Julie Gomoll

When I first saw the demo for Shopinterest, I was floored. The idea that it could be that simple to set up an ecommerce site made it seem like Shopinterest could be a real game changer. Plus — shopping + Pinterest? Duh!

And it’s true. It is that simple. But it’s got a ways to go before it’s a viable storefront for most folks.

Who Shopinterest is good for

If you’ve got your own products in inventory, and don’t require shoppers to choose sizes or colors, Shopinterest could be pretty sweet. Likewise if you want to set up an alternative Etsy storefront, this may be a viable option. Otherwise, not so much.

And who it’s not good for

If you’re a reseller or sell things as an affiliate, forget it. Shopinterest is for direct sales only. There’s no process for involving a 3rd party.

The upsides

• You don’t actually need to use Pinterest to set up a store. You can use any photo and assign a description and price.
• In addition to adding an item to your shopping cart, you have the option to pin it.
• A running total of the items from a single store updates quickly in the right column (but not from featured items — read about that in the downsides)

The downsides

I really don’t want to come down too hard on Shopinterest. They’re still in Beta, after all. I do think they’re on to something here, and they’ll no doubt be adding functionality. But it’s just not ready for prime time yet.

• The FAQ says there’s a way to specify sizes for clothing items, but I haven’t found it. So if you have multiple sizes (or colors, or any other options) you’ll need a separate product box for each one.
• There’s no way to order different quantities.
• Fixed shipping rate: you can specify a shipping amount, or allow for free shipping. There’s no way to adjust the amount for location or delivery speed.
• Hardly any customization: The name of your store runs across the top, and a teensy (~65 x 65) logo off to the left. That’s it. As a result, every store looks pretty much the same.
• No way to create a customer thank you page.
• Fixed sales tax: This won’t be an issue for most storefront owners, since it’s not necessary to collect sales tax if you don’t have a physical location. But if you do, you may have to charge different rates depending on location, and it’s not possible to do so.
• Paypal is the only payment option.

And a few scary things in the fine print

“we will offer a trial period and start charging after that. You will have the option to pay per item or to subscribe on a monthly basis to get additional features and services. The subscription costs will be based on sales volume and number of items. Buyers may pay a convenience charge.”

“We reserve the right to modify or terminate the Service for any reason, without notice at any time.”

“Shopinterest reserves the right at any time to time to modify or discontinue, the Service (or any part thereof) with or without notice.”

So for me (for my client, actually), Shopinterest just won’t cut it.

I read a handful of posts alerting me to the fact that Bitly rolled out a “redesign” today. Headlines announced Bitly had “lost focus.” Commenters proclaimed Bitly “ruined,” and complained of lengthy learning curves and many additional clicks to merely shorten a link.

My goodness! I sure don’t relish the thought of shifting to a new url-shortening service. Bitly’s not perfect, but the tracking is great and I’ve worked it into my process. That’s worth something. The cost to switch is not zero.

So I went to a link I wanted to shorten and clicked on the bookmarklet I’ve been using forever. I was brought to a page that looks very different than what I was used to. But there’s a pretty clear place to paste your url.

Paste the url you want to shorten, and you get an interstitial window with saving and sharing options.

As far as I can tell, saving here is the only extra click.

I don’t know how useful the saving & sharing will be. But I’m willing to play with it. I do know that:

1. I frequently want to recall links I’ve shortened. In this way I do use Bitly as a bookmarking site. I’m ok with seeing if it can evolve into more than shortening and tracking.
2. Yeah, it was an extra click. But the whole experiences is so much faster it’s irrelevant.
3. The new improved stats are pretty cool.

For a community rife with early adopters, we are too quick to dismiss design/UI/functionality changes. Yes, sometimes good companies make bad decisions. But the knee-jerk responses I’m seeing to the Bitly update strike me as…well, knee-jerk.

Give it a chance, folks. I see almost all good changes here.

