For absolutely no reason I want to take archery lessons. I wonder if I can find a place with lessons that aren’t full of 8 yr olds. I don’t have a problem with 8 yr olds, but I do have concerns about armed 8 yr olds.

Yeah, I get that message a lot. Adam’s camera is set to take GIGANTIC pictures by default and changing the setting requires an advance degree in engineering, so any product photos I take end up being 1000000000000px by 1000000000000px. Well, something like that. Needless to say, they all need to be resized before uploading to Etsy, or I will get the lovely message shown above. I would also like to keep the original Gihugeous version in case I need to blow them up and make giant posters of them. Or use the high-res shots for portfolio prints, which is more likely.

The easiest photo resizer isn’t really a program, it’s more like a process automator. It’s called Picture Resizer 3.0 (okay, so they didn’t spend a lot of time on the name) and you don’t even need to open a program up to use it. Here are the official instructions from the website:

• Download “PhotoResize400.exe” and place it on your desktop.
• Drag and drop JPG files or folders with JPG files on the application icon.
• The tool will resize JPG images and save them next to the originals. Names of the new pictures will be based on the original names, with a suffix indicating their size. For example, the resized version of MyPhoto.jpg will be called MyPhoto-400.jpg, where the number 400 indicates the size of the picture.

So once the icon is on your desktop you select your pics, drag them over the icon and drop. It automatically resizes and places the new pic beside the old. Done.

If you want to resize to a size other than 400 px just change the name of the file. I changed the name of the icon on my desktop to PhotoResize800 and all my photos were resized to 800 px when I dragged my folder over the icon. There are a bunch of other ways you can tweak the program described on the website, but I just needed a quick and easy photo resize tool and this fits perfectly.

For the Harry Potter fan in your life….

Also available in Natural Stain, but the lead time on that is 5 weeks since I need to order this box shape special and it won’t be ready for Christmas. In this series is also a map of Narnia, and one of Middle Earth, but again, the lead time on those two items is about 5 weeks. The provincial stain (above) id ready to ship now and WILL arrive for the holidays if you order soon!

Lucy, a tiny little Tortie with a Calico face is our newest family member and complete distraction. She is the cuddliest, snuggly-est little kitty on the planet. Her favorite pastime is burrowing under the covers and hugging our legs as we sleep, or nuzzling our necks and falling asleep herself.

She LOVES her big brother Chuki, who is a little unsure what to do about her. He gets along with her so much better than any other cat, even Ollie, allowing her to cuddle up to him at times and even giving her little licks on her head. But she wants to snuggle with him ALL the time - when he is asleep, when he is eating, when he is walking across the room, and he either ends up stepping on her by accident or getting pushed over himself.

She is definitely our cat - the first night she was home she sat very patiently for Adam’s photo shoot and poses quite nicely for all the random camera moments so far. She doesn’t seem to understand the human respiratory system since she tries to sit on our heads at night and nearly suffocates up, but she is learning…

Lucy was rescued with her three brothers Jude, Sgt. Pepper (”Sarge”) and Maxwell by Toronto Cat Rescue who are still looking for homes for one of Lucy’s brothers who is just as snugly and playful as she is.

After about 5 minutes in the store, I had my shopping list picked out. ShopGirls is my new favorite obsession, a classy boutique on Queen Street West in Toronto’s Parkdale district that features fine art and fashion from an all Canadian Artist base, with an emphasis on local work. Shop Girls is now carrying many Sixth & Elm pieces in their beautiful shop, and my work is in very good company there.

I fell in love with many items including some beautiful and unique jewellery, scarves and some very amazing mixed media pieces. Okay, fine, I actually did buy a necklace and pair of earrings and I had to keep reminding myself I was there to sell, not to buy in order to stop myself buying more. I have a feeling any money I make there will not last long and will quickly be used right back up buying goodies there for myself. Oh well, groceries are over-rated anyways.

PPCalc.com started out as a web-based PayPal fee calculator and rough currency converter, but has quickly evolved into an everything fee calculator with pages for not only PayPal, but also eBay, Etsy, Amazon.com, Half.com, Overstock.com and a bunch more. This calculator lets you figure out the total fees you will be charged for your Etsy listings, including the associated PayPal fees (if a buyer pays by PayPal), and your shipping costs. A very useful tool for figuring out fair pricing, or for just playing and punching in random numbers for an hour, like I just did.

