Flickr Quietly Backpedals out of Their PR Blunder
When is an apology not an apology? When it comes in the form of a sheepish form letter and omits any explanation as to what went wrong. Late last week flickr/Yahoo! and Rogers seemingly dissolved a long standing relationship that gave Rogers Internet subscribers a free flickr Pro account for as long as they remained Rogers subscribers. Why this agreement is no more is a little unclear as the only source of the news came from flickr.com when I logged into my account and was presented with an AJAXIAN notification bubble informing me that my free Pro account would cease to be free and/or Pro by July 1, 2009. This information was additionally corroborated by my account FAQ page to which this notification directed me.
I have to admit I am fond of flickr and enjoy the service so I opted to renew then and there for another 2 years of service. Upon verbalizing my dismay to these recent events on Twitter I quickly learned that no all Rogers subscribers were reporting the same experience. Some were being told their accounts would expire on November 1st 2011, nearly a full 2 years and 4 months after the date which was originally given to me.
So I went back to check my account, and there is was, the same notification bubble now displaying November 2011, not July 2009! Oh the FAQ still said 2009, but the notice now said 2011. So armed with these discrepancies (and the screen shots to prove them) I sent flickr/Yahoo! a scathing support query:
This morning I get a notice from you (not Rogers) that my Flickr pro account that I enjoy as a Rogers customer will [no] longer be pro after July 1, 2009. This was confirmed but not elaborated on in the FAQ. After feeling I had no other choice I paid for the renewal. Shortly thereafter, and after hearing contradictory reports on the internet, I noticed the new warning that now says November 1, 2011. However the FAQ still says July 1, 2009.
This is a fairly sizable blunder on your part and I think it was handled very unprofessionally. As a company who is one of the corner stones on the internet I would expect that you of all companies would know not to publish anything to the net before making sure you’ve got it all right down to the letter.
I want my money back (or my in progress transaction canceled) if indeed my pro account is still valid until November 1, 2011. I expect a response of confirmation of action.
Thank you.
Adam Merrifield
To which I got the ineffectual and less then sympathetic response (pay close attention to the fourth paragraph about FAQ and discrepancies):
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Billing.
I understand that you are contacting us to request a refund for your Flickr Pro account that you recently purchased.
Any changes to your Flickr account pertaining to your Yahoo! Hi-Speed service package with Rogers are set to take place due to changes made by Rogers. Please contact Rogers regarding further details of this change.
As per the FAQ found on Flickr.com, the Flickr Pro account included with your Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed service will change to a free Flickr account on July 1, 2009. There is not other information from Yahoo! that would support a November 1, [2011] date. I understand that this situation may be frustrating and apologize for the inconvenience.
Unfortunately, as stated on the order page there are no refunds on pro accounts. If an account has been closed before the pro term is up it cannot be transferred to another account and the unused portion is non-refundable.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Billing. If we can provide you with any further information, please reply to this email.
Regards,
Unnamed Female Support Personnel
Yahoo! Billing
This just infuriated me! I proceeded to make a spectacle of them and myself by posting about there response in as many places as I could. I sent them a short and to the point letter and supporting screen shot:
Uhhh… you work there right? And you can’t see what EVERYONE ELSE ON THE INTERNET SEES? See attached and don’t insult the intelligence of your users. Thanks.
Adam Merrifield
I guess this sent the message in the tone required to get some action on the matter for today I got what I assume to be the last and finalizing letter in response to this whole fiasco:
Hello Adam,
Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Billing.
I understand you have contacted us regarding your Flickr Pro service on your Yahoo! ID: xxxxxx@xxxx.com.
After reviewing your account we have issued you a full refund for your Flickr order from 05/15/2009 for $47.99. Please allow 7 – 10 business days for the credit to post to your credit card.
To view your billing history, please visit:
https://billing.yahoo.com/
and sign in to your account. Once you’ve signed in, you will be able to view all billing details regarding this Yahoo! account.
We apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused you.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Billing. If we can provide you with any further information, please reply to this email.
