1.) How American health care killed my father
2.) Create short URLs with your own domain
3.) 50 free UI and web design wireframming kits
4.) Amazing retro models

I got back from 4-day trip to Ohio this week and immediately started work on a hyper-local news blog, Madison Pike. Setting up aggregation of local news sources was easy. I also located a WordPress plugin that lets me easily turn any post into a calendar event. So by pulling in a feed of city hall news items, for example, I can immediately turn their announcement of a commission meeting into a calendar event. Slick. But trying to pull in other local resources it turning out to be more of a challenge.

What I’d like to have is an easy way to pull in the restaurant database for Madison from Yelp or Urbanspoon and display business basics like average rating, location and hours. Other than that everything would link back to the ratings site. I’m a little surprise neither Yelp nor Urbanspoon offer widgets for this. Yelp seems to have an API for this purpose, but I’m not immediately excited to dig into that. It’s not about stealing traffic. I’m more likely to send traffic their way.

Next up is getting local crime date into a mappable database. I’m thinking of using Google Docs and Google Maps to get this done, but will first spend some time sorting through WordPress plugins to see if there isn’t a more integrated solution.

I spent a lot of time yesterday and today upgrading the look of the print order forms and shopping carts on Vintagraph and Shorpy.  The old design looked clunky and had a very 1999 feel to it. It was basic html and lacked the appeal of most modern web stores.

With the new design I wanted to present a more sophisticated look and, on Vintagraph, help people make a purchase choice based on our most popular print size. That’s a tip I picked up from The Smashing Book (highly recommended). So I layered on some CSS, settled on a color scheme I liked and put together something that looks significantly better and more professional.

I also moved Shorpy over to the same shopping cart system we’ve been using on Vintagraph. Previously all orders on Shorpy went directly to PayPal, which was a turnoff for some people. And although it was possible for people to pay with a credit card without creating a PayPal account, it was not at all clear how to do so. We surely lost some sales from people who didn’t want to create a PayPal account.

Our new cart lets people pay directly with a credit card or choose PayPal or Google checkout. It also looks and behaves like a familiar shopping cart and makes it easier for us to manage shipping rates and discounts.

1.) Presidio Heights Mansion Has Special Jungle Room
2.) Bending over backwards in Photoshop. Literally
3.) Shorpy photo Farked in Photoshop contest
4.) Internet uprising overturns Australian censorship law.

What started out as a novelty from a couple of visitors to Shorpy has grown into a rather large collection of colorized photos.  We now have 96 photos in the gallery and a few more in the wings waiting to be posted. It’s interesting that the first few colorized photos that were shared on the site inspired a number of other people to start taking a crack at it. The quality varies, but a number are quite well done. The comments on a few of the photos have also become heated as people attack or defend the practice of altering historic images. The consensus seems to be, “let people have some fun.”

1.) 35 Beautiful E-Commerce Websites
2.) What the Web of Tomorrow Will Look Like: 4 Big Trends to Watch
3.) Being an expert takes time, not talent
4.) Top Camera of 2009: Contributors pick their favorite
5.) The Disrupted of Davos

Today I spent some time working on the About page of Historic Stock. I hopefully gave potential clients some good reasons for purchasing their stock images from our site and not somewhere else.

On all of my business sites I’m concerned with answering the customer question: “Why should I buy from here?” Sometimes that’s a value proposition and I have to convince the customer their money is being well spent and they’re getting a good value. Other times it’s a question of trust and we have to convince buyers we will actually fulfill our promise to deliver the product at the quality they expect.

On Historic Stock it’s a little of both. I answered the quality and value issue by showing some before and after samples of the images we offer and explaining more about the amount of work that goes into preparing the images. As for delivering on our promise, we try to be transparent about the types and sizes of images we upload and also pointing to our reputation of running the popular, community-oriented site at Shorpy.

Here’s a nice multimedia presentation by photographers Laura Heald and Bill Frakes on sorority flag football at The University of Florida.

1.) The NPAA Cost of Doing Business Calculator. Targeted at photographers, but useful for any small business owner.
2.) On the iPad. “If I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today.”
3.) Two Fast Ways to Apply Develop Settings to Multiple Photos in Lightroom
4.) My Dirty Little Task Management Secret

I was able to painlessly migrate my Tumblr blog to Wordpress using the handy Tumblr2WordPress script. The script timed out the first few times I ran it, but eventually it exported all of my Tumblr posts (900+) as an XML file that I imported directly into WordPress. It did not preserve the “friendly URLs” I had in Tumblr, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem since I’m not getting a lot of search engine traffic to the site.

I was concerned about whether my photos would make the transition over. In a way, they did. The export preserved the links to the original files on Tumblr. I would have preferred that the photos be pulled over and hosted with this WordPress install. That is a project I have to pursue later by manually moving each image.

The site still needs a few design tweaks, but it’s all gone pretty well. Before on Tumblr and after on WordPress.