Archive for In My Mind

As a change of pace from my last grumpy post…

I’m going to give a happy shoutout to the folks over at Carbonmade.com!

I recently came across the free (you can upgrade and pay for more space and more features) and advertisement-free online portfolio website called Carbonmade at Carbonmade.com and decided to give the site and its portfolio application a test drive on a basic free account…

and what a test drive it’s been so far!

Just so everyone knows what’s going on at Carbonmade:

Carbonmade offers two levels of accounts – the Meh and the Whoo.

The Meh account is the basic free account that everyone signs up with and with it comes an allotment of 5 Projects (think of this as 5 folders/major categories that you can label however you want), and 35 images. You can also link your portfolio to a Google Analytics account to track how your portfolio is doing in terms of views and the like.

If you upgrade to their paid Whoo account, the numbers and features get bumped up to: 50 Projects, 500 images, and 10 videos. In addition, you can get your portfolio linked to your own domain name (you have to own the domain name yourself already, obviously) and you get priority customer support.

Now.

For myself, I already host the majority of my own online portfolio on my own domain name because I do front-end web development and web design stuff and it’s a good way to show off my skills and so I decided (so far) to stick with the Meh account and use it to showcase my absolute favorite and most recent pieces of work.

If you visit http://graffitimaster.carbonmade.com, you’ll see that I used my Projects to divvy up my work samples into 4 categories (yes, this means I have 1 Project left to use) and if you click on them you’ll see that each category houses a number of screenshots of related work samples.

Additionally, you might notice that when/if you try and right click on the images/screenshots in question, it doesn’t pull up the portfolio image.

Pretty nifty, huh?

Yeah, I thought so, too.

A couple of major reasons I’m digging Carbonmade:

• Nice, clean, and simple layout options for the portfolios
• Easy to use interface for portfolio, Project, and image arranging; image uploading; tagging/labeling; editing the About Me page; and editing pretty much anything else that can be edited
• The display method for the portfolio images
• Great customer/user support!

After all of my recent grumblings about customer support, experiencing a polite, super quick and to-the-point answer from the Carbonmade team – thanks again, Spencer! – is really what helped to clinch my positive opinion for both the Carbonmade application and website AND the people behind the project.

Carbonmade’s mission is to give people who need online portfolios a no-muss and no-fuss way to display samples of their work.

With their easy-to-use interface, clean and sleek portfolio layouts, neat method of displaying portfolio contents, tiered account levels to suit both the light and heavier users, and very satisfactory customer/user support, I think they have more than delivered.

For me, at least, some of the features I ran into while on my Carbonmade adventure came as a very wonderful surprise.

Maybe for you, they will, too.

Cheers to you, Carbonmade!

Thanks for making my day!

~ EMG /

Maybe it’s just my own bad luck…

But an awful lot of support forums nowadays seem to be going the way of the dogs with people acting like they’re rabid – foaming at the mouth, biting at everyone that gets near them (warranted, unwarranted, and otherwise) and being altogether completely unpleasant to be around.

Just what the HELL is going on here?

Is July the month for Bad Support or something?

Everyone’s having a bad hair day?

Woke up on the wrong side of the bed?

Broke one hundred mirrors?

Broke up with significant others?

Crossed an army of black cats?

Good fucking GRIEF, people.

CHILL. OUT!

If you can’t say something at least remotely polite to a completely legitimate question, then don’t say anything at all!

~ EMG

The honeymoon is over…

when support communities for products and services – both paid and not-for-profit – don’t provide adequate support.

End of sentence.

It is even worse if the customer/client/user support provided comes with a poor attitude and the worst part comes when the support makes the customer/client/user feel looked down upon and belittled.

THAT is not just an end to a honeymoon, but it is an alienation and divorce of the user from the product or service or even company.

In other words, it is a death sentence for the company whom the user has distanced and divorced themselves from.

How far can one user go in toppling the reputation of an otherwise viable product/service/company?

Pretty dang far.

In the old days, if someone got stiffed by someone else, you could bet that word would eventually get around via gossip that the person who did the stiffing == not that great of a person to deal with.