Regards,
Unnamed Male Support Personnel
Yahoo! Customer Care
What is the moral of the story? Don’t take it lying down! $50 is still $50 and I shouldn’t have to pay it because of a Yahoo! PR blunder and neither should you. Did you get burned by this? Does anyone know what the hell is going on yet? The notification still says November 2011 while the FAQ insists it’s July 2009. Will my account go dead in July? Who knows? We’ll fight that battle when the time comes.
FireFox CSS Hacks
Sometimes it’s not Internet Explorer, and sometimes it’s not FireFox… Sometimes it’s (gasp) Safari. I always develop for Safari and then fix everything else but sometimes, just sometimes you come across a situation where IE7, IE8 and FireFox 3 all render the same way. By law of averages, wouldn’t that mean that Safari has it wrong? Well let’s not jump to nasty conclusions, that doesn’t prove anything right?
Well regardless, I’m not about to start hacking for Safari (on moral grounds), so that leaves CSS hacking for IE7, IE8 and FireFox 3 (IE6 is just a given so were not going there). IE7 and IE8 are dealt with well enough using condition comments, <!–[if IE 7]> or <!–[if IE 8]> for example, but CSS hacks for FireFox are a different beast.
Some time ago I stumbled across this guys trick that goes something like this:
#yourSelector, x:-moz-any-link {styles for Firefox 2.0 here}
#yourSelector, x:-moz-any-link, x:default {restore styles for Firefox 3.0 and newer}
You can read more about it there, but in short, the :-moz-any-link is a private Gecko selector that other browser just ignore. Be warned though, it doesn’t validate so you’ll want to move it out to a javascript file or something if you are concerned about that sort of thing.
I don’t use this that often (only once before in fact), but it sure is handy to have in the toolbox sometimes.
Let Them Know You're Open With PHP
I wanted a php script that would inform visitors to a web page that the office was either open or closed, depending on the day of the week and what time of day it was. I made a half hearted attempt to find one on the internet, but to be honest I knew I could write one faster. I thought of making it a proper extensible class but thought I’d better move on before I tie up too much time in it.
It’s pretty basic but I thought some of you might find it handy for your own purposes. The directions are in the script itself which you can download here.
Is social media really free?
I met today with a local Kitchener-Waterloo Graphic Designer, Umberto Micheli of Plus Branding to exchange ideas and experiences and stories about being self employed as a designer in today’s tough economy. It doesn’t seem to matter what sector you are referring to, the bottom line always looks the same; you have to spend money if you stand a chance of coming out the other end smelling like roses.
Of course our perspectives differed a little. I take online presence and social media for granted and Umberto knows the ins-n-outs or drop mailers and print advertising. The later comes at a real cost, like cold hard cash kind of cost while the former is free… or is it?
It got me thinking when I got home, what’s the real cost of social media and online marketing? What is the mental tax and real cost of labour involved. I bet when it really comes down to it, dollar for dollar, the physical path become a lot cheaper then the metaphysical path.
Real World vs Online
Consider this; a graphic artist may put anywhere from 2 to 6 hours into a flyer, that flyer gets printed for a couple hundred dollars, that flyer gets handed out home to home for a couple hundred more. Regardless of internet connectivity or technical know-how, the information on that flyer has now reached thousands of homes guaranteed, and may very well remain there anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Heck if your flyer is a Pizza or Chinese food menu, that flyer might remain stuck on the fridge for years to come. Total cost for such longevity? Anywhere from $500 to $5000.
Now let’s look at the flip side, social media and the “free” online presence. You want to maximize your impact, so you invest your “free” time in a blog, Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and maybe a pinch of Tumblr if you’re really in the game. But what kind of investment are we talking about here? Do you want your blog to be really noticed? Then you have to post to it more than once a week. What’s that take? A post like this might take a couple of hours once you’ve collected your thoughts, images, proof read (cough) and publish.
