Hello, Portland
Portland is now up and running. It’s kind of funny to compare WordPress.com and its panel with what MyAd has. There’s a lot of complexity that MyAd just doesn’t offer. There’s a couple of trade-offs made, though, that are worth it: myad is simple but there’s a lot going on under the hood. If you want to upload a 5 MB file from your snazzy new digital SLR, we’ll handle it. Yeah, it’ll be slow to upload for almost anybody (unless you’ve got Verizon fiber at home or a good connection at work). But you won’t have to re-size anything.
I started with bicycles. You wouldn’t believe how many different bikes the site will recognize. And right now, with few posts, it’s not worth talking about. But down the road, if you’re looking for a Madsen or a Centurion or a Batavus, keep myad.com in mind
how to post ads using stored photos
In “Never upload a photo again” I told you that I would explain how you use the photos you’ve uploaded.
How to select photos for ads
Notice that the first photo is selected but that the other photos are not. If these photos were of different views of the same dress, we would want to attach them to this ad and we could do that by clicking on the select button for each photo. Since they’re not, we don’t.
When you use a photo in an ad, it’s removed from the gallery, making it easy to know what you’ve posted and what you haven’t.
In another post, I’ll show you the two different ways you can upload photos from your browser. And in still another post, I’ll show you how to email photos from your cell phone!
MyAd is trying to make posting ads for your business as easy as possible.
Good selling!
Jim
never upload a photo again
What’s the least fun part of posting an ad? Sometimes it’s coming up with the title. Sometimes it’s setting a price that you can live with.
But I think the least fun thing is uploading photos. You have to browse around and find the photo that you’re looking for, then wait for it to upload.
If you’re posting one item, that’s OK. But what if you want to post a lot of stuff?
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could take a boatload of pictures with your digital camera, move them to your computer when you have time and then have them uploaded for you?
You can, and you don’t have to install any extra software!
Find your pictures, select some by clicking on them or all with Ctrl-A and then right-click. You’ll get this:
Send to email recipient
You can see 9 photos there. You could mail more than that if you had them.
Windows will ask you if you want to shrink them or keep the originals. It’s a good idea to shrink them so that you don’t have anything too big for your internet provider’s mail server. We will make copies of your images to fit our standard sizes.
Send pictures via e-mail
OK, but who do you send these pictures to? photos@myad.com
emailing photos in Outlook Express
So what happens after you hit send? Your files are copied into two standard sizes, one for viewing in category, like “Portland Cars For Sale” and another bigger size when somebody looks at your ad. They’re there waiting for you.
How do you use them? Tune in tomorrow and I’ll show you.
Good selling,
Jim
How can I post ads without an invite code?
In “Why MyAd.com uses invite codes” I said that we were using invite codes to limit who could post ads. And that’s true. If you want to post from a yahoo, hotmail or gmail * account and don’t have another email address, you’ll need an invite code.
Post ad asking for invite code
However, there’s a way that you can post without an invite code. If you have a microsoft.com or google.com or pbs.org or stanford.edu email address, you can give that as your email address. We’ll send you a confirmation message and you can then sign up with any email address you want.
That means you can get one email at work or school with the invite and that’s it. We won’t send any more email to that address. Not quality surveys, not newsletters, not anything.
We’re trying to balance having a wide-open system, where anybody can post and we have to devote significant resources to spam-fighting, against having a very tight system where it’s hard to sign up.
We want to allow as many people to sign up as possible. We want to make posting as easy as possible – no need to answer a CAPTCHA**, no need to click on a confirmation email – but we also want ads from real people.
Do we think this will solve all of our problems? Of course not. But we expect that it means that we can spend more time making the system friendly and fast. When people do something we think is wrong, like post to too many areas or to many categories, we can work with them instead of having to write and install programs that restrict reasonable people.
We think it makes a system that’s better.
Good hunting,
Jim
*Those mail systems – and some others – give away accounts to anyone, including me. But also including spammers and scammers. The people running them try very hard to avoid this, using codes that you have to fill out to try and foil automated sign-ups. They’ve worked fairly well but they can’t get too hard to read or people can’t use them.
** CAPTCHA is a way to try to screen out programs by showing an image. Spammers are quite innovative in finding ways of beating them, including using optical character recognition to read them or hiring people in low-wage countries to answer them.
MyAd using that
Radius searches put the “my” in MyAd.com
When you’re looking at MyAd you might not realize the degree to which you can customize the search radius.
Radius demo for search
By default, it’s set to 25 miles. * We’d started at 10 miles but users found that they needed to look further around them so we increased it. If 25 miles is too large or too small, you can click on “preferences” and then pick 5, 10, … on up to 500 miles or the whole US.
We think that this ability to “look around” is great when you’re trying to do some comparison shopping. Is that a fair price for a used bicycle of that type? I’m a fan of the “PistaDex“, where BikeSnobNYC tracks the price of used Bianchi Pistas. As a fixed-gear bicycle rider myself, I find it amusing.**
It’s also a good way for people who travel to another city or cities to establish a range where they’re willing to look. Maybe you travel from Bend to Portland every other month or so. You’re willing to look in Portland and places along the way. Radius search lets you do that without having to switch from Bend to Portland.
