Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988
Web design and development for small and large business, e-commerce, b2b, b2c, SAAS, and community websites. User experience design and usability testing.
A possum under your dishwasher at 3am means you aren't getting much sleep
This was the scene last night / early this morning when I went to put the cat out and close the back door. Cat peering under the dishwasher (even for strange Orson, this is strange), and a little possum under said dishwasher.
Hmm. This is not ideal at 3-something in the morning.
We locked Orson in the other room, then tried shooing the scared little guy out, which he would have none of. We tried luring him out with cat food, to the same effect. Finally, after an hour or more of scratching out heads, we just built a barricade that made a corridor to the back door, and went to bed, hoping he'd make a break for it when the coast was clear.
In the morning, there was no sight of him. So he probably left of his own accord. Hopefully when I get home tonight there won't be a possum under my bed.
Posted by espd at 3:16 PM |
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Sunday, September 23, 2007
Ozark Handspun featured in a book
The in-law peeps, Dave and Terri, have been featured in a cool new book for hip knitters: KnitKnit: Profiles + Projects from Knitting's New Wave, along with our buddy Sarah Kohl, who makes ultra-cool handbags out of Ozark Handspun.
I'm still their "webmaster" (man, that term sounds so outdated), making occasional updates, especially to the ever-growing list of stores where you can get the yarn (now in four countries!).
Globalization has made it possible to produce clothing at increasingly lower prices, prices so low that many consumers consider this clothing to be disposable. Some call it "fast fashion," the clothing equivalent of fast food.
Some things I knew, some other I didn't:
Polyester, the most widely used manufactured fiber, is made from petroleum.
The manufacture of polyester and other synthetic fabrics is an energy-intensive process requiring large amounts of crude oil and releasing emissions including volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, and acid gases such as hydrogen chloride, all of which can cause or aggravate respiratory disease.
Cotton, one of the most popular and versatile fibers, accounts for a quarter of all the pesticides used in the United States.
Fierce global competition in the garment industry translates into poor working conditions for many laborers in developing nations.
Some Chinese textile workers make as little as 12–18 cents per hour, according to the U.S. National Labor Committee.
Americans throw away more than 68 pounds of clothing and textiles per person per year, and clothing and other textiles represent about 4% of the municipal solid waste, according to the EPA. And this figure is rapidly growing.
There are rays of hope:
The U.S. government offers tax incentives for citizens who donate household goods to charities such as the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries, which salvage a portion of clothing and textiles that would otherwise go to landfills or incinerators.
Shopping at these kinds of stores is increasing — a 2006 survey conducted by America's Research Group, a consumer trends research firm, found that about 12–15% of Americans shop at consignment or resale stores.
The Council for Textile Recycling estimates that 2.5 billion pounds of post-consumer textile waste is collected for resale, and thus prevented from entering directly into landfills.
The International Standards Organization (ISO) is developing standards for a labeling system to identify garments that meet criteria as environmentally friendly.
While it still only represents 0.03% of worldwide cotton production, the sale of organic cotton fiber grew by an estimated 22.7% in 2004, over the previous year, according to the Organic Trade Association.
Sales of organic cotton women's clothing grew by a healthy 33% in 2004.
In 2004, Wal-Mart, America's largest retailer, began selling organic cotton women's shirts at its Sam's Club stores. Today the company is the world's largest buyer of organic cotton, offering several lines of organic cotton apparel.
Patagonia has been selling fleece clothing made from postconsumer plastic soda bottles since 1993. The company estimates that between 1993 and 2006 it saved 86 million soda bottles from ending up in the landfill.
Posted by espd at 5:43 PM |
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Monday, September 17, 2007
Google's going to the moon
Google is sponsoring a new X Prize challenge — the first commercial lunar landing. Most of the $30 million prize will go to the first private company that can land a robotic rover on the moon and beam back a gigabyte of images and video to Earth.
Can you imagine? It's been over 30 years since we went to the moon, and we haven't been back. Think about it. That was last century. At this point, there are two or three generations of children who have no memory of the first lunar landing taking place during their lifetime. Including me, by the way. I was one month old.
Posted by espd at 12:47 PM |
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Thursday, September 13, 2007
I almost walked pi
I walked home from work a couple nights ago and my calves still ache a bit today. I used the Google Maps Pedometer to measure my route and it turns out it's farther than I'd thought: 3.66 miles one-way.
Posted by espd at 7:35 PM |
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Two upcoming conferences
I'm looking forward to these two conferences coming to San Francisco next month: An Event Apart happens October 4 and 5, and the Voices that Matter Web Design Conference happens October 22–25. I'll be heading to both.
Posted by espd at 3:49 PM |
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Thursday top 5
Flight of the Conchords, "Jenny" This one's for Ynnej since I missed her birthday by a couple days last month. These two Kiwis are hilarious. There are a whole bunch of good vids of them on YouTube.
Family Guy Star Wars A preview of an upcoming hour-long episode in which the cast of "Family Guy" does the entire first Star Wars movie. www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGyGlp8sEHo
For font geeks and/or Nippophiles Shuetsu Sato is a railway employee who makes intricate, creative, hand-made signs and maps out of colored tape. www.pinktentacle.com
Internet People If you recognize more than half of these people, you're spending too much time in front of your computer. Like me. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pPCkhYMQgY
Posted by espd at 3:31 PM |
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Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Why some people hate cops
Because some cops are worth hating.