How about Twitter then? To be honest, if you’re not a moderately attractive woman with a few geeky words to say about tech gear, your chances of building up an instant following are slim to none. I have been on Twitter for nearly two years and only have 300+ followers. I’ve amassed nearly 6,500 posts on Twitter. That’s about to 9.25 posts a day. Even if each post only took me 1.5 minutes, you’re looking at nearly 15 minutes spent each and every single day for almost two years posting to Twitter… that’s about 91 hours per year, or tens of thousands of dollars worth of man hours spent on 300 people, a fraction of which actually care enough to pay attention. My advice, get into Twitter for the love of community, not for a leg up in the market.
The rest
So where does that leave FaceBook, LinkedIn and Tumblr then? Well, take the above paragraph and divide the followers by two, then increase the effort by two and you have a $ per eyeball ratio that is four times as costly as Twitter (or 25% as effective depending on your perspective).
The Best Approach
Is there a best approach? Different markets will have different needs. Certain demographics will embrace one approach more than the other so it depends on what your target market is. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense for me to market my downloadable RapidWeaver themes in a flyer sent to a few thousand local area homes, but that’s not to say I couldn’t benefit from the exposure. But Plus Branding, on the other hand could benefit immensely from both an online presence and a distributed print approach. But it’s finding the balance that is key.
Join the March, kill IE6
Designers have talked about it for years, while some big names in the industry have already taken action, even the little guys are taking a stand… the message has never been more clear; it’s time to stop supporting IE6.
So that’s when I come across IE Death March, a site calling for action against the support of Internet Explorer 6, a 7 year old browser. In this post, site creator, M. Dave Auayan urges web designers and developers to cease support for IE6 by March 2009.
In that time, we will be taking a long hard look at browser stats to see if the numbers support this action. The last thing we want to do is alienate a large section of people, but we also don’t want to be continually held back in our design visions simply because a nearly decade old browser can’t keep up. I know one thing for sure, IE6 support will become a billed-for feature.
My top 5 web development tools
As a small web design outfit in Kitchener I have to be particular about my development workflow and the tools I use. I can’t afford to continually invest in new wonder apps that do a bit of this and a bit of that, and do this thing well but not that thing, but this other app does that thing but not… well, you get the point. So I have to really focus on what makes me money and will continue to make me money going forward. So I have compiled a list of apps that make web design and development on the Mac possible for me.
TextMate
There is text editors and then there is TextMate. Renowned for it’s unparalleled abilities to handle a seemingly limitless set of languages, TextMate makes writing ANY code fast and painless. I use TextMate for every bit of text editing that I do, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, SQL and javascript, just to name a few. It’s not free but you will agree that there is no other text editor that comes close to TextMate.
MAMP
If you are already a pro web designer you are already aware of the need for a live server environment to test out whatever systems you happen to be developing at the time. You also no that uploading to a remote location is time consuming and working SFTP, SSH or WEBDAV can be unstable. You best bet is to have a local server, but if that is not within your means (or know-how) then you need to look at MAMP. MAMP is a nicely bundled package of MySQL, Apache and PHP that allows you to run a web server safely on your own computer. Though Apache and PHP are already included on you Mac, they tend not be as current as those found in MAMP. MAMP also allows you to quickly change your servers from one project to another to keep your perceived root URL common across all your local web work. The best part is, the only version of MAMP you really need to get this done is free.
Safari
Don’t hate for this. I don’t mind FireFox and I think FireBug is great but to be honest I never use either one on a regular basis. Safari, on the other hand, in an indispensable tool for me. By enabling the developer features of Safari I am able to peer into the DOM for those tricky to view javascript behaviors and see what is really happening on the client side. Safari, of course, is include with your Mac operating system.
PhotoShop
What is web design without the design? There are a ton of free options out there, but lets be honest, there is no substitute for the real thing when it comes to mocking up proposed web layouts. I agree PhotoShop is outrageously priced but in the grand scheme of things, if you are getting paid for your work then the cost of this app is nothing more than a tax write-off at the end of the year.