If I’m wrong, you owe me a beer.

On Friday, March 30, I’ll be holding another session of live website analysis during RISE Austin. I first held “Room for Improvement” at the last BlogathonATX. It was such a hit, I’ll be doing again at the next BlogathonATX, and have done another at a recent B2B Meetup. Read the comments to see what people had to say.

People love it, and I love doing it!

Here’s how it works: If you’d like some advice on your website, whether it’s regarding design, user experience, SEO, information architecture, messaging, or marketing, submit your url here, and I’ll choose 3 sites to review live. I promise you real, substantive, actionable advice. And be sure to register for the actual RISE session (it’s free).

So come join me. I guarantee you’ll learn something (and I probably will too :)

She’s pretty damn perceptive! And I have to admit that it never occurred to me to think of the McDonald’s logo as an M “made of french fries.”

Thesis 1.8 (current version is 1.8.2) introduced a great, easy header image uploader. No more messing with code to get a custom image for your website banner.

Unfortunately for some folks, switching to this method rendered their header image not-clickable. I had a hell of a time figuring out how to make it clickable again.

Turns out it’s really easy :)

First, remove any custom code for your header image from custom.css and custom_functions.php so you don’t have to worry about conflicting information.

Second, upload your header image via the header image uploader.

Third, make sure “show site name in header” is selected in Thesis > Design Options.

That’s it! You have a clickable header!

This is not an “I hate this app” post. Far from it. In fact, I really, really like this app. But I almost didn’t bother trying it.

A while back my friend Nando Tweeted the following: “Seriously, best productivity tool. Ever. WorkFlowy.” Nando has shared some great links in the past. I respect him. So I was very motivated to check it out. I clicked, and this is what I saw:

I was immediately skeptical. What is this product? Who makes it? Why should I hand over my email when you’ve done nothing to instill trust in me?

So I closed the tab, and responded to Nando saying I wasn’t willing to sign up for something I knew nothing about. He pinged me the next day and asked me (I’m paraphrasing) if I’d gotten over myself and tried it. He said he’d been using it for months and loved it. He also mentioned that there was a short intro video if I’d only scroll down a bit.

Sure enough. There’s a video. But it’s below the fold, and there’s nothing indicating there’s more on the page. Yes, this page is perfect for mobile, but that’s no excuse any more — there are other ways to handle that.

A simple link saying “what’s this?” or an arrow pointing down, implying there’s more on the page would help a great deal. I was motivated to explore this product and I left without learning a thing. Yes, I signed up after additional prodding, but how many people come to this page and think “nope, not going there.”?

The Good News About Workflowy

The good news is this really is an awesome app. Remember when wikis were gaining a bit of traction, and we had this idea that you could just start entering info and it would sort of “organize itself?” Yeah, that turned out to be wishful thinking.

Workflowy inevitably works the way your brain works. It’s drop-dead simple and flexible. There’s a really simple, intuitive tagging system, and it works just as well on your main computer as it does on your mobile devices.

And as much as the initial experience is flawed, the tutorial once you’re in is excellent. A couple of minutes with the walkthrough and you’ll totally get just how useful this tool can be. Like Nando, I’ve been using it every day ever since.

But really, Workflowy — with some simple tweaks to your home page, I’ll bet your user acquisition numbers would skyrocket.

I’ve long been intrigued with the idea of selling or trading small bits of time. Back when I was doing LaunchPad Coworking, I wanted to have a BrainBank for members. The idea was you could deposit x of your own hours, and withdraw hours to get time with people with whom you wanted time.

And after running the hugely successful Room For Improvement at BlogathonATX, I’ve been thinking more and more about how to monetize brief, info-packed consulting sessions that lots of people hope they can get for free over lunch. In fact, I’m about to launch a “Pick My Brain” experiment to do just that.

