raving lunacy

Online Business

Having a website allows you to offer your products and services around the world. In the vast majority of cases, what you sell or provide is something that is a little more local in scope, like getting a little more business from the folks in your town, rather than having to tell somebody in Kuala Lampor that you cannot repair their car on the internet.

Prior to the Internet, your directory was the yellow pages. You were limited to black and yellow, and depending on how much money you wanted to fork over every month, determined how much return on investment you received.

The major search engines will list you, and depending on how hard you work will determine where you finally show up. For some things, like books, videos, and music, distance is not a problem. But if you are in any other sort of business, a global directory listing doesn't make a lot of sense.

Enter the Local Directories.

If you are lucky enough to live in Arizona, there is only one.....

Arizona Business Online

If you can't find it here, you probably don't need it.

sizing and missing images issues

sizing and missing images issues

http://theheadlemur.typepad.com/ravinglunacy/2004/11/home_ownership_.html
guard1 is 400x352
guard2 is 400x357
guard3 is 400x357
guard4 is 477x426

http://theheadlemur.typepad.com/ravinglunacy/2004/11/image_sizing.html

modifying the code has no effect

why are these photos being hammered like this?

They look great in the editor window. does typepad need an exorcism?

Why are images being assigned a 'class' and the attribute 'image-full' creating this mess?

Image sizing

My previous post had a number of images.
Prior to today being mindful of the room I have to play with, I have been careful to size my images to enhance the clarity of my posting where I use them.

My previous images look like shit, as typepad is resizing them.

this image is 400x352 and not 300x264

Let's see it WRITING THE WIDTH AND HEIGHT ATTRIBUTES WORKS>>>>>

Home Ownership, Customer Service, and Bad Websites

One of the important details of buying a used home is getting a home warranty policy. A Home Warranty is a policy that the seller buys that covers the buyer for major problems in a home usually for the first year. This is a very good deal for first time buyers, as the vast majority of folks who buy homes are not into remodeling or are contractors, handymen, and until now called the landlord when stuff broke.

My house came with one. I am currently using it as my heating unit woke me out of a sound sleep last week in the middle of the night. The blower motor squirrel cage for the heating unit separated, which created enough noise to wake me up and set the dogs to barking.

I called the warranty company Nov. 4th, who called a local contractor, Guardian Heating and Cooling, LLC. who came out to look at the unit. The contractor came out on the 5th. The squirrel cage is attached to the blower motor shaft with a screw, which would seem to make this a minor repair. Get a new cage, bolt it in and move on to the next job.

Not so fast. The contractor had to go back to the office so that a staffer could call the warranty company to authorize the repairs. Upon approval, the contractor could get the parts, call the customer, schedule an appointment, make a second service call, perform the repair and get paid. This is a typical scenario between an insurance company, a contractor and the customer.

Let me make a distinction here. The technician, William, the guy on the point of the spear, was outstanding. From the diagnosis to the repair, he was courteous, knowledgeable, and efficient.

What makes this an atypical event is that the Warranty Company, Old Republic Home Protection, has a website, and so does the Heating Contractor, Guardian Heating and Cooling, LLC.
Both of them have information and contact methods.

Old Republic provided a Phone number and answered right away. With our conversation, the details were hammered out quickly and I was feeling pretty good. The Local Contractor was Guardian Heating and Cooling, LLC. The contractor came out on the 5th. Now understanding that the 5th was Friday, the typical routine would be Monday or Tuesday would resolve this issue. So Monday I surfed over to Guardian.

Guardian Heating and Cooling has an online tracking feature.

I am thinking to myself, this is gonna be cool, as this is one of the most important things you can do to manage your customers and your business.

After clicking on the Tracking your service online link, this is what I got.

A popup window that Requires my email address. Before you can go anywhere else, you have to provide an email address. I am tracking my service order, and not proposing to establish a relationship with a company that has me on hold. For folks who block pop ups, pop unders and other forms of misdirection, this is a non-starter.

Next up is what should have been first.

Using everyone of the search terms, this is what I got.

Yesterday, the 10th, I decided to call Guardian and get the scoop, The Phone tree from hell. After pressing the buttons, to tell them that I was checking on the status of my service order, yes it was a warranty issue, and yes I was in Phoenix, It took 50 minutes, before I got someone with lungs, and from Las Vegas at that. While I was waiting, I surfed over to the Guardian website and tried again.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Now the utility of this feature would if enabled, cut down on phone calls, the attendant wait times, and make the company look a whole better. As it is now they look bad. When I finally got someone on the phone, after digging through their records, they were able to confirm that they had gotten the part and schedule the repair this morning between 9AM-1PM.

