I believe any gifts already in the warehouse should get to the happy couples, and guests who used credit cards should be able to get their money back, but it’s not good for newly-weds at what is meant to be the happiest time of their life.

This is probably a good time to announce my new project: What We’d Like. This is a service like Wrapit that allows couples to create wedding lists. This difference is that guests purchase the gift in the old fashioned way - from whichever shop they wish, online or in person, and give the gift to the couple themselves. This means there is no risk as we won’t handle any of the money.

The other major benefit is that you can ask the guests to decide on the exact gift. For example you can ask for a “Picture of York”, and your guests can chose a nice one to give the gift a personal touch.

I developed the basic service when we got married 3 years ago because we didn’t want to be tied down to a particular shop. Recently some friends asked if I could do something similar for them so I started developing the site to something more polished. The site will be completely funded by advertising so there are no fees to couples or guests.

Currently the service is in public beta, but is in a usable (and presentable) state, with new features being added constantly. If you would be interested in using the service please contact me, or why not check out the What We’d Like Facebook Page.

I got a payment for £31.53 into my account today. That’s for 3 months of searches. I assume it includes some income from people I’ve referred, because otherwise it doesn’t add up.

So, if you haven’t signed up yet, do so now and get paid to search the web (currently using Yahoo). It’s free, and I can now confirm it really does pay!

The item I’m going to concentrate on was a ‘Buy it Now’ auction, so there was no need to get bid confirmation emails and such. I also paid for the item immediately using PayPal. Let’s look at the emails I received:

1. From: eBay, You won eBay item…
   Confirming I’d “won” the item, and asking me to “Pay Now” (including appropriate links)
2. From: Auctiva, You have won eBay Item…
   Essentially the same as the eBay email. Tells me I’ve “won”, and asking me to log in to eBay to pay. Also advertising the seller’s Auctiva store.
3. From: PayPal, Receipt for Your Payment to…
   Standard PayPal receipt for payment
4. From: eBay Member, Ebay item Purchased eBay item…
   Telling me I’ve “won” and asking me to pay. Essentially the same as (1), although gives me instructions for sending payment through the mail. I’ve already paid by this stage however.
5. From: eBay Member,Thank you for your payment. eBay item…
   “Thank you” email, including links to other items. No details on how it will be despatched or anything else!

All these emails were sent within 3 minutes! It strikes me as an excessive quantity of emails for one small transaction (around £5).

If this had been an auction format I would get even more, although arguably these would be justified.

Would it be very hard to put a small dellay into the process that sends emails 1,2 and 4 so that if payment is sent imediately, these are skipped (or at least changed). Can eBay not also put a field in their emails to allow the seller to send a message, rather than sending out a separate one (and so getting rid of email’s 4 and 5).

I understand that eBay and PayPal are officially separate organisations and so should send separate emails, but given how integrated they are these days they could quite easily share emails (although in my case my eBay and PayPal addresses are different).

Email 2 is just blatent advertising from Auctiva - no reason for it whatsoever!

So, to sumarise, in the case where a Buy it Now item is “won” and paid for within say 10 minutes, the number of emails could be kept down to two:

1. From eBay: You won item…
   Thank you for your payment etc. Including optional custom message from seller.
2. From PayPal: Receipt for your payment…
   Standard receipt. If the email addresses are the same, I don’t see a reason this can’t be integrated into the first email though. It would be good if the seller could add to this too, to let the buyer know when the item will be despatched etc.

Of course if payment is dellayed more emails may be required, although since eBay doesn’t send a payment confirmation email anyway, it could still be kept to just two, with the first one asking for payment.

Of course if further emails say something useful (such as “Your item has been despatched”) they are justified, but having so many almost identical emails makes information hard to organise and find - especially if you buy a lot.

My posts never appear on the search results page, in fact some keywords are completely irrelevant.

The visits even show up in my Woopra log, which means the bots must support JavaScript. Annoyingly due the the low volume of visits to my site, this is really throwing off my statistics. In particular, because the bot is reporting a screen resolution of 800×600, my total stats show 14% of visitors have that resolution (which clearly isn’t accurate).