When a friend introduced me to Allthis a few weeks ago, I thought “Cool! Someone’s figured out how to do this on a grand scale!” They were boasting something like 600,000,000 “members,” whose time you could buy, and I wondered just how this site had managed to escape my notice. Mashable gave Allthis a nice writeup in October, and seemed quite oblivious to the sleaze factor.

Back then, you could look around at profiles to see how much their time was going for. There were all sorts of luminaries listed — Mark Zuckerberg, Esther Dyson, Larry Ellison, Kathy Sierra… Right then, something felt wrong about the site. I read the “how it works” section, but couldn’t find anything that explained how or why any of these people would agree to chat with some random person for 10 minutes.

Well, it turns out they wouldn’t. And some of them are pissed off.

Rob Beschizza of BoingBoing posted a short, indignant post telling Allthis to knock it off. He explains exactly what his experience was in the comments.

Amy Hoy of Unicorn Free is says Allthis is “at best, copyright infringement, and at worse, fraud.” And Joel Houseman focuses on the copyright issues surrounding scraping public info in his post, “This Week in Douchbaggery: Allthis“.

Is fraud really what’s going on here? Is what they’re doing all that much different than other sites? There are all sorts of “profile” sites I seem to be listed on that I never signed up for — Intellius, PeekYou, BusinessCard2 seem to have found their way onto the first couple pages of search results for my name. And there are new ones sprouting up all the time.

Hell, Facebook pushes the privacy and copyright envelopes all the time. The unveiling of Seamless Sharing (or Frictionless Sharing) has all sorts of unpleasant ramifications. And we all know how easy it is to inadvertently opt-in to oversharing. Personally, I won’t use Facebook as an OAuth login, because I simply don’t trust them.

So why is Allthis inspiring all this acrimony? Because they imply that all these people have opted in when they haven’t. Mike Monteiro’s succinct Tweet sums it up nicely:

Does @allthis realize the hostile interaction they set up between me and someone who “bought my time” feeling I owe it to them?

It’s entirely unacceptable IMO. But is it fraud? Or is it just a clueless group of people making some really, really bad business and product decisions? Personally, I have a hard time believing they don’t know exactly what they’re doing. I think they’re being intentionally deceptive, and trying to grow a community without doing the hard work of actually building that community.

But I’m willing to be proven wrong. Anyone out there willing to try to convince me that Allthis is a good idea?

Nobody questions the value of most metadata in helping with SEO. Every SEO 101 article will explain the importance of page titles and meta descriptions. And for a long time meta keywords were considered a must-have. For the last year or so, though, the value of meta keywords has been questioned and debated. Even Google has publicly stated that they don’t use meta keywords in ranking.

A common conclusion is “well, they might not help, but they don’t hurt providing you don’t abuse them.” I reached that same conclusion, and have expressed that very sentiment to my clients.

Not any more.

Definition of Metadata

While metadata actually encompasses a huge range of values (see the Wikipedia definition of metadata), for the purposes of this article, I’m referring to Meta Titles (also referred to as Page Name, Custom Title Tag, or Page Title) and Meta Descriptions.

The Meta Title of an article is what appears as the primary link on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It may or may not match the actual title of your article. The Meta Description is the brief paragraph that appears on the SERP right below that link. Without an explicit Meta Description, what will appear are the first 150 characters or so of your post.

(click to embiggen)

Notice the title of the post is different than what the SERP shows, and that the meta description on the SERP is not the first 150 characters of the post.

If you’re using WordPress, you can modify these using a plugin like All In One SEO Pack. If you’re using Thesis (as I do on this blog), you don’t need a plugin — it’s built right in. For me, the fields for SEO details appear right below the text editor, and look like this:

Why I Won’t Use Meta Keywords Any More

Yesterday I read this excellent article on conducting website audits on Tamar Weinberg’s blog casually mentioning the fact that Bing flags all pages using meta keywords as spam.

What?!