The repair is done, the guy on the ground was outstanding, but the website still sucks. They could probably use a new CMS. Marqui may be a solution.

Terry Heaton nails it.

Terry Heaton is one of those folks who gets the internet.

What the people of the world are discovering is that there's a deep difference between stupid and ignorant. Stupid is forever, but ignorant can be fixed. We've been treated like the former when actually we're the latter. THIS is the revolution underway.

Link

Media companies who want to dig their asses out of the mud would be well advised to read Terry.

Back to plain text

In my previous posting on Typepad Problems, I listed the Rich Text Editing as a 'feature' that I did not care for.

All is not lost, as in the editing window way down on the bottom of the page is the link to Customize the display of this page. Here is where you can turn off RTF and advance to the rear, by switching back to plain text mode.

I can now cut and paste, and then blockquote text in the editing window, which is how I prefer to post. It provides a clear indication of what I am saying vs what someone else is saying. Typepad's RTF allows me to cut and paste, but I have to switch to the Edit HTML window to make it happen. When I switch back, the cursor returns to the top of the document and I have to try to get the the bottom to continue my posting.
If I have used the Indent 'feature' the carridge return/enter key puts a new paragraph inside the blocked/indented section. Not the most elegant solution, as well as creating crappy code.

The downside is that I loose the spellchecker. Oh well. I usually cut and paste things I am not sure about into outlook express and use it's spell checker. Yes it is probably an unnatural method of composing, as I am using two applications where one should work. Oh well, the next upgrade will probably include the spellchecker in plain text mode.

Now to get the photo albums assignable to specific blogs rather than stuffed into the root directory.

Firefox 1.0 has landed

Firefox is the browser you need to be using. It is simply the best damn browser out here.

Quicken's Business Model

Quicken is probably the best known software for personal finance. But it is getting ugly.

Ed Foster notes the latest Lock-In

AOL's New Strategy

Being a person whose life is tied to the internet, I spend a lot of time getting folks connected. The vast amount of information available on every subject that can be imagined is creating new challenges and opportunities for individuals, organizations and companies to connect with each other.

The Leader in internet connectivity is AOL. Using every method of spreading the word, from TV, Radio, and direct mail, with the famous CD offerings, AOL is at least as responsible for the growth of the Internet as everybody else combined.

For a very large group of people AOL is the Internet.  Primarily due to how AOL works. It has it's own browser, and is it's own self contained universe. One of the little secrets about the internet is once you have a connection to an internet service provider, you can use any other browser, to explore the web. AOL is an ISP with a prepackaged browser and user interface that does provide not only connectivity in browsing and email, but is also the leader in Internet Relay Chat, which in the AOL Universe is your Buddy Lists.

This ease of connectivity comes at a cost. AOL is a gated community.

A gated community is a place where you have fences erected to separate you from the rest of the community next door, down the block or across the world.

In the latest push for the hearts and minds of folks to get people on the AOL web comes the AOL Optimized PC.

$299.00 for a complete system.  This is a loss leader of tremendous proportion. The caveat is that this is available to new members who sign up for 12 months at 23.90 a month.(286.80) If you already are on AOL you can get this if you sign up for 24 months at 23.00 a month.(573.60) If you cancel before the end of this period, severe penalties apply. The cancellation fee is the balance of the sign up period @ 23.90 plus 40 bucks. Did I mention shipping?

This is a very scary development. But hey, fear sells almost as well as sex.

Hello Sailor! ;-)

With the debate about  blogging for dollars comes the latest volley from Jason Calacanis, the staunch defender of the Separation Between Blogging and Dollars, comes this nugget.

I am happy to announce that Weblogs, Inc. is currently seeking, and talking to bloggers for our Flash, WiMAX, Art, Yahoo!, Alternative Energy, and Security Weblogs. If any of these topics light your blogging fire please contact me. And, if there is another niche that you know you would love to write about, let me know that too as we are continuously seeking new topics and talent. Our network now includes 60 weblogs written by people with a passion for what they are blogging. We do all the technical work and sell the advertising, while our bloggers, quite simply, blog. We either pay our writers a set amount for a certain number of posts per month, or we split ad revenues with them.

Let me see if I understand this. When Marc Canter proposed paying webblogers to blog products, without editorial oversight, Jason had this to say;

What we’re saying is that if you mix advertising into your editorial, and have the writers getting paid to promote products, you are a whore.

I guess blogging for dollars vs blogging for dollars is different in the same way that getting a blowjob on a street corner is different than using an outcall service.