Peter's Useful Crap

As I was looking through Business Week’s feature on the 101 best web freebies, I was intrigued by the entry about this free jewelry site, SilverJewerlyClub.com. Basically, the site rotates 4 different pieces of sterling silver jewelry (mostly earrings, pendants, and rings with one size at a time) for sale at a time, with each item being available for 15 minutes. There is a somewhat fixed catalogue (you can do a Google search and find a site that shows the entire SilverJewelryClub.com catalogue), so if you miss an item, it will probably come around again soon. You might spend quite a bit of time watching the items rotate, though…

The draw is that you only pay the “shipping cost”, which is $8.99 USD for orders outside of the United States (yup, that means shipping to Canada is $8.99).

So I took the plunge, ordering a sterling silver cubic zirconia ring, as shown in their product image here:

I paid via PayPal on January 7th, 2008, got an immediate confirmation, then got a shipping confirmation on January 10th. The item arrived on January 23rd in a bubble envelope:

As you can see, they paid 69 cents for first-class international shipping from California. The ring came in a nice little case of sorts:

And here is the bag that was inside the case that contains the ring:

Legitimacy

There’s nothing fishy about SilverJewelryClub.com, unless their overseas manufacturing facility makes you uneasy (see the last part of this post). They delivered as advertised. Just make sure you read the full specifications for each item. They give you full information about each piece of jewelry, so you might want to get your ruler out to understand the size of the earring or whatever it is that you are getting.

The site has been around since 2005, and it has some handy diamond guides.

The person whom I gave the ring to said that it’s a good quality ring but the stone isn’t as shiny as one would have expected. My thoughts are that it looks good…

Why it’s “free”

The official line from SilverJewelryClub.com is that they want to introduce their quality jewelry to the masses so that people will then want to buy more expensive items from Peora.com. You’ll notice that Peora.com has a lot of the same “about” content but it sells better jewelry with a lot more choice (such as which size ring you can get).

While the “attracting people to Peora.com” might be a small reason for the existence of SilverJewelryClub.com, I think there’s much more to the story than that. It’s free because it’s not actually free. You pay almost $9 for something that costs 69 cents plus the cost of the envelope to ship. Whether you structured that as a $6.99 piece of jewelry plus $2.69 shipping, it’s still the same total cost for the buyer!

There’s even an affiliate program that pays people $1 for each “free sale” that they refer (no I didn’t sign up). This makes me believe quite strongly that SilverJewelryClub.com does not exist purely for you to entice you to buy more expensive things at a later time. They’re taking advantage of economies of scale here… word of mouth for free things on the Internet spreads fast and I suppose that there’s a bit of an addictive appeal to the fact that the items rotate with only 4 available at a time.

Lastly, SilverJewelryClub.com eschews the cost of running a retail store. They report that the items on their site would retail for between $50 and $70, which is probably true at some places. Most importantly, the labour to make the jewelry is relatively cheap. If you scroll up to the image of the bag that the ring came in, you’ll see that it is made in Thailand. In fact, their website is quite honest about their overseas manufacturing facilities.

By default, WordPress allows certain tags in comments. Therefore commenters can add links, style text in bold and italics, add tables, and more. This can be quite useful.

Unfortunately for this site, almost no one has actually needed to use tags in comments, while many people have pasted code samples in comments only to see them disappear or be interpreted as HTML by the browser.

While you can write something like “<img>” by typing “&lt;img&gt;”, it’s not very convenient for people to do that.

Also, there doesn’t seem to be a quick option to simply disable HTML in WordPress comments. There is a pretty nice plugin that enables commenters to enclose any code in backticks. Anything in backticks is then nicely output in the comment as code. Depending on the nature of your site, this could be a good solution.

My solution for theblog.ca is simply to treat all comments literally, sort of like a plain text e-mail. Whatever the commenter types will be displayed literally. No “certain tags are allowed” or “do this to code samples”. Simple and a bit stubborn.