So I did some digging. And the evidence began to pile up. When I saw that Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land talked with a senior product manager for Bing webmaster outreach who confirmed that meta keywords are basically a bad idea, I was convinced.

There’s no need to panic here. It does seem that Bing, like Google, penalizes you for using useless keywords more than anything. But if the mere presence of keywords is a signal for possible spam, it seems best to err on the side of caution.

So. No more meta keywords for me.

Are you still using them? Does the Bing news change your mind on the issue?

The slogan is mine, but the original art is by vhm-alex.

Sorry, Bobby, you’ll need to ride on the Condensed Bus

When I left my house at 1:45 for a meeting, it wasn’t raining. 10 minutes later, after parking my car downtown, I got caught in a deluge. This wasn’t just runoff — it’s been raining for the last couple of days here. It caught us all by surprise. I needed to cross the street I filmed here. What fun it is, showing up drenched for a meeting at an art museum :/

I love, love, love this ad. So much is said in 30 seconds, it kind of blows me away. The look on the dad’s face goes from mortified to embarrassed to relieved to absolute love in a matter of seconds.

This ad gives me hope. It encourages me to keep believing that the world is changing for the better.

I wish Renault still sold their cars in the US. I’d be first in line to buy one, just because of this ad.

via sexgenderbody and HT to @penguirl for pointing it out

Six posts into my new blog and 5 of them are about dogs. Yes, I’m a big dog person, for sure. But don’t worry, cat loves. I like the kitties too.

Every week my friend Jan and I go the the Austin Humane Society to “interview” cats. We write bios for their web site to encourage people to adopt them.

AHS is a really great place. It’s a no-kill shelter, and the animals their get great care and tons of attention.

It’s hard, sometimes, not to go home with another animal, but so far I’ve resisted. I can’t say the same for Jan, who recently fell in love with a sweet kitty and had to bring her home.

To be honest, if I were sure my dogs would handle the addition of a cat, I’d probably get one.

Any guesses as to whether or not Tip got a bite?

Over the past 2 months I’ve had as many as 8 dogs living at my house. I have 3, and Tina has been visiting with anywhere from 3 to 5 of hers. In between Deb visited with her dog. There’s been the occasional kerfuffle, but mostly it’s been awesome.

Nonetheless, when Tina left with her pack yesterday, it was a bit of a relief to be back down to just my 3.

This morning at 6am, my pack started barking. A lot. I assumed at first it was some critter crossing the fence that’s withing view of my bedroom windows, but  quickly ruled that out. By 6:15 I was wide awake, got up, and let them out. They immediately ran to the back of my house and resumed their rather frantic barking. It was still dark out, so in the interest of not totally pissing off my neighbors, I went outside to calm them down.

I saw a large creature across the street. I could only see his eyes and a vague outline of his body. I was pretty sure it was a dog, although it seemed big enough to be something else, but nothing else realistic came to mind.

Once he saw me petting my own pooches, he trotted across the street and introduced himself.

This was one big dog. I’d guess 90-100 lbs. All black, obviously a lab mix, but a mix with what I didn’t know. Rottweiler? Newfoundland? Maybe just a huge lab? He had some purple on his tongue, so there was certainly some Chow in the mix.

Anyway, my pooches loved him, and he loved them. They played for hours. I posted info about him on several lost-pet sites, tweeted about him, and sent info to the neighborhood mailing list, to no avail.

I had to leave around 11. I got home as early as I could, around 3:45, by which time he was gone. I hope he found his way home.

I’m not at all sad he wasn’t here when I got home. NOT AT ALL. Nope, not one bit. Not even a little.

Maybe he’ll show up again tomorrow…

It’s never easy saying goodbye to a beloved pet. Finding a way to make the last couple of days good goes a long way, though.

I met Trucker, one of 5 dogs belonging to Tina, a couple of years ago. He was the epitome of a “loveable lug”. Big, gentle, slow-moving, on the awkward side, he was happy to be at the back of the pack. He had lots of nicknames — Gramps, Bud Light, Bubba — and they all fit.

