Today, I discovered the greatest subreddit of them all: Hybrid Animals. The idea is simple but the results are stunning.
Thank you, Reddit, THANK YOU!
SmugMug and Squarespace Join Forces!
If you aren’t a photographer, this doesn’t mean much. But if you are, this is huge. These are two of the best services on the web for photographers today. Squarespace is an amazing portfolio service, full content management system and web host but they have lacked integration with a shopping cart, which this could solve. Smugmug has been the best place for photographers to deliver photos to clients for years and offers excellent e-commerce tools. Now that they are integrated, hopefully photographers will get the best of both worlds.
Here is the announcement from Squarespace:
Today, we’re pleased to announce a new partnership with SmugMug – the incredibly popular photo hosting and commerce service for photographers. With our new integration, photographers can easily showcase their best work with images from their SmugMug galleries and direct customers back to their SmugMug site to purchase gifts and prints.
With just a few clicks, you can easily browse and import selected SmugMug photos into a Squarespace gallery. We grab the original image and generate multiple sizes so your pictures look great on any device. Plus, we keep your metadata intact and auto-populate the click-through URLs to your SmugMug lightbox.
To celebrate our partnership, SmugMug is offering 25% off all new accounts for Squarespace customers. Click here and use coupon code SquarespaceNow by March 13th to take advantage of the discount.
And here’s what SmugMug had to say on their blog:
That’s right. Instead of uploading twice, simply browse and import your best images from SmugMug into your Squarespace galleries. They’ll slurp them over and automatically create multiple sizes so that your photos look great across any device.
You can create as many SmugMug galleries on your Squarespace site as you want, and there’s a max of 50 photos per gallery. You can keep each gallery as a standalone page or in gallery blocks within other pages or blog posts.
Best of all, all of your photos’ metadata and SmugMug links will stay intact, and people can click through from your Squarespace galleries to your SmugMug lightbox (and shopping cart!)
Erin in all her glory.
It’s Not the Mail We Need, It’s the Letter Carriers
A few quotes from today’s excellent story in today’s Washington Post.
Carriers and customers develop a strange kind of official intimacy. The country’s hundreds of thousands of uniformed carriers are six-day-a-week visitors from the government (and have been known to report crimes, detect gas leaks and check on the elderly). They know your reading habits, your love for Netflix and your speed-camera problems.
Now he recognizes his customers by address (Kapuscik lives on Glenside Drive, he noted), knows their birthdays, and is careful to put the checks and postcards on top of the stack and bills at the bottom. He once brokered an arrangement between one customer who had a downed tree and another who needed firewood. Then he helped split the logs.
“I don’t want to just deliver the mail and not stop to chat,” Stacy said. “I want to be somebody out here.”