Brett Darrow, 20, was questioned and repeatedly threatened with false charges by Sgt. James Kuehnlein in St. George, MO. It was all caught on video by Darrow's in-car camera, and he posted the video on the Internet.
I can hardly maintain my composure watching this video. This hysterical asshole is soooo out of line, he needs to seek new employment, a psychiatrist, and a vasectomy.
Posted by espd at 7:10 PM |
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Starting a group on Flickr
I've been researching how various community sites handle their offerings and features for groups, so I decided to make a Flickr group. I'd participated in a couple before, but I'd never made one of my own on Flickr.
It was easy to set up and fairly feature-rich, although I think the discussions feature needs a little work. I did a Flickr search for "Robert Heinlein" and then invited a dozen or so people to join the group and add some of their photos. Within about an hour I had five group members.
Posted by espd at 5:33 PM |
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Thursday, September 06, 2007
How to merge Blogger accounts
I actually have six Blogger blogs, and until today they were spread across two separate Blogger accounts. But I finally tracked down a way to merge accounts. Well, actually it's not merging, it's transferring permissions from one to another, but it accomplishes the same thing.
Until a few months ago this was not possible, according to this helpful post on the Google Groups site. Read post #4 by dancingbrook for the method. It worked like a charm for me, and I was able to move three blogs from one account over, merging them with my primary blogs on my main account.
Posted by espd at 6:35 PM |
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Designing and maintaining email newsletters and marketing campaigns
Updated May 12, 2009: Added Mailer Mailer, AWeber, StreamSend, Spam Meltdown, and Equinux’s Stationery Packs.
Updated January 30, 2009: Added iContact and VerticalResponse to the list.
Updated December 16, 2008: Added Emma to the list, the Premailer service, and a Flickr group.
Several web-based companies have sprung up in the past five or six years to provide small businesses, nonprofits, and individuals with better tools for managing large email lists and collecting statistics on how well one’s email marketing efforts are working (or not working, as the case may be).
I have a long history of managing large email lists, having done so for a number of nonprofits in the past 12 years. I used to manage a sizable list for the Graphic Artists Guild, and a couple of pretty large ones (several thousand email addresses) for Headwaters Forest preservationists and for Bay Area Action and Acterra.
Back then, you had to do all the list management with your email program (I used Eudora, which was pretty good for this sort of thing), or often a server-side program called a Listserv, and there was practically no way to measure success other than counting your “Message delivery failed” bounce messages.
Things have come a long way since then. Now we have online services that take a lot of the headaches out of managing your data, and which provide a lot of extra functionality and usually offer a lot of info on best practices for creating and sending email marketing.
Some advantages of these services:
Far less administrative time required by your staff or volunteers.
Email examples and templates are provided, or you can often upload your own.
How-to articles which offer best practices and insights for content and design.
Automated list management removes duplicate emails, invalid addresses, and more.
Robust statistics track your success: open rates, clicks, and more.
You have to pay for these services, but it’s generally very reasonable compared to the savings your likely to realize in saved time and headaches.
If you’re in the market for this sort of service, here are some you may want to look into:
CampaignMonitor www.CampaignMonitor.com I can recommend Campaign Monitor because I’ve actually used it (here’s the email event invitation I made with it). The others I have looked at a little bit, but haven’t actually used. I’ve received some good emails from others using Emma and VerticalResponse, though.
When it comes to designing and coding for the various email programs, platforms, and browsers people use, it’s even harder to make your email work the same for everyone as it’s to make a web page look the same in every browser.
Among other problems you face, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and all the other services and programs each display emails differently, plus they all have their own bugs and quirks. For example, you can’t attach CSS like you normally would to a web page, you can’t even put it all in the <head> tag; you have to do all your CSS inline.
More email design resources
Premailer is a free web-based service that runs your HTML email through a script to convert your CSS to inline, checks your HTML against email clients, and other helpful stuff.
Email Design is a small but growing Flickr group showcasing screenshots of good email designs.
Spam Meltdown is a showcase of design trends in HTML email design, categorized by color, industry, design technique, etc.
For Apple Mail users, Equinux offers several Stationery Packs of professionally designed templates (works with OS X Leopard only). I’m not sure how compliant they are with the various webmail apps, etc., but the designs are high quality and easy to use.
Iggy Pop's entertaining rider A rider is a document that spells out what a band requires a venue to provide for the artist. There have been some legendary strange requests over the years, but this one's just plain fun to read. www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1004061iggypop1.html
Aaron
Alexis
Anne
Anya
April & Matt
Ari
Bo
Brian
Bryan
Chris
Cousin Carol
Dave & Terri
Dave H.
Debby
Drue
Fibu
Four Waters
Fwegan (aka Ynnej)
Gary
Holly
Hilary
Internet Rockstar
James & Eric
Jason
Jen
Jesse
Jessica
Joey
Kansinee
Karl
Kelly
Laura
Leah
Marc
Martin
Matt
Mike
Morgan
OkayDave
Olya
Paco
Peter
Rick
Rocky
Ryan
Stellah
Tatum 
Trent
Velma
Veronica
Whiskey Media
Yuliya
Yu-Po