Parallels
You can dispute me on this choice because I honestly have no experience with anything else. The work involved in getting 3 valid VM’s working for the purpose of testing 3 related and equally crappy browsers, IE6, IE7 and IE8, leaves me with no interesting in going through anything remotely similar in the near future. But my point is this, you need to have a way of testing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, version 6, 7 and 8 and whether you do this via Parallels or VMware is of little consequence to me. It needs to get done all the same. The cost of each is comparable to the other.
If the above list is all you ever invest in for your web design and development career then you are in excellent shape.
Rogers; You Got Served
You cannot begin to understand my frustration with Rogers and there recent tactics for hijacking “Server not found or DNS error” response pages (see here and here). I got so furious that I called Rogers and demanded a workaround to their little “solution”. And to my surprise, the technical representative JUMPED at the opportunity to show me how! So here’s to you Rogers and all that you mean to me:
- find the Internet Settings on your computer or router (there are plenty of web article to help you for Windows or Mac)
- Change the “DNS server(s)” to something public, like, for instance, 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.1 (a US based public DNS server, not likely to ever go down)
- Boom! Buh-bye Rogers/Yahoo! search page
You see, by default, Rogers (or any other ISP) has you using their DNS server (your computer will automatically use your ISP’s DNS server unless told to do otherwise) and therefor they can track what you are doing or see what’s being served to you. So in the event that you call for a site that doesn’t exist, they can cheerily offer up a Rogers/Yahoo! search page laden with advertising and paid-for links instead of actually telling you that that server or site you actually requested might not exist or might have an error.
Here is where Rogers FAILS! Umm Rogers? People who actually know how to use a computer and who aren’t using Internet Explorer 6 actually use the address bar as a search field and not strictly a place to resolve URL and DNS calls. For instance, my local Mac reseller is Carbon Computing and I wanted to call them today. I thought I would get their phone number from their web site so into my address bar I entered “carbonation” and pressed enter, which, prior to Rogers meddling, would normally resolve to “http://www.carbonation.com“. If the search term were something unresolvable, like “jingle butt pants on fire” then my browser would inform me that “http://jingle%20butt%20pants%20on%20fire/” cannot be found and probably ask me if I wanted to search for the term “jingle butt pants on fire” in Google (or which ever search engine I have set as a default).
Rogers figures they are doing you a solid by removing this extra step, they’ll just perform the search for you. But in a case like mine I don’t want to SEARCH for “carbonation”, I want to RESOLVE it by slapping a .com on the end of it. And by circumventing the default server error message, don’t you think they are causing more mayhem than good?
To the bonehead at Rogers that thought this was all a good idea… you are the biggest boob of all the boobs at Rogers. And that is a fair feat my friend.
SproutCore; open source meets Apple and web apps
When Apple assimilates… er… I mean hires developers, you often wonder what will come of it. Will a shinning star be snuffed out, buried, forgotten or stymied? Or will great things happen, pushing the envelope that contains the Apple-sphere, making the hardware giant showcase a new facet of the… erm… once narrow minded, acutely focussed business model.
One could wonder such things when Apple hired Charles Jolley, Sproutit founder and Mailroom developer, to re-architect their .Mac side of things. We have seen new things pop up in .Mac that were surely the influence of a Charles Jolley way of thinking; the photo gallery and what-not. And then comes MobileMe, a very rich internet application that defies all that we have known about web apps; they don’t have to suck. Surely this is the work of Charles Jolley. So what is to become of this seemingly fresh way of doing RIA’s?
That’s when Apple (and a few friends) drop SproutCore on us, an open standard platform for building web apps that look and feel like desktop apps… seriously… they do. But let me restate the cool part, open standard platform. That’s right, this is not Flash or SilverLight or even Java, this is open web standards such as HTML, CSS and Javascript with a bit of Cocoa inspiration.
Finally a javascript framework that I can get behind and one that I can sit down and take a crack at, knowing that a) it’s open and b) it has the support of a few heavy hitters behind it.
RapidWeaver tip: Add native search
One of the first things any visitor to a website looks for is a way to search within the site. One thing that has been sorely missing from RapidWeaver is native, integrated search functionality. Understandably it would be tough to get a desktop app to somehow construct a back end database on a remote server, though I bet it’s not impossible on mac since they run Unix, as do most server environments. But I think Dan and company have their hands full with more pressing, killer features.