I found this post on Blogboing (and this older one), and this fuller explanation (including instructions on how to block it), which partially explains them, but the Microsoft response is clearly rubbish. As far as I’m concerned, this is just referrer spam, and another reason not to use Live Search!

I don’t think I’ll block them for now, but may do if it continues.

Any regular readers (although I don’t think I actually have any!) of this blog will notice I recently changed the theme to the fantastic Freshy 2 theme from Jide.fr. Together with the customise plugin it’s a great theme with many great features, including support for the Gravatar plugin.

Unfortunately as of version 2.0.6 there’s a very small error in the way the Gravatar function is implemented, which means the Gravatars aren’t displayed properly (and in fact it means commenter’s email addresses are displayed in the source).

Luckily the fix is very simple. You need to edit the file comments.php (using the theme editor or your favourite method), and find the following section (around line 37)(sorry about the indentation - Wordpress insists on removing it!):

<?php // gravatars
if (function_exists('gravatar')) {
if ('' == $comment->comment_type) {
echo '<img class="avatar" src="';
gravatar($comment->comment_author_email);
echo ‘” alt=”‘.$comment->comment_author.’” width=”40″ height=”40″ />’;
} elseif ( (’trackback’ == $comment->comment_type) || (’pingback’ == $comment->comment_type) ) {
echo ‘<img class=”avatar” src=”‘;
gravatar($comment->comment_author_url);
echo ‘” alt=”‘.$comment->comment_author.’” width=”40″ height=”40″ />’;
}
} else {
//echo ‘<img class=”avatar” src=”‘.get_bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’).’/images/default_avatar.png” alt=”‘.$comment->comment_author.’” width=”40″ height=”40″ />’;
}
?>

And you need to change the two gravatar() function calls to look like this (remove the paramters):

gravatar();

If you prefer you can download a fixed comments.php to replace you existing one here:

coments.php.zip

These changes actually make a lot of the code redundant, as it’s not possible to display a Gravatar for a trackback (there is no email address)

Make the above changes and you should be able to see Gravatars for all your visitors!

I also note, it looks that as of Wordpress v2.5, that gravatar support is built in. Note, if you use this the get_avatar() function does require the email address of the user as a parameter!

Update: Please note, the above download is for the old Frshy 2.06. Freshy 2.07 may have a different comments.php file, although it still has the bug so you will need to make the repair manually (let me know if you have any questions)!

Update 2: The bug is now fixed as of version 2.0.8

The biggest change is that Yahoo is now used for the searches. I haven’t done enough searches to be able to judge the quality of the results, but I doubt they are as good as Google. I would guess the cashback per search is likely to be similar though.

The other change is to the “personal homepage”. As well as the main search box, there are tabs for “My Gadgets”, “My Shops”, “My Bookmarks” and “My Blog”. None of these are functional yet, but they seem to be aiming at an iGoogle sort of service.

Interestingly, despite them quoting the domain homepagesfriends.com in their logo, the domain they are using is myhpf.co.uk!

Sign up here and take a look, and start earning. I’ve accumulated over £30 so far, and am close to £20 “past 45 days” threshold I need for my first payment!

I suppose they are too used to doorbells not working, but surely people wouldn’t bother installing doorbells if they didn’t have a use for one. Why not knock and ring?

The reason this is such an annoyance for me is that I work from home in a log cabin at the bottom of the garden. This means I can’t hear anyone knocking on the door, which is why I installed a wireless doorbell. I’ve missed a lot of deliveries because of their fear of bells. Citylink seem to be the worst offenders, but I missed one from Royal Mail today.

I think I need to get myself a “Please Ring” sign, but I am reluctant to have to put up instructions for such a simple device. Maybe something like these from Dave Gorman’s Flickr set:

(see also this Flickr Group)

One downside is that they are moving away from Google to use Yahoo as their search provider. It looks like they are hoping to add more Yahoo services to Homepages Friends in the future. Maybe we will see a service that pays you to check your mail?

