Late to the Party

UPDATE: Now that I think about it, I probably needed to register for an account to see my co-worker’s album because it was a private album. In that case, Webshots is the same as Flickr. So I apologize for that little bit of misinformation. However, I still maintain that there are better ways of implementing private albums without forcing people to sign up to your service. I have a Smugmug account (and I pay the yearly professional-level membership fee) that allows me to share private albums with anyone, and all they have to do is enter a password that I give them. Both Webshots and Flickr would do well to implement a password mechanism for private albums instead of this lame “only let my ‘friends’ (meaning fellow Webshots or Flickr users) see this album” crapola.

And BTW, I’m glad someone from Webshots (the PR dept, not tech support, BTW) stopped by to comment that they’re looking into the problem I described. I appreciate it, even though I virtually guaranteed that I won’t get the blasted newsletters anymore because I changed the e-mail address associated with my account. I still think it’s ridiculous that I (or anyone who has customer support issues with any company that makes it difficult to find their tech support info) had to resort to airing out my issue in a public forum just to see some action result from it (or warn other people).

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GRRRR.  I absolutely hate websites that have these unsubscribe pages that DO NOT work.  I signed up for a free Webshots account just to look at a co-worker’s album quite a few months ago, and haven’t revisited the site since, except to futilely unsubscribe from their spam.  None of the newsletters are checked in my account, yet I still get the stupid e-mails.  The unsubscribe link in their spam doesn’t work, either.

So I decided to hit up their site to find a feedback or “contact us” link, and get shuttled to their “tech support” page that has FAQ and this ever-so-helpful link:

Yeah, great.  I tried to see if I could just delete my stupid account, and found this answer:

How do I cancel my free membership?
We cannot delete member names once they are created, but you can remove Webshots from your computer, unsubscribe from our mailing lists and remove your personal information from your account.

To uninstall Webshots:

1. Click Start > Settings > Control Panel.
2. Double click Add or Remove Programs.
3. Select Webshots Desktop.
4. Click Change/Remove.

If you have uploaded photos to the Community section of Webshots, delete them by going to the My shots tab. Click an album title then choose the Delete Album link. Repeat for each album you’ve created.

To unsubscribe from Webshots Weekly, click the My Account link in the upper right hand corner (If you can not find My Account, you’ll need to sign in by clicking on the sign in link.). Uncheck the box next to Send me ‘Webshots Weekly’ emails. Personal information may also be modified.

To sign out of Webshots, click on the sign out link at the top of the page.

Bullcrap.

So basically, since their unsubscribe mechanism doesn’t work, I have to go to my account, which apparently will exist forever, and blank out all my info to approximate getting rid of the account.  Yeah, thanks!  Why would a company do this?  I would think that companies like this, who try to steer people away from free accounts, would do some kind of regular purging, like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail do, where if you don’t log into your account in a couple months or so, it gets deleted.  I’d think they’d want to continually free up space taken up by “delinquent” accounts.

I did find a feedback form and typed this:

I have tried many times to unsubscribe from your newsletter from both the unsubscribe link in the e-mail, as well as going to the My Account page on Webshots.com.  None of the newsletters are marked as subscribed, yet I still am receiving the e-mails.  Since I can’t even delete my free account, I have no choice but to send feedback via this form and hope that someone actually reads these.

Unsubscribe me immediately.

I highly doubt this will work, so I’m just going to change my e-mail address to one from Mailinator, and hope that this shakes them off my Gmail account.  And if it doesn’t, I’m just going to report them as spam to Gmail.

A. I HATE websites that force you to sign up with them just to see photo albums, or other content.  I understand that they have to figure out a way to profit from their venture, but this is NOT the way to do it.

B. I HATE websites that don’t even have a working unsubscribe form for their spam newsletters.

C. You know it’s a bad sign when the website has buried their contact information or tech support page.

No offense to Webshots users, because I know there are a lot of people who enjoy the service (and take very nice pictures), but I think Webshots, the company, absolutely SUCKS.  I can’t believe they are a C|Net company, because the tech news part of C|Net is pretty good.  One of their main netcasts, Buzz Out Loud, is one of my favorite netcasts.  But Webshots is junk.

If you want a free site to post your pictures on, I would recommend Tabblo.  They have a really nice set up, with no limits on bandwidth or storage (that I know of), pretty nice iPhoto-looking album templates, and the ability to share your albums without forcing people to sign up for a Tabblo account.  AND you can download full-resolution pictures if the settings allow it.  No downsizing pictures and locking away the originals.

Of course, there’s always Flickr, where you can share public albums, also without forcing people to sign up for a Flickr account.  If you make the album private, your friends and family will have to sign up with Flickr.  And there are limits to the free accounts.

Anyway, there are many other sites to share pictures from; I highly recommend staying away from Webshots, unless they make some major changes to their tech support and account management.

Ever since I got my T-Mobile MDA, I got back into the habit of reading e-books. I used to do it all the time when I carried around PDAs regularly, and it was nice to start again. I loaded eReader and redownloaded some of the e-books that I bought that I hadn’t finished reading. I get the eReader e-mail newsletter to keep up on new releases and get the discount codes, but I haven’t bought that many e-books in a while. And it’s weird, because often I’ll see a whole slew of romance novels being pimped in the newsletter…is that the main demographic of e-book readers (as in people, not devices *smirk*)?? I would think that there’d be way more sci-fi and techie kinds of books, not to be stereotypical of PDA/e-book users. I just can’t see most soccer moms toting a little PDA reading romance novels while they’re running errands or whatever! Okay, I’ll stop now, before the flames really come in.

