Almost As Good As Chocolate

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 ↩

The plan that could have made Manhattan more livable was nixed in Albany.

Mr. Bloomberg and his supporters — including a vast array of civic environmental organizations, as well as key city officials like the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, and other elected officials — viewed the proposal as a farsighted and essential step toward the city’s future growth. But the plan was strongly opposed by a broad array of politicians from Queens, Brooklyn, and New York’s suburbs, who viewed the proposed congestion fee as regressive and Manhattan-centric.

So instead the people who actually live in Manhattan need to continue to suffer?! The city should be a world leader. But the infrastructure is crumbling. This plan was critical to allowing the city to absorb more people and was supported by multiple environmental groups.

Some version of this plan has to come back for the city to survive and thrive.

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 ↩

On Wednesday, the Department of Education inaugurated cricket as its newest league sport, with about 600 high school students playing on 14 teams during a 12-game season. The first matches, held in Queens, featured teams from John Adams, Richmond Hill, Aviation and Newcomers High Schools. The Department of Education said New York is the only public school system in the nation to offer competitive cricket.

Playing a Sport With Balls and Bats, but No Pitcher – New York Times

By artist Ji Lee:

The USA has become increasingly evangelical in the recent history. This trend has a deep impact on the Washington politicians who often champion their christian convictions in order to appeal to their voters. This proposal for the new Washington Monument reflects the new christian nation that the US has become.

Hat tip: Shoot! The Blog

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. ↩

is proving to be a way to preserve my sanity in times of extreme stress and sleep deprivation.

The digital age has destroyed my handwriting. I used to have a really nice flowing handwriting that was, if not beautiful, at least attractive.

But besides writing meeting notes and class notes by hand, everything else is on a keyboard and has been for years. Since I type much faster than I write, so I usually choose to type if given a choice.

Now, writing thank-you notes, it is quite horrifying to see how my handwriting has devolved.

But there’s something to be said about a handwritten note that is mailed… it feels more personal. Like there was more effort put into it than dashing off an email thank you.

So I am working hard to make mine look pretty.

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!