For example:

An old friend of mine from way back when got one-upped by a new mechanic in town who thought he could pull a few tricks on someone he thought to be an unsuspecting customer.

Said friend of mine is a mechanic himself, so it was a no-go, but the new mechanic didn’t know and proceeded to try to convince my friend that the repairs would cost three times more than they normally would at any other location for the next several towns over and that in addition to the repairs already warranted, the brakes needed fixing and the tires needed aligning.

What did my friend do?

He proceeded to tell all of his friends via word of mouth (including me) that the new mechanic in town was looking to make a quick buck off of unsuspecting people.

What happened to the new mechanic?

He hardly got any business and within a few months, closed up shop.

That was a long time ago and that was only through word-of-mouth.

Now in the cyber age, there are such things as blogs and online journals and Yelp.com and a load of other places where someone like my friend could do a one-click publishing of their bad experience and have it available for all to see on the world wide web.

So let’s apply a similar scenario to a fictitious company called Company ABC who puts out Service 123.

Let’s say that for this Service 123, Company ABC provides lousy support and not only that, makes their clients/customers/userbase feel awful about the whole experience to boot.

Let’s also say that, like my friend, these clients/users have a large online and offline network of friends whom they frequently talk to and blog with and about, AND, much worse, they’re huge fans of consumer review-ish websites and aren’t afraid of posting their experiences – good and bad for all to see.

Can you imagine the extent of damage someone like that could do, especially if whatever product, service, or company they are feeling wronged by is still in its fledgling or yearling phase and still relies on the userbase/fanbase to really grow?

I repeat what I said earlier: Pretty dang far.

So to all you people out there who think either you, your product, your service, or your company is ‘all that’ and is ‘hot stuff’ and that it gives you the right to act like a complete jackass to your userbase and clientbase, THINK AGAIN and FAST.

Just because your user asked what seems to be a ’stupid/newbie question’ (your words, not mine) doesn’t mean that the user, is in fact, STUPID.

It will be just your luck that the user is like my friend, the mechanic, and it will also be your luck that they get pissed off enough about your attitude problem to yell about it off the rooftops of the world wide web where everyone can hear.

And when your high and mightiness crumbles?

I will only be able to point to this post and say, “I told you so.”

~ EMG

If there is one thing I usually end up disliking about communities of ANY sort…

it is the prevailing attitudes of a lot of the ‘veteran’ community members.

In other words, some people’s attitudes simply SUCK.

Yes, you heard me right: “Your attitude SUCKS!”

No, seriously, some people really need to take a chill pill and realize that their ‘You should have followed directions’ and ‘This community isn’t about handholding’ and ‘This is all I’ll tell you, now beat it’ attitudes are detrimental to the very community and its projects, causes, and services it is representative of.

Without saying which community this occurred/occurs in, I WILL say that after watching new users being snapped at for not following directions THAT WERE NEVER STATED IN THE FIRST PLACE and for posting in a forum that specifically deals with problematic installations, my impression of that community as a whole has been soured.

Dangit, people.

We were all learning at SOME point or another.

Just because YOU know everything doesn’t mean everyone else does, too.

It also doesn’t mean that people should grovel at your feet for help and feel pleased when you decide that their question is worthy enough to be answered with an attitude that literally says, “I have better things to do than answer your stupid question, but I’ll pretend to be a better person and answer the question anyways.”

It’s no wonder that some of these communities end up having some of the most disenchanted userbases.

If the lack of comprehensive support isn’t a turn-off on its own, then the attitude that comes with the support sure will be.

Thank goodness I seldom need support myself anymore.

~ EMG

In some ways, Emotiomental Graffiti doesn’t look like much.

To be sure, it really isn’t all that complicated of a website compared to a lot of larger, more media-heavy, and more complex sites.

Running off of the (absolutely kick ASS) WordPress application (version 2.8), Emotiomental Graffiti is, for the most part, a smorgasbord of valid XHTML Strict coding (my work), WP-specific PHP hooks (their work; I just hitched it all together), and a crapload of CSS (my work).

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