The Homepages Friends domain (homepagesfriends.com according to the logo in the email) isn’t active yet, although similar domains redirect to www.whitedotbox.com which seems to be the same organisation and offers search income to sports clubs etc.

They promise changes over the next few days, in the meantime we can get paid to use Google.

I hope this continues to be a good service - I have over £30 accumulated so far!

[Update 2008-06-09:] The changeover has taken place - see my new post.

I looked out of the window to see someone cutting our neighbours hedge with a Flymo lawnmower! Sorry about the photo quality - I only had my phone on me and just snapped a quick pic (click for larger).

Not exactly the right tool for the job, but to be fair to him, the finished result was ok!

Our main problem with it was we were woken up before 8 on a Saturday morning - Abby was not happy at all!

Photolate.com (short for Photo Manipulation) is a new service that offers professional photo retouching for your own photos. The homepage is bright and cheerful and clearly shows what they offer with the simple claim “We retouch everyday photos”. The three packages “Natural”, “Rejuvenate”, and “Party Glam” start at just £4 per photo (£5 for Party Glam) and are described well with plenty of “Before and After” examples. They also offer addons for just £1.50

All packages offer basics like red-eye removal, colour and exposure correction, and blemish removal, as well as many more. Add ons offer to change eye colour, straighten teeth, blur the background or a bespoke add on which lets you ask them to do anything (although I’m sure there are limits?)!

I decided to try the service out with a photo and Abby and I at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich last year. As you can see, in the original we both have redeye, I have spots, and I’m very red (click for larger).

To place an order you must first sign up for an account. This is a pretty easy pain-free process (although you have to wait for a confirmation email), and once you have signed in to you new account you need to upload your photos. When I placed my order this was through a standard upload form, but now it’s been replaced with a fancy flash multi-file upload thingy - it seems to work very nicely. The size limit (when I ordered) was 10MB, which should be no problem for most resolutions.

Once uploaded, you’re shown thumbnails of your photos. These aren’t very good quality, but they’re good enough to chose your photo. Select your photo and you’re given the choice of which package to apply to your picture. If you can’t remember which is which, a handy help popup is provided to remind you - with more examples. You can also add any of the addons to your order.

I went for the Natural Package, with a bespoke treatment to get rid of the bandages on my fingers.

From here it’s very much like any other online shop: add to basket and checkout. At the checkout there’s a handy ’special instructions’ box to tell them what you would or wouldn’t like retouching (this is where I specified I wanted the bandages removing). Payment is made through Paypal (which I don’t personally like, but it is widely trusted, and ideal for a startup such as this).

They claim to retouch your photos (all by a real person) within 48 hours. I had to wait longer than this, but when I chased it up I got a prompt reply saying she wasn’t happy with the results so had to get it re-done. Quality control is certainly a good reason for a delay, and I am pretty confident this is just a teething problem.

A short while later I got an email telling me my photo was ready (”You`ve been photolated!”). I logged in to my account and downloaded the photo from the “My Orders” page. They only store the finished products for 2 weeks, so you have to make sure you are able to “collect” your order within this time. The finished result is below (click for larger):

My first reaction was “That’s not been retouched”, but that’s the whole point of the natural package - a natural look! The red-eye has been removed (on both of us and the random guy behind). My complexion is much improved, and the overall colour balance is better. The bandages on my fingers have been expertly removed. I still look slightly red, but I’d been in the sun, and I would probably look too strange pale or artificially brown.

Technically, the photo was the same resolution (2MP - this was taken on my old camera), and the EXIF data had been retained. The image was actually less compressed, although obviously this wouldn’t ‘bring back’ information lost in my camera’s original compression.

Here are some before and after closeups at full resolution (click for larger):

Overall a pretty good service at an amazing price. A few teething problems but they’re improving bits all the time. I would highly recommend this service.

Photolate are currently offering a limited offer of a free retouched photo for a limited time only (not sure how long for), so you’ve got no excuse not to try them out (enter free0805R at the checkout).