That being said, I thought it was time to revisit this old thread and see how much further we could take this idea of integrated search. So without further delay:
How to add native search to your RapidWeaver site
Create a new MySQL database on your host server.
This will vary from host to host but here is a rough idea:- Login into you hosting control panel.
- Go to you MySQL management area.
- Create a new MySQL host server (we’ll call ours “mysql.yourdomain.com”).
- Create a new MySQL database (call it “isearch” and apply it to the host server you just created).
- Create a new username and password, i.e. isearch_admin, yourpassword (write them down because we will need them later).
Install iSearch2
- Download iSearch2.
- Unzip the package contents.
- Via an FTP client, upload the folder “isearch2″ and it’s content to the home folder of your host server, i.e. “public_html”, “html” or “home” depending on your host.
Configure iSearch2
Configure your basic settings in “isearch2/inc/config.inc.php”:$isearch_sql_server = 'mysql.yourdomain.com';(depending on your host, this might be “localhost”)$isearch_sql_username = 'isearch_admin';(this is the username I told you to write down ealier)$isearch_sql_password = 'yourpassword';(and this is the password I told you to write down earlier)$isearch_sql_database = 'isearch';(this is the name of the database we created)$isearch_admin_password = 'adminpassword';(this is the password you will make up to administer iSearch from a browser)
Note: Consult your hosts help documents if you have any difficulty in this area.
Index your site
iSearch2 needs to compile the contents of your site into an indexable database:- In a web browser, go to “http://yourdomain.com/isearch2/admin” and login using the isearch admin password you created here.
- Enter your email address and home page URL.
- In the last large text box, enter the urls that you don’t wish index in the search database separated by a space. I highly recommend excluding all folders that contain xml or other files intended to be read as RSS. These will fair well in searches but will result in the user trying to open RSS feeds when they may not intend to do so or may not have a means of reading RSS (like Internet Explorer users)
- Click save.
- Click “Spider” and wait. If it’s a big site it will take a while.
- Test the service by going to “http://www.yourdomain.com/isearch2″ and performing a search for a common term on your site. Did it work? Good! Carry on.
Note: To have iSearch2 stay up to date you can set a Unix “cron” job or Windows Scheduled Task on your server to run the spider engine. Use PHP from the command line as follows (replace “http://www.yourdomain.com” with the full file path to your sites root directory):
Unix :/usr/bin/php -q /http://www.yourdomain.com/isearch2/admin/reindex.php cmd
Windows :c:\php\php -q c:\http://www.yourdomain.com\isearch2\admin\reindex.php cmd
Make a search page
In RapidWeaver:- In the lower left corner, click the “+” button and add an HTML page (top level is preferable).
- In the Page Inspector, set your name, folder and file names appropriately.
- In the content area paste in the following:
Note: the%base_url%in the action attribute will allow RapidWeaver to write the proper path to the isearch program. Keep in mind that you have to properly set the base url in RapidWeaver (Site > Show Site Setup > Publishing) for this to work. It is assumed that you will enter your home domain there in this exact format: “http://www.yourdomain.com/” (note the trailing forward slash)
- Publish your new search page and give it a spin… Still working? Good! Carry on.
Search all over
Search from anywhere on you site by copying the code from here and pasting it anywhere on your site.Make it sexy
You probably noticed the results page is nothing short of terrible looking. I bet you want to make it look like the rest of your site, right? Ok, here is how:- Open the source of your published search page (the one you just finished making) in a text editor.
- Highlight from “
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC...” to just before “<!-- iSearc search form -->” and copy it. - Open the file “/isearch2/index.php” and replace from “
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC...” (at line 19) to “</head>” (line 29) with the code you copied. - Go back to source code of your search page and highlight and copy from the end of “
</FORM>” to the end of the code. - Next, go back to the file “/isearch2/index.php” and replace from “
</body>” to “</html>” with code you just copied. - Save you changes.
