Jorgensen: I started the site in 2008. Originally the idea was to see if I could just get free stuff from companies just by asking. The first company I wrote was Apple. The reply that came back irritated me. It was boring boilerplate marketing and made no mention of anything I’d written in my letter. It was basic facts any Apple fan would already know. So I wrote them back and complained about the reply and they sent me a pen.

At this point I realized I enjoyed the letter writing more than the free pen and Jackass Letters was born.

In college my roommate and I wrote a few letters to companies complaining about things like insect infestation in our boxed potatoes, but it never occurred to me to make those letters public. (This was before most companies had websites. ‘92 or so.)

EEI: Why did you choose ExpressionEngine for this site?

CJ: My first dynamic site was a blog run on a used Apple G3 iMac in my basement using a version of pMachine. When EE came out I migrated to it with a new project.

I’ve used other CMSes, but I am a dabbler, so attacking another learning curve is not something I get excited about. Even going from EE 1.x to EE 2 was a major task for me. I doubt I would have done it if I wasn’t also interested in doing a redesign. I’ve used Wordpress, Joomla, and a couple of others, but have seldom been tempted to switch to something other than EE.

EEI: Wow, so you’re a senior member of the community. Are you using any add-ons or special configurations with the site?

CJ: I’m running a pretty much out of the box installation. I used the first third of your book ExpressionEngine 2: A Quick-Start Guide to get going, but once I felt like I knew enough to do what I wanted I just dove in!

I have an amazing amount of “Advanced Conditionals” set up to deliver different content depending on the URL structure. I have about a dozen templates running the entire site and this counts my site map and RSS feed.

There are a lot of plugins I would love to have, but the site costs me about $600 a year to run. I spend about $150 a year in postage alone! Maybe if the site ever makes money I’ll consider adding some more bells, but I often take the hard way to save a little money (like manually creating my site map template and hand rolling my .htaccess).

EEI: Do you accept donations for postage?

CJ: I do accept postage donations. I also accept donations to my legal defense fund, to the illustrator charity fund, and to the girlfriend/editor/typist dinner fund. (I don’t really have a legal defense fund.)

I couldn’t do my site without the help of others.

Jackass Letters hasn’t gotten me sued yet, but one of my letters got me set up with a lawyer. He gives me advice from time to time when I have questions about whether I can legally put something online. I don’t always listen to him, but he makes it so the girlfriend can sleep at night.

I also have a great illustrator who works with me because he likes to be part of what I do. He’s named Anthony Imperioli. I make donations to his favorite charity rather than actually paying him.

EEI: What’s your favorite thing about ExpressionEngine?

CJ: The flexibility. One of the things I’ve recently started to do is to try to use my own content more efficiently. I’ve started writing my letters directly within EE. I created a print template only a logged in Admin can see. I print the letter, set a future post date in EE for 3 months out, then if it’s answered I move it to the main channel. If not it posts to the Unanswered channel.

I plan a video/podcast shortly and intend to do that within EE. If I can imagine the page there seems to be a way to do it. I’m still learning, and I am intimidated by all the things the design pros do with EE. I do all my own templates and CSS and such, but I am not a programmer. Yet I still manage!

EEI: Is there anything that you’d change about ExpressionEngine?

CJ: I would love the ability to autoupdate. For someone like me that is more focused on the content side the actual maintenance of the site can get in the way. If the database backed up and the site stayed up to date, I could let it get out of my way and just produce!

I’ve often thought there should be either first party or third party templates, but for some reason these haven’t caught on for EE. It would be nice to do a “Newspaper” install or select “Web comic” or one of dozens of design options; blog, store, magazine, etc.

EEI: Are you working on anything cool for the site?

CJ: One of the things I am currently working on is a script that will pull all the content of an EE category and cURL the contents into a directory, then zip it up as an ePub and rename it. I have it working fairly well for text only posts at this point.

My first test will be to create an ePub of all the content at jackassletters.com/unanswered.

I still have another 100+ letters to input there before I can pull them all back out, but this still beats doing all that formatting by hand. I want this to eventually be a cron job that fires off daily and creates an ePub of “The Worst of Jackass Letters” or “The Best of” or whatever.

I have a lot of plans for books this year. I am currently writing all the Governors & Premiers in the US and Canada. I also have a woman in Malaysia writing letters on my behalf to companies she likes interacting with. I am outsourcing my labor for a book I am going to call “Jackass Letters: Outsourced.”

We’ll see how long it takes me to do this. I feel like I am close to getting “Unanswered” finished.

If someone made an add on that easily allowed for ePub creation I’d buy that in a heartbeat. It’s not as easy as you might think though.