When he arrived in my home once again a couple of weeks ago, it was meant to be a transition. Tina is moving from Marfa (her home for the last 6 months) to New York. She planned to take 4 of the dogs, but for a variety of reasons it seemed like a bad move for Trucker, so he was going to stay with me.

And I was looking forward to it. Dogs don’t get much more low maintenance than Trucker. He did have a tendency to wander, so Tina got him a collar that worked with my invisible fence just in case, but I really wasn’t too worried about things.

He had been behaving oddly for a couple of weeks before arriving, though, and really went downhill not long after he got here. After many difficult nights, we took him to the vet and came home with a diagnosis of kidney failure and a brain tumor. His time was up.

We got some drugs to make his last couple of days bearable and allow Trucker, Tina, and me to get some desperately needed sleep.

This morning, Tina and I took him to Longview Park, Trucker’s favorite place in the world. Friends Adam, Jenny, Sal, Rick, and Jilli were there to. For about 45 minutes he was happy as can be, trotting around and seeming to forget his aches and pains and confusion. Sal and Jenny brought him a burger and fries, which he enjoyed immensely.

Everyone said their goodbyes, and a little after noon today, he died peacefully and painlessly with Tina, Adam, and me holding him.

Bye, Trucker. You were an awesome dog, and we’ll all miss you.

Jilli Dog is quite the celebrity. She’s been on Live with Regis and Kelly, has been featured on Animal Planet, and has played poker with Bette Midler. It just so happens that her trainer, Rick Caran, is the brother-in-law of Tina Rosenzweig, who’s been staying with me for a couple of weeks.

Jilli has a big show in Dallas later this week, so Rick brought her to the San Jose Hotel for a dress rehearsal. Unfortunately she was feeling a bit under the weather, so we didn’t get the whole show, but we did get to see her say hi, dance around a bit, and shoot some hoops. This is one entertaining little Yorkie. Everyone loved her, and she loved everyone right back.

There are tons of videos on her web site if you’d like to see her in action. I’ve heard from a couple of trainers that little dogs can’t really be trained. Jilli definitely proves the claim entirely wrong.

Tonight I made Quinoa Risotto with Mushrooms and Thyme. I think of Risotto as a rice dish, so I figured it must be one of those Italian terms that refers to the cooking method rather than the ingredients. Nope — risotto is rice, period. Whoever came up with this recipe simply took liberties. I’m glad they did, because it was delicious.

My assumption that risotto might have a different meaning stems from an experience I had in Italy 10 years ago. I was in Florence, at a restaurant off the beaten tourist path. The menu, of course, was in Italian, and while I’m an adventurous eater, I found myself looking for familiar terms.

The first course I ordered wasn’t vegetables and pasta like I expected, but some kind of mixed organ meat platter. When I saw Carpaccio on the menu, I was thrilled. What better place to sample one of my favorite dishes than here? I anticipated a lovely plate of thinly-sliced raw beef.

But no.

Turns out carpaccio means “thinly-sliced and raw” but not necessarily “beef”. The dish that arrived clearly wasn’t dead cow. I look to the waiter, who spoke no English, pointed to the plate, and asked “Moooo?”

He shook his head no, put his hands in his armpits, flapped his elbows, and said “Quack, quack, quack!”

Great. Raw duck. Naturally I had to at least try it. And it was fabulous. Served with a bit of olive oil and arugula, it was some of the best raw meat I’ve ever had. It made me grateful to be willing to experiement.

A picture a day. Every day. Maybe some words too. Going with a picture gives me some incentive to delve further into photography. Every day gets me in the habit of blogging. Will it work? We’ll see.

It’s fitting that the first picture is of one of my dogs. This is Kody, resting comfortably on the couch, enjoying pillow goodness courtesy of Tina Rosenzweig, who’s staying with me for a while prior to her move to New York.