Valentines Day

Valentines Day is here again.

We don't have any new mean cards to add to the roster before Valentines, and by this point nothing but next day UPS is going to arrive before Sunday anyways. Thank you to those who purchased cards this season of love.

This next week is a Hawaii trip for our main card producer. We're jealous of the jerk, so we've decided that when he gets back we're going to tie him down and make him get a whole new batch of cards online. Might even be some "taking a trip" related ones. We'll also have a contest to run to come up with your best bitter holiday trip greeting cards. Prizes of course to be announced.

Adventures in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Site Loading Speed

So the Mean Greeting Cards site is live, and I've been working on all aspects of SEO. For those who don't know, SEO is the practise of optimizing your website so that Google (And all the others, but mostly google) not only knows you exist but has faith that your site isn't a pile of garbage. This optimization helps with your page rank, how you show up in search results and with getting a higher quality score in the advertising pay per click mediums.

For this article I'm focusing mostly on Magento (by Varien, google it) shopping cart as it's the best open source cart I could find. Magento has a number of SEO features, but does seem to be loading a little on the slow side. A cart store like mine shouldn't take more than a second or two to load. So I decided to delve a little deeper into the code and site. Please remember, I am an amateur at web design, so while some of this may seem like givens for you professionals, noobs need helpful articles too.

The first thing I did was a google search for website speed. You'll find a couple of speed test sites which gives you tips on where your problems are. The first result was the best, and so I got the site analyzed.

Low and behold over half my website landing page size was images. So I trundle off to The Gimp (Open Source version of Photoshop, it's awesome because it's free) and begin dropping my image sizes by reducing the quality. With .jpg files it's easy because you can just reduce the quality. With .gifs it's a bit more involved because you need to set the maximum number of colors for the image, which can be tricky if you don't know how. The Gimp has an option under the image menu -> mode menu and hit indexed mode.

So I do this to my logo images, and the slider images I have up and my site dropped in size by about 40%. A good start if I do say so myself.

The next thing to add to the magento install is the Fooman Speedster extension. This extension combines and compresses your .js (javascript) and .css (Cascading Style Sheets).

I run the server under the Wolfpaw Services co-location in Edmonton. We're debating getting it upgraded as my box might be a bit shy in spec to be a decent webserver.

Kryss Out
www.callousgreetings.com

Valentines Oddity - Callous Greetings mean cards for all occasions

Valentines day is a funny time of year. It is much like Christmas and Easter, starting with a religious base and yet morphing into something completely different. It’s also an amusing time of year because people really have only 2 view points on Valentines. Either you love it, or you hate it.

Personally I hate it so you may see some extra venom in the mean cards around Valentines day. We’ve gone as far as to rename it Spiderman Day around here, just cause.

It’s obvious and easy to see why people love Valentines. It’s a time of love, a reminder of the relationship two people share. They pick out a cute card, a box of chocolates and attempt to be more romantic than they are the other 364(5) days of the year. Women tend to be extremely nostalgic and sentimental around this time, and men tend to do whatever they can to have sex, even if it means adding diamonds to the cards and chocolates.

But what about the people who hate Valentines. Those are the people I’m interested in. What would drive someone to break up with their significant other on the most romantic holiday of the year? Why would someone pick the peak of the heart to choose to end a relationship but for the simple impact that it has on the other person.

So this means that people are intentionally ending relationships on Valentines Day simply because it is more of an insult than any other day of the year you could do it. There’s no other reason to select that day. In fact it’s the day people are most likely to be hiding their relationship problems.

I think that it is a very interesting statement about the human condition to acknowledge that people choose to break up on Valentines simply to hurt the other people more. Means there are quite a few couples who aren’t just not happy, but who have a serious dislike or hatred for the other person. The line “He was happily married for years, but his wife wasn’t” seems to be appropriate here.

That’s why we went for a Valentines launch. Mean cards, especially the relationship variety are a needed commodity around this time of year.

If you like mean valentines humor have someone you’re planning to break up with, check out Cupids’ Folly, Candy and Roses are Red for a good chuckle

http://callousgreetings.com/seasonal/valentines/cupidfolly
http://callousgreetings.com/seasonal/valentines/candy
http://callousgreetings.com/seasonal/valentines/rosesarered-1

Kryss Out

Launch day is here

So we're a few hours from going live and it's been interesting thus far. Have you ever tried to build something with no formal training? Well that's what this website has been for the last few months. Callousgreetings.com is now almost bug free, with product up and ready to purchase and laughs up ready for free.

Figured I'd do a quick post on some of the background info in case anyone was bored and needed help sleeping at night.

Presently we run with a shopping card designed by Varien called Magento. It's quite a robust little cart which I've thus far had very few problems with. At times it feels like it wants to do a little too much but with a steady hand and the tenacity of a bear in a honey comb you can work through the program to get a website up and running in rather short order. The best part about Magento is that it's open source. If you have the time you can make it do anything. If you don't have the time, pay Varien for official support.

We're using Canada post primarily for regular shipping and UPS for expedited but as they don't pay for this spot in the blog (not that anyone would given no consistent readership) this is all the plug they get.

We're being hosted at present by Wolfpaw services out of Edmonton and our support has been fantastic. Wolfpaw handles server co-location, virtual servers and many other things. Quite frankly they've been nothing but fantastic for any and all issues that we've run into. www.wolfpaw.net

So pretty quick, I lift the last few restrictions from the site. Accounts can be made, orders processed. And that's when the spamfest begins. Facebook, Twitter, google adwords. Any and all possible places I can pass word on to is what I'm going to be doing. People buying cards is my main goal, but sometimes just having people who check back to have a laugh at a new card is a good thing too. So if you read this and haven't seen the site yet, check it out. If you like our humour, send it to a friend so they can laugh too.

Kryss out

Vinegar Valentine - Penny Dreadful - Callous Greeting - Mean Card

It has always seemed an unfortunate element of society that every year things get just a little fluffier. The toys children play with have fewer small parts and more rounded edges, the words we use are in spoken and written word become less direct, the media we watch is a little more politically correct. It follows that our greeting cards consistently become happier and more cheerful which on the grand scheme of things isn’t such a bad thing.

Things used to be different in the greeting card market however. Have you ever heard of a penny dreadful valentine? They’re insulting and mean greeting cards for the romance season that were originally distributed back in the mid 1800s’. Incredibly insulting, especially for their time, these cards were usually sent anonymously. The best part of the whole thing was that Sir Rowland Hills’ administration of prepaid postage didn’t begin in Britain until the 1840s’ so in many places people were still being charged when they received mail rather than sent it. So you could easily have just paid the post man for an anonymous insult.

Nowadays you can find a number of different online card retailers who are selling mean greeting cards. These are the present day Penny Dreadfuls’, though certainly not limited to Valentines Day. Some of them are crude, some sly and witty, some with great artwork and others with pictures that seem cherry picked from many unreferenced sources. You will find free e-cards, paid for e-cards, cards that can be downloaded and those that can even be mailed to the address of your target.

Truly has the Penny Dreadful become more sophisticated.

Site Approaching Completion

We've moved into the final testing stages of site production. Barring a few outages here and there due to database work and syntax testing, the site is essentially ready to go. From there, its just artwork and then marketing.

Art Concepts Ready

Revamp of the site to fix many of the problems made by being a newb webdeveloper. Got a slideshow of the cast up on the site now and am mostly back to where I was. At this point it's really just a matter of the individual card art.