This is accomplished by way of a plugin that uses the simple htmlspecialchars PHP function. I’ve pasted the necessary plugin code below:

// This will occur when the comment is posted
function plc_comment_post( $incoming_comment ) {

	// convert everything in a comment to display literally
	$incoming_comment['comment_content'] = htmlspecialchars($incoming_comment['comment_content']);

	// the one exception is single quotes, which cannot be #039; because WordPress marks it as spam
	$incoming_comment['comment_content'] = str_replace( "'", ''', $incoming_comment['comment_content'] );

	return( $incoming_comment );
}

// This will occur before a comment is displayed
function plc_comment_display( $comment_to_display ) {

	// Put the single quotes back in
	$comment_to_display = str_replace( ''', "'", $comment_to_display );

	return $comment_to_display;
}

add_filter( 'preprocess_comment', 'plc_comment_post', '', 1 );
add_filter( 'comment_text', 'plc_comment_display', '', 1 );
add_filter( 'comment_text_rss', 'plc_comment_display', '', 1 );
add_filter( 'comment_excerpt', 'plc_comment_display', '', 1 );
// This stops WordPress from trying to automatically make hyperlinks on text:
remove_filter( 'comment_text', 'make_clickable', 9 );

What this does is it converts single quotes, double quotes, the less than symbol (<), the greater than symbol (>), and ampersands (&) to HTML entities whenever a comment is posted, so that they are displayed as-is when someone views the comment. It then passes the comment off to any subsequent processing that you might have (such as an anti-spam filter) so it should play nicely with other plugins. This also does not affect any subsequent editing by the site administrator, so I can add link tags to a comment in the rare time that a commenter intended to do that.

If you want to implement this plugin quickly, you can download what I call Peter’s Literal Comments. All you have to do is unzip it to your plugins directory, then activate it in the admin interface.

Suppose you are browsing through the file system on your computer. If you then open a new window in the file explorer, you are typically presented with the documents folder. But what if you wanted to open a new window at the directory level that you were previously browsing?

In Windows Explorer, you right-click a folder, then click the Explore item.

There’s no such menu item on Mac’s Finder. Thanks to this site (via Vivien), I discovered that you need to hold the Apple key (for some it is the Command key), then double-click the folder you want to explore. Voilà — a new Finder window at the directory level chosen.

Currently, the CRTC’s (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) National Do Not Call List is planned to be operational on September 2008. At that time, in theory, those who wish to have a few less telemarketers bugging them can add their number to that list.

In the meantime, the Canadian Marketing Association has its own Do Not Contact Service. As it says on the CMA’s website:

The Do Not Contact Service enables individuals to reduce the number of marketing offers they receive by mail, telephone and fax. Consumers register to have their names removed from marketing lists held by members of the Canadian Marketing Association.

With 800 corporate members in the CMA, putting your number on the CMA’s list won’t exactly give you complete respite from telemarketers, but it’s something!

Canadian Marketing Association’s Do Not Contact Service

September 2008 update: Starting on September 30, 2008, you can get on the National Canadian Do Not Call list at www.LNNTE-DNCL.gc.ca or by calling 1-866-580-DNCL (3625). For TTY service, call 1-888-DNCL-TTY (1-888-362-5889).

I write for another blog as well, and wanted to create a combined RSS feed of my posts on that blog and this one. I discovered that the easiest, and quickest way to do this is with Yahoo! Pipes, which describes itself as “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” Browsing through the existing “pipes” that people have made, it does quite a lot of cool and innovative stuff. To me, it’s simply a great service that offers a very intuitive interface that enabled me to combine RSS feeds!

The interface has a bunch of elements:

It looks rather technical, but I was able to very quickly find which elements I needed. These elements can be dragged and dropped into the work area and then connected in an intuitive workflow:

For example, I had a source element that fetched my two RSS feeds. These feeds were are piped into the sort operator and combined so that the feed items are sorted in descending order. Then, the results of that are filtered to show only the posts that I have written (since the other blog is a group blog). Poof, the output is piped out and into a nice RSS feed. I can even “burn” this feed on Feedburner without anybody knowing how easy it all was…