Technology

I’m trying some RSS importing tricks. So my blog and my feed may be a bit… temperamental for a few days. Please bear with me through this tinkering.

I’ve cleared up my subscriptions to online mailing lists considerably. But I have been unable to unsubscribe from four categories of email –

1. Hotel California – I get an email. I click on the link that says “unsubscribe” and I get to a page that offers me the option to subscribe, but not one to unsubscribe. Alternatively, it is a page of my subscription preferences and every single email variety is set to “do not deliver”. But, of course, I am still getting emails. What the heck??

I’d love to just hit a “report” button and have the site do the investigation to fix the issue instead of my having to find a customer service email and follow up.

2. FOAF¹ abuser – A friend at one time or the other sends out a huge mass email. Every single email address is visible. A FOAF then copies all the email addresses and spams everyone going forward. You’d think getting off these lists is easy. Not. I wrote to one of these FOAFs requesting to be taken off the list. He writes back that he can’t check every email blast that he sends out and instead the mutual friend should have been more careful (?!?!)

People! Don’t expose my email to spammers! Where’s the sense of responsibility?!

3. Annoying acquaintance – The person sends five emails a day. Ok, sometimes less. But these are all stupid forwards about flowers, pets, kids, rainbows and other crap. Now, if the person is a friend, no problem – email back and tell them to take you off. But the acquaintance situation is harder. I don’t know the person well and don’t want to seem rude. This bucket also covers the random relative to whom you can’t possibly say “What’s wrong with you?? STOP emailing me!!!”

4. Scare Forward – I particularly hate these. Hate is actually not a strong enough word. Abhor. Despise. Detest. These are the emails with a threat at the end of it – “if you don’t forward this to your 3 million friends in the next 16 nanoseconds…” or “This email has been around the world 496 times…”And of course, there are the religious versions of these that invoke Ganesha, Jesus, Sai Baba and every other god, demigod and saint known to man.

I take special pleasure in dealing with those. First I find every person in the chain who has forwarded it to others. Then I dig up my canned response – a stern talking to about email abuse, how despicable it is to forward threats, the potential legalities of spam etc. – and I send it to all of them. Then I delete the original, refusing to inflict it upon others.

A subset of this are the fake emails – urban myths. Instead of checking Snopes, people blithely forward on the crap. Well intentioned, but so incredibly useless.

Yes, I know that it is very easy to hit the delete button. But why should I waste any time, even if it is the 10 seconds needed to process these stupid emails??

Unsubscribe me already!

1. Friend Of A Friend ↩

It seems like the whole world is blogging. But that’s hardly the case¹. When blogs first started, only the technically equipped could blog. Blogger changed that. But the interface was limited and once Google bought it, innovation on that platform slowed down for a long time. WordPress² offered people who were slightly technical flexibility. The fact that it is open source meant that user needs quickly drove feature development by the army of users. The power of WordPress and the open source platform is truly brilliant and is something I’ve noted before. But many (me included) are finding that maintenance is a fair amount of work. And the complexity ratchets up with every plugin that’s installed.

I blogged privately on Blogger for years before I decided to switch to WordPress and blog publicly. I chose WordPress because of the flexibility, the ability to host it on my own url and because it was completely free. But over time, it has become a pain to manage the various plugins and the upgrades. In addition, something as simple as a template change is real work because things break. So I’ve stuck with what I have even if I don’t love it.

Tumblr is the new face of simplicity and elegance and is a great platform for blogging. It is quick, it is easy, it is clean and the UI – both for the poster and for the reader – is a sheer joy to work with. It has no sidebar and no plugins (that I know of). The blogger can change templates and colors on a daily basis if she wants – it is a much better alternative to the population that would otherwise choose Blogger.

The lack of thousands of widgets – really, the lack of choice and therefore the lack of complexity – is what makes Tumblr great. It forces you to be simple and focus on the content.

Let’s say that I am sold. Let’s even say that I am willing to give up plugins I like (such as Subscribe To Comments) in order to make my life easier. Can I switch to Tumblr?

The answer is a resounding NO. For one big reason – I cannot migrate my content to Tumblr.

I want my blog to contain all my posts – the content and the comments. This would require the ability to “import” my WordPress blog into tumblr, something almost every other blogging platform allows. Should it be doable? Yes. Is it doable? No. Or not yet. I have no idea whether this is on the roadmap or not, but until it is, I, and others like me who desperately want to, can’t move to Tumblr even though we want to.

Tumblr is late to the game in terms of blogging software. And while they may get a large percentage of those who are just starting³,  a lot of people have blogs already. A few will be willing to cut over in order to avoid the hassle, but most, even those with little traffic, will want all their posts and comments moved over. Tumblr should bring their “easy, clean, and beautiful” approach to this problem and solve it. I am sure it will have a big impact on adoption. I’ll be the first in line.

1. In fact, just this week, I told three very smart eBay colleagues that they should be blogging ↩

2. I’m ignoring TypePad in this discussion since it won’t affect the discussion ↩

3. I recommended that all three folks use Tumblr ↩

Ah, finally. Everything opened up. Perhaps permanently. No more worrying about whether the next iTunes update will lock your phone and render it useless.

It’s a no-brainer now. Get the 3G iPhone. PWN it. Stay with T-Mobile. Use an international SIM card when needed. Be happy!

Read more here. Oh, and gotta love the music to the video – it even syncs up perfectly with the visuals!

If you are interested in photography, add the PhotoShelter blog to your feed reader and to your must-read list.

But first, let’s talk a bit about PhotoShelter¹. If you are a serious amateur or a professional, this has to be a service that you get very excited about.

