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.

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.

To ensure that your Etsy items are showing up in relevant product searches, you must periodically upload your items to Google Base. I didn’t know about this, but I have been hearing a lot about it on the Etsy forums, so I did some digging and found this on the Let’s Ets website:

Google Base is a service that lets you tell Google about the items you have for sale. After your items have been loaded in, they will appear above the normal search results for relevant Google searches. Our GoogleBase formatter takes item details from your Etsy store and converts them into a format that Google understands.

So, the info we upload will be included when someone makes a Google Product Search (www.google.com/products):

Or above a regular search as a “teaser:”

Let’s walk through the process for doing this using the handy formatter provided by Let’s Ets:

1. Go to www.letsets.com
2. In the “Google Base Formatter” box, enter your Etsy username and click “Fetch My Items”
3. Scroll down to “Step Two” under your item list and click “Download Bulk File” to download this list as an XML file. A window will Pop-up asking you to open or save this file. Chose “Save to Disk” and chose where on your computer you would like to save it. If you have your computer set to download directly to your desktop, then you will not be given the option to save anywhere and the file will be ready for you on your desktop. If you are given a choice of where to save your file, make sure it is being saved as an XML file (.xml). It should automatically save as an XML file named after your username. For example, mine would be sixthandelm.xml
4. Go to www.google.com/base
5. If you do not used GoogleBase before, go to the right side of the screen and choose “Data Feed” from the options available (“One Time,” “Data Feed” or “API”)
6. Sign in with your Google Account, or create a new one if you do not have one yet. If you have a Gmail, blogger, or Picasa account (or a few others) you already have a Google account.
7. Accept the Terms of Service, if you agree with them
8. Fill in whatever profile items you want, such as your website, and click “Next”
9. It will take you to the next step automatically if this is your first upload, but if not, you will have to click on the “My Items” tab and chose your Data Feed, or “New Data Feed” if you didn’t get one made yet.
10. Set up your Data Feed: Chose the Country (we will need to use United States since our file has the items listed in USD) and chose “Products” for item type. Product items will need to be updated every 30 days (or earlier if your items change quickly) or they will expire. Chose GoogleBase for the feed type and enter the name of the file in the “Name of Feed” space (For mine I would put sixthandelm.xml). Click “Register Data Feed” at the bottom of the page.
11. On the next page you will see in the middle column Manual:upload file – Click on the upload file link. Browse to your saved XML file and click “Upload and Process.” The status column will change to “Processing,” which will take a few minutes to a few hours to finish. You cannot use the scheduler, listed above the manual upload link since Etsy’s RSS feed does not give images (or prices, I think).
12. Once the feed has finished processing, the page (when you refresh) will show either “Success” or “Failed” (or a Partial Success message). If the upload was successful, you can now click on the “My Items” tab and view your active items. If it has failed, but sure to click the details link next to “Failed” to find out why. Help can be found in the GoogleBase help, or by searching the Etsy forum for “GoogleBase Errors” to see problems other sellers has come up against.
13. When you want to repeat the upload, in 30 days (or less) you can keep the same file name and data field name and GoogleBase will just replace the old data, saving the number of clicks for each item as it recognizes that the new upload is a renew of any repeat items.

All Done!!

I made some Twitter buttons with the old and the new birdy thing for you to use on your blog if you want. To use, just copy the code below the icon you would like to use, replacing the text in bold to your actual Twitter username. If it’s not working, you can always right-click save the images, upload to your blog server and use that way. Enjoy!

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-new-250px.jpg”/></a>

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-new-125.jpg”/></a>

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-250px.jpg”/></a>

<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/yourtwitterusername“><img src=”http://sixthandelm.com/wp-content/uploads/twitter-125px.jpg”/></a>

Here are a few handy online tools to help you spring clean (fall clean?) your blog and make sure it is optimized, tagged and correct. I am a notorious bad speller so I need to use a lot of these to find spelling errors, mis-linked hyperlinks and weirdly-spelled meta tags.

I do not own any of these sites and have tried most, but not all. Always use discretion when giving your email address, but the sites I have been to all had online reputations and recommendations and clearly stated privacy policies, so I felt safe with them.

Spell Checking:

http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/spell_check.htm

http://www.texttrust.com/

http://orangoo.com/spell/

Finding Broken Links:

www.linktiger.com/

http://www.creatingonline.com/site_promotion/broken_link_checker.htm

http://validator.w3.org/checklink

http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/link_check.htm

Browser Compatibility Checking: (How does my blog look in other internet browsers?)

http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/compat_check.htm

http://browsershots.org/

I didn’t mention any HTML validation in this article – that is a little more behind-the-scenes and a topic for a more in-depth article about website maintenance, but I will be writing about validators and other web developer tools in the future.

My day job revents me from reading the storque back to front, or reading all the admin forum posts so sometimes I miss new features, like the Moo.com partnership with Etsy. Did you know you can print your Moo minicards, stickers and other stuff from your product listings, instead of going through Flickr? You did? Oh. So I was the only one who didn’t know? Damn. Never mind.