Note: I advise that you put your RapidWeaver search page in a folder on the top level. This will prevent broken link in the code that you just copied and pasted.
WARNING: It should also be noted that some RapidWeaver generated code, apostrophes in particular, can break the php code. I recommend doing a search and replace on the RapidWeaver code you pasted in and swap all apostrophes with .
Style some more
iSearch2 allows for some extensive control of it’s style. You can begin to control these styles by adding the following CSS selectors to either the styles.css in the theme, live on the site or directly into the file “/isearch2/index.php”:
Configure some more
Remember the admin panel (“http://yourdomain.com/isearch2/admin”)? If you poke around in there you can set a HUGE number of options that allow for differences in the way the results are delivered, advanced versus simple search, help menus, how partial results are handled… Go ahead and have fun with it.Some Examples
To see this search engine in full effect try it out on seyDesign or on Merrifield Photography.
Pathfinder is the only Finder you need
Have you ever been using the Finder in OS X and wished it could do more? I remember when 10.4 came along and being so thrilled with the new finder. It was so advanced, it had a sidebar… The novelty wore off pretty quick when I still wanted tabs, breadcrumbs and more features. For a while I was using Captain FTP as my main file browser since it allowed tabbed browsing but it’s tough to push an app that was design for “here-to-there” file transfers into a common file browser. It was actually a bit cumbersome at it.
Then I came across Pathfinder, “Path Finder is an innovative file browser and manager with powerful tools to make you more productive on Mac OS X.” Indeed it is. I wasn’t sold on first try. The reality is I didn’t give it a fair shake. I had it open for about 2 minutes, convinced myself I didn’t like the GUI and moved on before so much as opening the app.
It wasn’t long before frustration with the Finder was overwhelming again and since a few months had passed, I thought I ought to try out Pathfinder again. This time, being determined to do away with Finder, I forced myself to use Pathfinder for a week. Well this time it didn’t take more than a day and I was completely hooked. This is what the Finder was always meant to be. Pathfinder allows total system control and file management. It’s a dock, a path finder, a breadcrumb, file manager, image browser, image converter, pdf viewer text and document editor, ftp client, terminal interface, console panel and so much more all wrapped into one.
It shares some things in common with Finder, like the sidebar that is capable of showing your volumes and shelving your frequently travelled folders and files for easy access. But that’s not all your sidebar needs to show. Click on the bar that defines what is being displayed below it and you will be presented with options such as shelf, volumes, processes, file history, folder history, selection path, info, permissions, iTunes browser, attributes, subversion, preview, hex terminal and console. With all of those choices, you might think that one sidebar is not enough. Well that’s why you can have three more, one on the right, one on the left and one below for a total of four programable sidebars, each with two programable panels. We’re talking total file management here!
With all of this you can imagine I could go on for ever about what I like to do with Pathfinder, so I’ve decided to limit it to some of my favorite features.
Tabs – no common browser, whether it’s for the internet or file browser, should be without tabs. There is no excuse for it.
Drop Stack – you can easily drag a file or folder from tab to tab, but if you haven’t yet figured out where you want to drop that file or folder, simply drop it into the “Drop Stack” and there it will remain until you find the right place to drop it.
Breadcrumb – need I say more? Breadcrumbs are the single most important part of any navigation, so why limit them to websites?
Convert image – resize, crop, and convert the file type of any image. This is ideal in my blogging workflow where I am constantly working images to fit into a particular page size on various blogs.
Common sense – developers are constantly adding to and digging into their contextual menus. It seems as though Pathfinder has caught on to this. Most of most oft used contextual menus items are right there in the information panel, or the tool bar or in the sidebar, etc… One in particular that saves me a butt load of time is the “open package” button found in the information panel of any app or plugin or proprietary file type. Since the RapidWeaver themes I design are all packages, I find I use this button nearly every minute.
Information – know everything about the selected file without hot-key combos or contextual menu selections. Select a file and, depending on your panel configurations, you can know all it’s information, attributes, and permissions right there in front of you.
You may like your Finder just fine, but it you are looking for more, get Pathfinder. Your productivity will go through the roof.