#i know...not vintage...just for the algorithm lol

[fruitstickerr]

hello kitty letter set and stickers (2001)

[citylawns]

what are those websites you recommended? sorry if you already answered this but i cant find it - also! do you know the name of the docs you posted? i love the stitch detailing on them

The Docs are the Church/Monkey Boots! There will be loads secondhand, don't pay full price for them. Take it from someone who worked for that company for 4 years lol. They're my fave style of docs I wish I had taken a lifetime supply when I was there.

eBay is the best secondhand website! I use it for so many things it's really worth it once you figure out how the filtering and search system works. I love it because you get high quality for cheap and it feels like a treasure hunt :')

the next one I use is depop - it's great for curated secondhand and vintage. I look for shops that sell styles I like rather than using the search function, when you 'like' items the algorithm shows you more of that kind of clothing and there's a 'suggested for you' page that works really well. it's more expensive sometimes but it's worth it imo because you're paying for people to curate selections for you which is the labour you would do by hunting yourself, just depends on whether you enjoy that or not!

another great one is vestiare collective. some people have issues with it because they have apparently purchased fakes even though the platform has an authentication system but I'm not the kind of person who buys high resale value designer so I'm never worried about that lol. you can set up saved searches for wishlist items like 'Ann Demeulemeester Boots (filtered by size, country it ships from, colour, etc)' and then every time there's new items added you can scroll through. It works best for me when I'm looking to buy from a specific designer and get inspired rather than searching for a specific item. Here are the brands I love searching for on there:

one I would use if I lived in the USA is the real real! this is the goat. insane clothes for dirt fucking cheap but only if you live in the US because shipping and customs to the UK is prohibitively expensive, like over £100 so it's not worth it for me to buy an £18 designer dress. although I've been considering it recently for an item I'm really in love with.

the other ones I browse through but haven't purchased from yet are vinted and thred up. the search function on vinted was a little annoying for me to use but its good once you figure out how to filter out all the SHEIN and H&M and fast fashion. it's another one that's good to search by brand/designer but people can be really lazy on there and size and list things incorrectly, rip labels off fast fashion items and market them as "x style or x inspired" to put them in the mix of results when you search for a specific designer.

my personal tip is when you're out shopping and see something you like, make a note of the brand/designer. do this on depop too when browsing through shops that sell styles you like, then take that designer/brand and search for it on the other platforms. for example I found one of my favourite brands Costume National that way, so I always search for them on ebay, vestiare, etc

btw if you want a link to any of the items you see here just let me know bc I'm not gonna purchase any of the stuff I have shown

[moondirti]

pleasee how do you get your pinterest to be so beautiful like what do you search for to get the most visually delicious pins for your boards

they're absolutely stunning

thank u so much darl! i spend an egregious amount of time on pinterest, so here are some things i picked up –

aesthetics have subsets. i usually get as niche and specific as possible when creating my boards, otherwise you’ll end up with a less-than-cohesive colour palette/subject matter. for example, if you’re looking into cottagecore, consider the different variations of it. fairy, gothic, witchy, country, etc…

on that note, there are a standard set of tags you can apply to any aesthetic that’s bound to get you the results you’re looking for. adding vintage, funky, soft, cute, or other adjectives in the search bar will help you narrow down.

but to answer your main question, i don’t use specific keywords (mostly because i dont know what im searching for half the time). it usually starts off by finding a picture i really, really like on my home feed which doesn’t fit in with my pre-existing boards. from there, i add it into a secret, nameless board and scroll through the ‘more to explore’ section below that pin. usually the vibes are a close match, and i keep on adding until pinterest’s algorithm has enough to recommend me other pins like it! i’m usually very picky while sifting through them though, which might explain why you feel my results are more curated. they’re not! im just a design student with way too much time on my hands lol

naming comes last. once i have a good idea of what the vibe is, i’ll come up with something so hyper specific you’ll wonder what the hell it even means. it’s my favourite part and usually adds an extra ‘yum’ element, if that makes sense. by making it decipherable only to you, you’re adding your own touch on a board that’s otherwise impersonal

i hope this helped? there isn’t rly a secret, just a tedious and picky process :) if you have a specific board you like, you’re always welcome to just pull pins from it until you see it manifest on your home feed <3

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, May 2019

Welcome to my latest summary of recent news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & ecommerce! This covers articles I came across from May 3 to May 30, although some may be older than that. 

I am out of town June 10-16, so I cannot predict when the next edition will come out, but I will do my best to make it before the June trip. I’ve recently narrowed my reading list so that I can get through it more quickly and post these more often. If you have any suggestions or comments, please let me know! 

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

If you had your entire promoted listing budget eaten up by clicks on an item with “shoe” in the searchable keywords, contact Etsy to make sure you will be refunded. 

Etsy was accidentally suspending some shops for not using Etsy Payments, but they are in ineligible countries. Some but not all drop ship or use fulfillment in countries with Etsy Payments, but that doesn’t appear to explain all the errors. 

Mailchimp launches a new marketing platform that integrates multiple marketing needs, not just emails. Pricing will stay the same for existing customers for the time being. 

On the same topic, here is a study of various email services, and their different deliver-ability rates. 

Etsy is being sued after a child dies, strangled by an amber necklace bought on Etsy. [video & article] This is getting a fair amount of media attention. Not covered in many stories is the fact that the daycare employees didn’t call 911 at first, and the day home had more infants that day than they were licensed for.  