Etsy Fee Calculator - http://etsy.ppcalc.com/

Coming right on the heels of yesterday’s post about the new Third-Party Etsy RSS App developed by akendall1 is the news of a new site called Featsy (which sounds kinky, but it’s really just a mix of  “Featured” and “Etsy”), a web-based app (similar to the Heart-O-Matic) that will send you an automatic Email when any of your items is featured on the Etsy Gift Guides or on the Homepage. An alert system to notify sellers of an item being featured on the front page is something that Etsy Sellers have been waiting for Etsy to develop and this is another example of clever people taking the problem of these missing features into their own hands and developing third party apps, despite the fact that Etsy has not yet released a public API.

I signed up for both the email option and the RSS. The email worked beautifully, I got a little email a few minutes later telling me that my Floral Abstracts Box was featured on the Etsy front page on Tue Nov 11 20:30:50 CST 2008 and a little link to unsubscribe to this alert below. The RSS was confusing and I am not sure I did it right. After you enter your email and submit, it offers an RSS link – I got a feed that had just the title of my Floral Abstracts Box and a link to it, but no mention of where it was featured and when, and then it had some other seller’s items under it. Oh well, the email option works for me. Very handy.

No mention of the site’s privacy policy that I saw, so I hope they don’t sell my email address. There is a link to email the developer, so I could have done that and asked before entering my email, but…meh…

Via The Unofficial Etsy News

The Heart-O-Matic, the super-cool tool written by Julian of Juln.etsy.com has moved from Majaba.org to a new site, http://www.craftcult.com/. Craft Cult is co-owned by Julian and Karena of Magicjelly.etsy.com and features all of your favorite Heart-O-Matic Stats in a fancy new design, with more opportunity to advertise on the very popular site.

For the uninitiated, the Heart-O-Matic is a tool designed to help you easily see who has favorited your shop, which of your items have hearts and how many, and what your total item views are without having to click on each item or doing more math than any of us need in a day.  Go check it out if you are not familiar - you’ll love it. Of course, us Etsy sellers are so starved for shop stats that almost ANYTHING stat related gets us drooling.

But it’s not from Etsy.

Etsy Sellers have been asking (crying, shouting) for an RSS feed for our shops that is useful to us. For the unaware, an RSS feed for an Etsy shop is like a news ticker that will notify anyone following it when you post a new item. But an RSS feed is useless if it doesn’t entice your followers to click through to your shop, or if it provides so little info about the new listings that people stop bothering to look at it. The current Etsy RSS feed is just that - a boring list of your item titles and descriptions with no picture of the item and no price. A fine format for news, not for a shopping site.

Enter akendall1, who is not actually an Etsy Seller, he is an Etsy Member married to an Etsy Seller (soapdeli, to be exact) and I guess he figured getting involved with Etsy was his only chance of ever seeing his wife again, a lament many an etsy spouse can relate to. He wrote a beatiful app that gives you an RSS feed address to replace the Etsy RSS address that will show your listed items including pictures, prices and (wow!) an “Add to Cart” button right in the feed! And it somehow grabs my shop name as Sixth & Elm, not sixthandelm as the Etsy RSS does - much nicer looking.

How do you get this fabulous feed? The address for your “superfeed,” let’s call it, is hosted on the Google app engine and to access it you just use http://etsyfeeder.appspot.com/?userid=5034807 (replacing 5034807 with your Etsy user ID number) as your Etsy RSS url instead of the one you get from your shop. It is true that anyone subscribing to your feed via the button in your shop will not see this new feed, but you can promote the new feed address on your blog or twitter to get people to follow it, or import it into facebook, twitterfeed, indiepublic or any widget that accepts an RSS feed import. Please see the accompanying forum post on the new app, which includes info on what to do if you get a server error the first time you try to go to the address (just hit reload a few times - it means your shop is big).

Hello? Etsy Tech? Are you taking notes?

Is my Etsy ID different from my Etsy Username? How do I find my Etsy ID?

Your ID is different from your username. Your username is the name you chose and the one you log in with. Your ID is an Etsy-assigned number that you can easily find by simply going to your store. If you use a bookmark or if you type your “friendly” store address (www.username.etsy.com) you will always get redirected to an address that looks like this: http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5034807 That one is mine. Pretty ugly and not very catchy on a business card, right? That’s why Etsy gives you the friendly address and it just redirects automatically to this one, I guess. Your Etsy ID is the set of numbers at the very end of the address after “id=” … so mine is 5034807.

Hope that helps!