PhotoShelter has two parts to it. The Personal Archive is where a photographer can manager her photos and her business. Incredible amounts of storage to upload and back up every picture you’ve ever taken, watermarking, rights management, ecommerce modules,  download protection, lightboxes and other powerful tools to manage your images.

And a few months ago, they launched the PhotoShelter Collection – a marketplace for images where the photographer can set the price. The PhotoShelter Collection has the capability to fundamentally change the market for stock photography by giving power and importance back to the photographer.

To be able to find and buy great stock images, a photographer has to be able to make money. Enough money to earn a livelihood, put food on the table, pay rent, and continue to take great photographs. Pricing stock photos at a dollar is just plain silly. A great photo is worth more than that and if you want continued access to such wonderful images, you understand that. That’s why the Collection is an effective and, very importantly, sustainable source for buyers to find unique images.

Last week, PhotoShelter started blogging² and I love it. The blog talks about emerging trends, what buyers are looking for, contests and features some incredible photographers.

It is on my daily read list. And if you love photography, it should be on yours.

1. Full Disclosure: I am on the board of PhotoShelter ↩

2. There’s always been a corporate blog to interact with the community, share upcoming changes etc. ↩

I wanted to play around with the colors of my WordPress K2 theme (the presentation layout that you currently see). Stuff that should be easy – the header colors, the background of the overall page (currently grayish), the white body background, the color of the text, the links etc.

The only way to do this, however (at least as far as I can figure out), is by getting into the CSS file and manually tweaking each element. And the basic file is very long and has tons of elements.  But I tried for a while. I made the header blue, the background black, the body background dark gray and the text white. But wait… I noticed that the header colors for each post was a bit too dark. The blockquote background was wrong. The link colors needed changing. Okay. I went in and fixed each of those by searching through the CSS file. Then I noticed more elements where the colors were off. At that point I gave up and reverted back to my old CSS file (which I had fortunately saved).

This should be a lot easier. There needs to be a WYSIWYG editor to tweak your theme. Each element (let’s say there are 25 or 30) should be listed with the option of changing the color by entering whatever hex code you want. At the bottom of that page, there needs to be a sample post where each change is reflected.

Sounds pretty straightforward to me. A plugin could do this easily I would think. Why doesn’t this exist? Of if it does, where do I find it? If I could code, I would build this myself!

Tumblr has an incredibly easy user interface. Right from the signup process on, things are very simple . In addition to working great, it looks wonderful – clean and elegant. And there are a number of cool features that make re-blogging something very easy.

For example, the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet allows you to quickly share a photo, a quote, a link, chat or a video. And all from the page you are on, without having to log in to your blog at all.

This is a big deal for me. I often see something I’d like to share quickly with a comment attached, but the thought of having to log into my blog, compose, copy and paste the link etc. makes the bar too high for a quick post.

I could move to a Tumblr blog to get this feature, but I really like a lot of the WordPress plugins that I use (and want to keep). So I did a quick search for Tumblr and WordPress and what do I find? A plugin that does the exact same thing as the “Share on” bookmarklet.  Called QuickPost, the plugin looks and works great.

Another reason I love WordPress.

When I lived in California, I listened to music all the time when I was home. Moved to NY, married someone with overlapping but different tastes in music, combined our music collections and put it all on a shared server. In concept a great idea, but the damned thing never worked properly and connecting from my Mac was excruciating (old NAS boxes were very Mac unfriendly 2-3 years ago). And back then, our collection was too big to put on a single iPod.

Barely listening to music for over two years = less happiness.

But all that changed when my friend and tech savior George visited and came up with the idea of making a Mac Mini into our server. With a couple of external hard drives plugged in, all the music is shared and we can each listen to anything. Everything is online. One central, in-sync library. Perfect.

I have all my various versions of Offenbach’s Barcarolle/Belle Nuit on continuous repeat 🙂 Happiness.

Thank you, George! You rock!

Update: check the bottom of the post for an update. In a nutshell – glitch. They know about it and are working on it.

———

I am trying to buy a friend on Facebook a gift. It’s his birthday.

So, I click on his profile and say “Send <name> a Gift”. I get to a screen which requires me to verify my password. Okay.

However, when I type in password, here’s what I get. Where, precisely, am I supposed to enter my email?

And yes, I did try to enter my email in the password box. But of course that didnt’ work…

Facebook – what’s up? Don’t want my dollar? I’ve read conflicting numbers that their gift revenue is anywhere between $2 and $20 million per year. I wonder how long this login issue has been going on…

Update: Nov 15th, 3PM – After IMing with Eileen (who works at Facebook), I tried a few things to get it to work. Finally figured it out – when you sign in to Facebook, if you check the “Keep me signed in” box, gifts don’t work. If you leave that box unchecked it works. Apparently they are working on it.

Charlie and his partner Alex are taking a very open the kimono approach to their startup, Path 101.

I’ve always believed that if you have an idea, there is bound to be someone else who’s also had a similar idea. So execution is nine tenths of the battle¹. Given that, their approach makes a lot of sense. In addition to sharing what they learn (thereby helping other entrepreneurs), they also open themselves to feedback from many more people.

One of their more recent posts was on how they’d like to work with LinkedIn. I loved this post for a number of reasons. Ever since Charlie has come up with the idea for Path 101, he’s always expressed that he wants to leverage great products that are already out there and get his users onto other platforms as well. I agree completely. Many of the ideas he suggests will result in expanding the value of Path 101 while at the same time expanding the market and network of LinkedIn to a market it does not currently capture – college students and recent college grads. Read the post – some interesting ideas.

If you want to follow a startup from inception including details like their weekly meeting schedules, head on over to their blog.

_{Disclosure: I’m involved with Path 101 in advisory and other capacities.}

1. another reason why entrepreneurs should not bother with NDAs ↩