I do wish that e-book selections were better, though. And I really wish the Harry Potter books were available as legal e-books! I admit, I have non-legal copies of the HP books that I’ve been re-reading the last few days (I wanted to refresh my memory on the storylines, since I listen to Pottercast), but I don’t feel bad about it because as far as I’m concerned, I have the dead tree versions of all the books (most in hardback form), I’ve bought the books for other people, and I’ve put lots of money into watching all the movies in the theatre and on DVD. It’s annoying that I can’t read it on my PDA because some lame publishing company doesn’t have the foresight to recognize a viable market. So I feel like the e-book versions I have fall within fair use, even though I’m relatively sure I don’t have a legal leg to stand on… *sigh* I would dump my non-legal copies in a second if eReader or anyone else would offer the HP e-books.

While we’re on the subject of e-books, I have a few things to say about the Sony Reader. I did get to see it in person finally, and I was pretty impressed by it. For a while I was really itching to buy one, but I was lurking around the Mobileread forums for both the Sony Reader and Iliad iRex (IIRC?) reader (which was more interesting with the bigger screen with touch capabilities and higher resolution) and reading people’s experiences sort of cooled me on the idea of buying the Reader (that and I had just bought my MDA, which was the same price, and could be more than an e-book reader).

I liked the hardware and the technology, despite some wonkiness in the button/menu layout and navigation. My main issue for not pushing to buy the Reader is that I’m very wary of the Sony Connect e-book store. The proprietary format that Sony is using concerns me. Sure, I could probably convert my own PDFs for reading on the Reader, but even that is kind of touch and go because of inconsistencies with the software conversion tool. Since Sony’s notorious for using closed formats, I’m worried that if the Reader doesn’t do well enough, the Connect store will languish, and I’ll have e-books that are locked to a discontinued Reader device. At least with books on eReader.com, they’re viewable on my Tablet PC and PDA, and they seem established enough that I’m not as worried (though it’s possible) that they’ll close up shop and leave me with useless files. I wish the books on Connect were PDFs or something more universal. Hopefully they thrive so that their proprietary format isn’t as limiting (ha).

Honestly, as cliche as this will sound, if Apple made an e-book reader, it would propel the e-book market. So hurry up and do it, Apple! Maybe then I’ll be able to have legal e-books of Harry Potter! *smirk* Oh, and while you’re at it, make a Tablet, too.

I love Lifehacker.  It is such a cool site with a lot of cool tips and links to interesting software and websites.  The problem with it is that it can be so engrossing to follow the links or stories that they post that it can be a major time sink.  As a result, I do not regularly visit the site, lest I surf the day away.  Nevertheless, I check in on the site once in a while to keep up with it, and I stumbled upon a nice list of Pocket PC freeware.  There’s a list of 11 programs as a teaser for the blog post author’s book of 101 “killer apps” for the Pocket PC.  A few more good programs are listed in the comment thread.

I’ll try to post more about the programs that I am currently using on my T-Mobile MDA, because most of them are freeware, but right now I’ll just point you to Lifehacker’s post.  If you have some PPC app suggestions, free or not, please post a comment.  I’m always on the lookout for some new programs to try.

Wait, what?  James isn’t president…too bad; maybe we’d have way more awesome Asian gadgets imported to the US if he were.   Nope, he’s just giving a quick update for us on how the site is doing, and it’s doing quite well!  3 million visitors to date…  That’s amazing!  4000 articles, plus 10 million different netcast shows (I’m kidding, there are “just” 3 — Mobile Tech Roundup, On the Run With Tablet PCs, and the less-regularly-updated JKOntheRun Audio Edition) makes James and Kevin busy guys. I don’t know how they do it!

Keep up the great work guys, and here’s to millions more visitors!

Pffff. If you visit my blog and notice missing pictures, please post something in the comment thread for that entry. Sometimes when I post from Windows Live Writer, the pictures don’t display properly. I try to tweak the HTML code if I notice a problem, and sometimes it fixes the problem. The weird thing is that I can view the blog post just fine from my computer, but if I try another computer, it still has missing pictures. And if I just refresh the page (on my computer or others), sometimes just doing that will fix the problem, other times it won’t.

I really don’t like posting via WordPress.com’s web interface (which I’m doing right now), and I prefer to use Windows Live Writer because of its ink blogging capabilities. I realize that Windows Live Writer has some funky HTML output, but I feel like WordPress should be flexible enough to take the input from WLW, since other blogs do fine with it. *sigh* I know there are other offline editors out there, but they don’t really work for me, for one reason or another. And none of the others have an ink blogging capability, which is important to me, even though it’s been quite a while since I’ve ink blogged.

Anyway, just venting. I’m fairly sure that WordPress won’t fix this, judging from the replies on their support forums regarding Windows Live Writer, so I’m just going to have to deal with it. It’s a shame, since I think WordPress is a lot nicer than most of the other free blogging services out there. I’d happily pay a subscription fee (within reason) if WordPress would just fix their finicky HTML rendering. I’d consider hosting my own WordPress blog, but I don’t think that would fix the problem, since it would still be a WordPress blog…or would it?