Massive TV finally picked up

They came and got it today. Of course I wasn’t home when the woman from the charity called to say they were on their way. At first I was all bitchy and huffy because she’d already made me stay home all day on Tuesday waiting around for her and she never showed. To her credit she did call me at 10:30 pm to explain,but still, annoying.

Luckily the sportsfan was home and even helped them get it’s huge bulk down the stairs. I told her and told her she would need at least 2 strong dudes to help her. She brought one dude and herself.

But now some under-privileged kids have a mini theater sized TV to entertain them and I no longer have a TV the size of a closet hogging my back room!

Everyone wins.
ashley really needs a tv
Except this one girl who was so desperate to get the set that she actually emailed me a photo of herself in either a bra and underwear or a swimsuit…

Makes me wonder if I was a dude what influence that may have had on me…if I’d be all like screw those kids the hottie gets the TV.

Great Success!

I met up with my father last night to talk about his site and etc but I was so happy to see how fabulous he is looking these days. What a difference a summer in the garden can make. He gave me some tomato and basil from the garden-and they were delicious.

We made serious headway with plans for the site,too. He showed me the printouts of the site so we could talk about content and I was happy to see the site prints very well.

We agreed that Georgia was a fine font and we agreed to get rid of all the strange punctuation. In my defense I copied and pasted the content from the old site into the new one and perhaps, like the game of telephone, things became even more confused during this process. All sites should have correct spelling and grammar and punctuation but literary sites especially have to watch this area.

I feel bad that my dad has felt like he had egg on his face all this time because of the awkward punctuation. I always meant to do as he asked but always got side tracked by some design issue.

So I have officially nabbed him as editor! And he should be good at it because he did it for a magazine for many years.

The biggest achievement was the both of us agreeing that he needs to switch hosts. Switching hosts will save him over 140 dollars a year and greatly improve our options for expanding the site. All in all it was a very good meeting.

The tomatoes and basil went right into the pasta sauce for my dinner. Yum.

Abandon Cart All Ye Who Enter Here

” Anyone can write a book. Anyone can publish a book. It takes a genius to sell a book “
-Alfred Knopf

Today I read an email from my dad about a discussion I opened on how happy he was with his site. I was never 100% satisfied with it.
My dad is a print man. He didn’t like the font I picked or the punctuation mistakes.I just knew it was still slightly confused and had too much repeat content. I also knew that as an online shopping experience it didn’t cut it. But I didn’t feel I had the right to change the content of the site.Sure, I took new photos and connected a lot of them to LightBox. I made the site look more up to date. I changed it from static HTML pages to PHP…but lack of bells and whistles weren’t the problem. The site’s goal is to sell books. We don’t make it easy to sell books from the Web site. Game Over.

This is entirely due to the fact that on his host it wasn’t possible to have a mySQL database connection until a few weeks ago. This cut us out from using ZenCart or PHPShop or Cubecart. So we made due with the host’s store building program (Shopsite Starter) that only allows you to have 15 products for sale in the store at any time. Talk about limiting!
My dad has more than 50 titles for sale. I tried to convince him to upgrade to the second level of Shopsite which cost the same as what one month of hosting costs-doubling his costs. He balked. I don’t blame him. For what he pays he could have (mt) Media Temple’s awesome service. But switching an entire site is a big job as everyone knows. I am seriously going to suggest it, however.
Hosting has advanced and the days of hosts being able to charge business prices while providing totally crap service are pretty much gone.
Until we can sell every single title from the same shopping cart service, the site will remain confusing and confused. I mean, it is hard enough these days to sell books. Harder even still to sell obscure niche literature. Which is why we have to provide the clearest, easiest shopping experience to my dad’s customers.

Have any advice? Is it better to offer only 15 books for sale (but then what to do with the 40 other books on the site, just not even show them at all?). Should I chuck Shopsite and Mercantec and only use Paypal? I’d love to steer clear of Paypal for the time being.

Should I make the jump to (mt)?

If it is free they will come

We’ve had this massive 56 inch TV squatting in our horrible back room for over a year. Why the hell we have it in the 1st place is because it was free. A good friend of ours is in the moving business and a customer didn’t want it anymore.My boyfriend was a mover when I met him,along with most of his friends and lets just say there was a ton of second hand furniture floating about.I know from my own past moves that one sheds a lot of personal belongings during any move.

Back to the TV as big as a house. So we lugged it up the stairs,plugged it in and it worked. Bonus. But it was way too much TV for us. It dwarfed our living room space. It loomed.So we shoved it in the horrible back room and used the top as a shelf.

My success with getting a good TV on Craigslist inspired me to finally take some snaps of the monster and post an ad in the free section.Free as in no money just come and get it. Free as in if I were a fool I’d pay you to come take it.

I got responses 10 minutes after I published the ad which was not sugar coated at all. I said it wasn’t perfect, huge, needed a van to transport it and needed more than one person to come get it.When I checked my email today there were 12 more emails asking about it.

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. How does one decide this? I will give it to the 1st guy who wrote. But if he doesn’t like it when he sees it I will probably give it to the charity that wrote to me today.