Of course, you can look in both places if you want. Unless you’ve changed it, each time you’ll have a radius of 25 miles of the city you’re looking.
Good hunting,
Jim
* Technical detail: we use “centroids”, which are approximately the centers of zip codes. If we could get your address and convert it to latitude and longitude and get the addresses of all the sellers and convert them, then we could be extremely precise. In the meantime, we’ll use centroids as approximations.
** I have to admit that my “fixie” was bought ready-made with brakes front and rear as well as fenders and a chainguard. My customization has been adding a rear rack and a bell. Bike messenger, I’m not.
Why MyAd.com uses invite codes
Initially we used the “anybody can post” approach. And we didn’t have too much trouble with spammers but we had some. And it was growing.
It seemed clear that when MyAd.com took off that we’d see a lot of spam. We could spend a lot of time and money trying to counter it. We could try to get more and more sophisticated about detecting spam. We could stop you from posting your vacation rental in more than one city by putting in duplicate detection.
Instead, we’re going another way. To be able to post on MyAd, you need an invite code. Once you have an invite code, you can invite as many other people as you want to. You can send each of them an invite code.
We certainly don’t think this is going to stop all of the problems that can arise. But it means that you can post your vacation rental in relevant cities in the relevant category and not have it automatically rejected by us.
This means that we’re going to grow only as fast as people talk about us. That’s a good position to be in, we think. We’ve got a neat system that people should talk about.
search results via email coolest thing ever
I’ve been looking to buy a tandem bicycle, ideally with a child stoker kit on the back. The stoker kit makes it possible to move a set of pedals up and down the rear seat post so a child can use the rear seat. More than you wanted to know, right?
What I would like is to get email every time an ad is posted that matches my search for “stoker” in the Portland area. And now with myad.com, I can get that. I just do my search:
Searching for stoker
and get:
no ads for "stoker"
Which is not a big surprise. So, OK. It’s fall and it’s raining here in Portland. I commute by bike as long as it’s not icy but the kids don’t like the rain. It’s not a big deal if I don’t find this for a few days or weeks or even until next spring.
What I don’t want to do though, is have to run this search every day. And with search results via email, I can just put my email in:
Subscribing to search
and click subscribe:
Subscribed to search
OK. Now, I won’t get any messages until there’s a match within 25 miles of Portland for the word “stoker”. Maybe you should get a confirmation email right away but it’s going to be empty – there aren’t any results – and it’s one more thing to delete.
That might not matter if you only do one of these but if you do a lot, well, it’s not fun. Hmmm. If you’ve got a strong opinion about it, please comment.
So what does a successful search result look for in email?
Let’s try subscribing to something like “Toyota Highlander”. Wait a while and here’s our results:
Highlander email search
Notice that you can unsubscribe with one click and unsubscribe from all searches with a different one click.
This is a basic feature but it’s totally neat. If you’ve got a narrow search, you don’t want to have to run it by hand more than once or twice. If it’s a rare item, like a tandem with a stoker kit, you don’t want to have to remember to run the search.
And if it’s a hot item, you want the results via email so you know about them as quickly as possible. Whether it’s sent directly to your cell phone or your inbox, you get to see it seconds after it’s been posted.
Good hunting!
Jim
Display Case – what is it? Why should I care?
Do you have items that you want to show off to potential customers? You put them in your window displays or a display case to make sure people see them.
When you go to almost any website of a local retailer, you’ll see that they don’t display what they have in stock. Not even featured items that they think would bring in customers. This is actually probably a good decision, based on the costs of custom programming and potential security problems with running a system open to the internet. For businesses that are aimed at local customers, the idea of implementing an ecommerce system is way more than they need.
That’s why you might be interested in the Display Case ™ feature of MyAd.com
By posting one line of text onto a page on your website, you are able to show off items in your store that people should know about. You can do this with no security issues – there’s no database or custom programs that you need to run.
Businesses can turn off and on all items that you’ve listed on MyAd.com or you can display only certain ones.
To get started, register on MyAd.com
blog.myad.com moved to wordpress.com
We’ve turned off our local version of WordPress and are now using wordpress.com for our blog. Why?
Reason #1: we want to have a resource that you can check in case there’s a problem with our site. Something that’s not dependent in any way on our own routers, servers, bandwidth, etc. So you can subscribe to our system status feed and just get that info.
Reason #2: we’re tired of wordpress security concerns. We’ve got enough issues without having to worry about getting cracked because there’s an exploit. There are probably things that we can do better here as far as responding but the point is that we don’t want to do that. We want to concentrate on developing our site and communicating with you.
We haven’t been doing such a great job on the communicating with you recently but we’re going to try do better. We look forward to hearing from you.
