“TechCrunch answers to no one. Your complaints fall upon deaf ears oh puny startups. We will select five of you to put on our pedestal, but only those five who will wash our feet and … you get the idea. We don’t need to stick to deadlines, yes we said the 17th, but it could be today, tomorrow, or a week from now and there is nothing you can do mwah ha ha ha.”

an ironic comment on the crunchies awards blog, after 2 missed deadlines (17th, 19th dec) for the release of the nominees. no explanations given, whatsoever.
not pretty, if you ask me.

ps - it’s not the fact they haven’t released the nominees yet. it’s the fact they had 82k votes and dare to miss 2 public deadlines without an explanation - knowing they have all those people waiting on them.

at the time of the previous implementation of this website, the choice of CMS was motivated by paralel projects envolving joomla… but joomla soon turned out to be a little naughty monster, that i kept trying to tame. our relationship grew in the premisses of tweaks and workarounds, half-working modules and whatnots…

but my patience for such things has run out a long time ago. so today, with p. in charge of the php/mysql migration front and me on the design side, we moved the blog from joomla to wordpress. i would have anticipated lots of problems, but the whole thing went rather smoothly, and the website looks pretty much the same.

to me though, it feels so different! finally i have proper categories, tags, rss feeds that don’t have encoding problems, a spam filter for comments, clean urls, etc etc etc.

horray!

ps - i’m not sure for how long the feeds will hold, so feed readers should update their feed to feed://meiadeleite.com/feed. sorry about that.

ps2 - if you find any problems, let me know :)

i was browsing the search queries that arrive at meiadeleite.com (always entertaining) and stumbling upon the strangest phrases:

* desenho tenda de indios
* how to make leite creme
* porque as mulheres tem vontade de ser mae (…)
* o que significa i need a hug? (oh dear…)
* dor no ombro
* dimicina pills
* so so in portuguese (lol)
* mulheres podem dar leite sem estar gravida (and a lot of variations of that! :S)

…and then comes p.: “where are you checking that?”.
“awstats”, i said. off he goes to check his own stats. i was guessing “postcrossing guy” or something like that would come up first. nops. instead, “nude pumpkin race” does, way ahead any other queries.

and check this out, for that query, his site comes even before nakedpumpkinrun.org on google! now that’s classy! :D

thank you! i mean it, i wanted to say “welcome, and thanks for coming around!” even if this is your first or last visit to this site.
i declare today “meiadeleite.com visitors’ appreciation day”!

(edit: yes, feed readers are included as well. :) )

“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise.” - Sylvia Plath

a big portion of the weekend is spent answering emails that have been piling up through the week. from trivial questions, location changes requests, “i think this user is acting fishy”, people whose “english is not very famous” (that quote actually made us laugh almost to tears!), their email is not working, how much is a stamp to madagascar…
we try to make the effort to answer even the silliest email (quicktext and the quickmove extensions for thunderbird give us a precious hand, common sense is also an underestimated tool).

complaints and requests, most of the time. mais hélas, once in a while, a little kid (or a full class), a grandma or a family somewhere writes to say how sending postcards makes them happy or is keeping them in touch with the world.

and all is right and meaningful again. it feels really good to be part of a project that doesn’t specifically target “people our age”, but instead stretches to reach people everywhere, young and old, more or less internet savvy, with interests as vast as bunny-hopping (as in training bunnies to jump around - i kid you not!) or carol singing.

the only common thing between them is the love of something offline: postcards on their mailbox, when they get home. :)

(on the picture, what i do when i have too much to do: as levi would say, “pantominate”. take pictures, arrange flowers, catalogue coffee marks. what do you do?)

i love threadless. they’re a company that works with user-generated content at its best, while giving a good part of their profit back to the community that makes them successful. sounds like a recipe to success to me.

still doubtful? let’s see. you submit a design and win a couple thousand bucks if it gets selected (by the users) to be printed, plus several bonus. if you’re not a designer, you can still buy a tshirt, submit a photo of it and get $1.5 worth of discounts. or if your picture is really good, $15! how cool is that?

to tell the truth, i think the average picture that users upload isn’t exactly “gallery-material”, and anyone can do a far better job with a little imagination. sooooo, right after we bought the camera, i kept bugging p. to take pictures of our tshirts, and guess what, so far, with 2 pictures taken, i’m stocking $16.5 in discounts! i’d say it’s well worth the shot, even if you’re a little camera-shy!

oh! btw, they’ve just opened their shop in chicago, and i heard it has some cool features. besides being a perfectly good example of how an online business can break boundaries and stretch towards the real world.

i would tell you more about it, but a (recently upgraded) super-typhoon is scheduled to hit shanghai this evening and i’m super-excited and semi-worried and i can’t think of anything else. our first typhoon. some 200k people have been evacuated and let’s hope i remember to park the bike indoors. basements are spooky. i tend to avoid them.