Monthly Archives: January 2008

Macworld Liveblogging

Asides, ,

Rating the Livebloggers talks about three of the blogs that were covering Steve Jobs keynote where he announced the Macbook Air. The one with the highest rating, Gizmodo’s Live site, is hosted on WordPress.com as a VIP, which is how they managed to avoid the problems that hit Crunchgear, Engadget, Twitter, et al. Here’s a Flickr picture showing how spiky the traffic can be. (That’s from the iPhone keynote, not the latest one.)

WordPress in South Africa

Asides, ,

Paul De Sousa writes in: “One of South Africa’s largest media groups, Avusa, which owns most of the countries BIGGEST newspapers is now using WordPress. Here are 2 of their MU installations: The Times is South Africa’s first interactive newspaper, it’s part of The Sunday Times which is the countries largest newspaper. Financial Mail is a largely financial newspaper also owned by Avusa. It’s expected that in the near future more rollouts for other publications, newspapers, and magazines will happen as WordPress is ingrained into our online strategy.”

Twenty-four

Asides

Every year my birthday sneaks up on me, and this was no exception. After the lull of the holidays and the whirlwind first few days of the year, I am now officially 24. This is the sixth year I’ve celebrated with you guys on this blog, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23. This year should be interesting because many of the things I started 2–5 years ago are just now starting to come to fruition. I’m also hoping there will be some big changes on photomatt.net, including possibly a change in domain name. I’ll post more on that as it develops though. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.

ThinkGeek’s Crappy Wishlist

Essays

I’ve always found the Wishlist concept to be cool, especially as Amazon implements it. I love it when the developer of a plugin or software I use links to their Wishlist because then I can buy them something personal, it seems less crude than a Paypal donate link where you’re putting an explicit price on things.

The other day Kent Brewster found a JS problem on WordPress.com. I was browsing his FAQ and saw this: “My ThinkGeek Wish List is always open.”

If you click that link, you’ll see in red letters: “To shop from this wishlist, please add items to your cart using this form only! Otherwise, your gifts will not be removed from this wishlist, and the recipient may get duplicates.”

Okay — a little weird, but ThinkGeek’s home-grown shopping cart has always been a little odd, I’ll run with it. I add it to my cart from that form, go to the checkout form and sign in (I’ve spent lots of money with ThinkGeek over the years), and complete the order. (How to Survive a Robot Uprising, for the record.)

So I send an email to their customer support: “I ordered something off someone’s wishlist, order e5886bb4. Everything in the order looks like it’s being shipped to me, not the recipient. Could you confirm it’s going to this guy’s wishlist and not me?” I then linked to the wishlist. Next morning, a response:

Matt,
This order is being shipped to [my address redacted]
United States
That was the address entered when the order was placed.
Thanks,

Tracy G
Customer Service

Not helpful at all… my reply: “Why would I buy something off someone else’s wishlist and then ship it to me? If it can’t be shipped to the person who made the wishlist, then please cancel it.”

No response, and two days later the order ships, to me. This morning, a final response from Tracy:

Mr. Mullenweg,
When the order is placed the order you had the option of entering an alternate ship to address.
Since your order has already shipped we can not change or cancel the order.
Thanks,

Tracy G
Customer Service

Given the next-day shipping I paid extra for, the book should be arriving any day now. The whole point of a wishlist is that I don’t know Kent’s address, nor should I need to. Also the big red sentence on the wishlist page implied to me that Kent would get anything I order from that specific form/page, otherwise why would I need to add it to my cart specifically from that spot?

To Kent, my apologies. If the robot uprising comes before I’m able to get you this book and we both die in the aftermath I’ll buy you a drink.

To ThinkGeek, you’re cooler and smarter than this. Please fix your wishlist functionality.

To everyone else, set up a wishlist on Amazon. It works, and if you link to it from your blog and do nice things people may order from it for you, and there’s nothing nicer than a surprise Amazon box showing up at the door.