I wish I had found out sooner because there was a coupon code for a free keychain/card holder, but it expired in may. I found the deal by randomly wandering through the “Community – Resources” section on Etsy and clicking on the “MOO” tag. Wonder what else I can find…

Technorati used to rely on Alexa to produce the thumbnails used when indexing websites and Blogs, but I discovered that they are now using Snapshots from Snap.com, which explains why my Alexa thumbnail was current, but the thumbnail shown on Technorati was about 8 months old and showed my old blog design.

Never heard of Snapshots? You know when you go to a site and roll over a link and that giant picture bubble pops up with a thumbnail and description (and usually an ad too)? Yeah, That’s them. I think they’re kind of annoying, but some people find them handy. To each his own, I guess.

Getting Snap.com to update their thumbnail of your site is easy. Follow this link, and click on #14 – How do I update a preview image for a page. They are usually updated within 24 hours of submitting the request.

Et voila!

Yeah, yeah, you’re supposed to be posting items in the shop or making a new ad banner for Project Wonderful, but you know you’re gonna spend almost the whole time looking at cute pictures of your friend’s new cat on Flickr or looking up old boyfriends on Facebook. While you’re there, you might as well get a little marketing done. Here are some ways to drum up some interest for your shop while wasting time on the internet.

1. Upload all your item photos. *Given*
2. Search the Flickr groups for keywords related to Etsy or your craft and join the groups.
3. Upload a few photos to each group whenever you are on Flickr.  Etsy sellers, buyers and bloggers all frequent the groups as well as more popular design bloggers.
4. Make sure you have a link to your website in your profile. As per Flickr rules you are not supposed to use Flickr for marketing so you are not supposed to add your Etsy site address, just your blog address, but I haven’t been caught yet. Please don’t rat on me.
5. Search for users with tags related to Etsy or your craft and add these artists as a contact. Chances are they will add you too and see the your new items when you upload them to Flicker.
6. Comment on other artist’s photos – a lot. People follow the link back to your profile if you do, I promise.
7. Add me as a contact

1. Search Etsy forums for “Twitter” to find other Etsy buyers and sellers to follow. They will probably follow you too.
2. Go to TwitterFeed.com and set up your Etsy shop RSS so you will generate an automatic Tweet whenever you post an item to your Etsy shop. While you’re there set up a tweet for your blog too. contact me if you need help with RSS or finding your Etsy RSS URL.
3. Fill out your profile and make sure there are links to your Etsy shop, blog and/or Flickr account.
4. Go to your favorite design blogs and look for a “follow me on Twitter” link to follow them. Even if they don’t follow you, they will probably still at least check out your webpage.
5. Of course, follow me on Twitter!

 

1. Add the My Etsy Application to your Facebook Profile – Go to the App page and enter your ID. While on that page (after hitting submit) go to the very top of facebook and go to Settings>My Etsy Settings (the settings menu beside your name) and chose the “Profile” tab, then click “add” beside the Box selection. You can try the Etsy Shop App too, but I just got an error when I tried to add it.
2. Join the Etsy Sellers Facebook Group, upload some pictures, explore the group page and write on the wall or participate in the discussions. Sellers can be buyers too, and I have referred more than one buyer I could not help to Etsy Sellers I talk to on facebook, Flickr or forums.
3. Add photos of your shop items into albums in your Photos section.
4. Add other Etsyians as friends by searching for “facebook” in Etsy forum posts (like this thread, or this one) to find people who want to add other Etsy sellers or buyers to their friend lists.
5. If you want to get REALLY into it, you can make a Facebook page for your store, and encourage other Etsyians to become your fans if you become theirs. I have not done this yet since I don’t have time to maintain a store on Facebook too, and this list is mostly for quick ideas you can do while puttering online.
6. Add me as a friend: (make sure you let me know you’re an Etsyian, or I’ll think you were a random serial-friender).

1. Add shops and items to your favorites, especially new shops. They shops with 1000+ hearts don’t always have time to visit each shop when someone favorites them, but the newer sellers will without fail.
2. Choose an interesting shop item of yours for your avatar. When people see your avatar in convos or forum posts they will be curious and click through to your shop.
3. Participate in lots of forum threads. Lots. Talk it up, baby.
4. Join street teams.
5. Create treasuries, or make friend with people who do!
6. Pitch story ideas for the Storque to the editors. If accepted, you will get a lot of exposure for authoring an article.
7. If you have nothing new to list, renew items on a regular basis to keep your page appearing in the recently listed sections.
8. As always, check out my shop.

Other Online Distractions:

1. Check out your Etsy stats at Majaba.org
2. Comment regularly on the Indie and design blogs you read
3. Add your name to the Etsy Sellers Blog List
4. Check out my blog! Oh, wait, you’re there now…

Yay for justifiable online puttering!