Remember when I asked Colin what the opposite of Portland was and he said Florida? Well, It turns out the opposite of Portland is actually somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Huh.

Antipodr.com – find the other side of the world for anywhere you want. Not sure why you’d want to, but it might come in handy if Jeopardy ever gets big again or you ever meet Ken Jennings.

An Engineer’s Guide to Voting

Coming Soon To The Shop…

Items I have been working on, but haven’t had a chance to list yet…

Broken-Furnace-Keeping-Warm Strategies

I just found a new way to make waking up and getting out of bed easier when your furnace is broken and the guys hasn’t come to fix it yet. Rare situation, yes, but you work with what you know, and I know our furnace is broken and the guy hasn’t come to fix it yet.

First you run out of bed as fast as possible and put on any clothes near the bed you can find, including socks, extra pants, sweaters and another sweater, on top of the warm pants, longsleeve and sweater you went to bed in. Then dive back under the giant duvet and wait until you are so hot you have to get out and take off some clothes or die of heat exhaustion. By then you are up and warm enough to brave the frigid house.

Of course this could also be filed under “ways to fall back asleep warm and cozy and make you late for work,” but I don’t usually find myself looking for ways to do that so I don’t think I need a file for it.

Share This.

Adam found a new plug-in (well, new to me) for a website he is designing and I decided to share. There are many different views when it comes to the social media icons you should include in your posts to entice people to blog about your article, submit it to Digg or StumbleUpon, post to Facebook or any of a million other choices. Some feel that the more icons, the better as it increases your chance of being submitted. Others shun the design of this approach and opt for none to keep the page simple, reasoning that if someone really wanted to submit a post they would find a way or most likely already had a toolbar button for this purpose.

I’ve always been in the middle, flipping back and forth, so I was really happy to find the Share This Plug-In that you can see demonstrated at the bottom of this post. It is unobtrusive, mostly text based in design and kinda cute. It has evolved into a web service (www.sharethis.com) and you can login and access stats about your site’s submissions and preferences across all Share This enabled sites. Go ahead, click on it. See all the options? No, really, go click on it. Come on, just click on it! You can’t fully appreciate it until you do. There, see how cool it is? .So, hopefully this entices some of you to get to Digging or Stumbling and posting my more educational or entertaining posts, after you hop on by to the website for the Share This plug-in and grab it for your own blog.

I just realized this is an Alex King Plug-in, my favorite plug-in designer…OH GOD! Just also realized I am way more than a gigantic dork. I have a favorite plug-in designer. Beyond dork.

Watching the Past, in the Future…?

Since Colin and Emily moved to Orie-gone they are enjoying a west coast time zone, and are consequently three hours behind us. We always tease them that we are calling from the future, and how is it there in the past, anyways? Of course the joke gets old, but that doesn’t mean we stop saying it.

Adam and Colin have both just signed into i-Chat on their Macs to watch the end of the world series together (virtually) and talk about the game just as if they were in the same room, like we do for a lot of things since they have moved. But Adam is watching on Fox, Colin on TBS and fox is about 20 seconds behind. The i-Chat has no delay, but this means that Colin’s TV is essentially 20 seconds in the future. So now they’re trying to figure out how Colin is watching 20 seconds into the future, from three hours in the past.

Of course, Adam has had a few Steamwhistles and I am sure Colin is lubricating his World Series Experience in a similar fashion, so it makes the whole thing a lot harder for them to figure out too. They’re both quite befuddled about it now.

Um… Moo.

I forgot to show you all my new Moo Cards…

I also grabbed a cute little leather holder that holds 25 cards to carry around with me for times when a random “Well, hey, let me give you my card!” situation turns up.

And don’t forget that you can make your Moo mini-cards (and full size cards and stickers and postcards and…) right from your Etsy listings instead of through Flickr.

Never seen a Moo card before? They’re little half-size, unique business cards based on pictures you provide. Here, read about ‘em on the Moo website.

Are Your Etsy Items Searchable on Google?

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:

Go to www.letsets.com
In the “Google Base Formatter” box, enter your Etsy username and click “Fetch My Items”
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
Go to www.google.com/base
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”)
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.
Accept the Terms of Service, if you agree with them
Fill in whatever profile items you want, such as your website, and click “Next”
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!!

Twitter Buttons For Your Blog

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!