Better media attention: disappointed in the long delay for the introduction of the Harriet Tubman $20 bill in the US, an Etsy seller designed a stamp buyers can use to cover up Jackson’s face with Tubman’s. “Harriet Tubman” is a trending search on Etsy frequently since these articles, so this media coverage is really bringing traffic to the site.

Amazon is now using packing machines in a few of its warehouses that replace 12 workers each. They have other warehouse automation, too, & just started work on their hub at the Cincinnati airport. If you need any more evidence that diversification is the key to successful businesses, remember that they make the biggest chunk of their profit on their cloud services. 

ETSY NEWS 

This year, Etsy’s Maker Cities program (US only) has joined up with Mastercard for their grants. Applications are due July 3, and there is a webinar on June 3 with more info and instructions. [links in article]

They’s also extended their Design Awards submission deadline to June 4. Check out their FAQ if you have any questions.  

Etsy released a summer update to their spring/summer trends guide, with some useful search data. Clothing shoppers are interested in vintage styles, “with Etsy searches for “70s” and “90s” up 26% and 7% year over year.” I summarized the earlier report here.

In case you missed it, Etsy released their first quarter financial report for 2019, & I summarized it in the Etsy forum. 

In related news, Etsy ranks 3rd in USA Today's list of the top 20 fastest growing retailers in the world, even ahead of Amazon.

Some businesses are competing based on delivery speed, but Etsy is able to do well with much slower shipping. (That’s a nice feature in an article they didn’t write; not all good promotion is paid.)

I can’t remember if I posted this interview with Etsy chief financial officer Rachel Glaser before, so here it is again. [audio file/podcast and short text excerpt. Please note I have contacted Etsy about the photos & search comment, but they have not yet replied, other than with the usual links to Etsy’s search guide.] 

Short piece on Etsy’s approach to diversity. Spoiler alert - they like it, and the article links to other materials demonstrating why this is the best approach for businesses.  

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

If you want to get your website or blog material ranking faster, Moz has some tips for you. Note that the first part in particular contains advanced-level technical tips, but most of the rest is easier to grasp for non-techies. It’s worth a skim! 

But don’t break Wikipedia rules to get your images on top - North Face got caught doing that, & had to apologize. But “[f]rom Leo Burnett Tailor Made's original statement, it seems the agency was anticipating such a reaction to the North Face effort all along. In stunts like these, the ensuing controversy and attention around it can be part of the overall campaign goal and strategy.”

Once your website starts getting Google traffic, it is not unusual for growth to start to slow or even stop completely, but there are things you can do to avoid that.

Despite many people insisting that longer blog posts are necessary for good Google ranking, there is no ideal length for a blog post. 

Here’s a good list of free SEO tools; note that some are paid tools that have a limited free version. 

Links on other high-quality websites still matter to Google. (Most of us won’t be able to do the link-building that this test did, but the test demonstrates how much the links are worth. So if you aren’t ranking, realize that other people linking to your page is probably a big factor.) Some of your pages might fit perfectly on a resource page/site, if they answer a question or uniquely fill a need. You can find link opportunities on Twitter through following certain hashtags and engaging with the users. 

Google search results now include podcasts. “This feature doesn’t only search for the title or meta data of the podcasts but also can search for the audio – as Google transcribes them — directly within the podcast show itself.”

As of July 1, Google will use the mobile version of all new websites for their index, so make sure that you have a good mobile set up on any new websites (or old ones, for that matter, since most web traffic is mobile these days). 

There was a possible Google search update around May 9, then May 22, and now maybe May 29th. Google updates its algorithm a lot, if you hadn’t already noticed.  "To give you a sense of the scale of the changes that Google considers, in 2010 we conducted 13,311 precision evaluations to see whether proposed algorithm changes improved the quality of its search results, 8,157 side-by-side experiments where it presented two sets of search results to a panel of human testers and had the evaluators rank which set of results was better, and 2,800 click evaluations to see how a small sample of real-life Google users responded to the change.” (and some people think Etsy tests a lot LOL)

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails) 

Have popular content on one platform/site? You can repurpose it to use elsewhere, for maximum reach. It’s less work than coming up with brand new ideas all of the time! 

Micro-influencers may work best for most businesses, because they can speak directly to your target market. 

There are proven ways to get more social media followers; it’s not just luck. 

Up-to-date infographic on the ideal sizes for social media images, by platform. 

Facebook announced several upcoming plans at their annual developer conference, including a desktop redesign. Facebook has also changed the video algorithm to favour posts that people watch for longer, and to disfavour posts that are just repurposing old video. 

Tweetdeck is rolling out more updates, including emojis and the ability to set up polls within the app. I use it, & I like it - I wish they had a phone app! 

If you are using LinkedIn, you may be missing some great tricks to get more attention. 

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS) 

Here’s how you can get better results out of Microsoft ads (formerly Bing ads) 

There was a bug in Google ads stats for April 30 & May 1st; they are working on fixing it. 

Google advertising can be very confusing, so here as some tips on mistakes you should avoid. [video with transcript] They also recently announced some upcoming changes.

Etsy shops can only buy their own Google Shopping ads through Etsy’s program, or you can let Etsy buy them for your shop, but if you want to advertise your website, here is a great starter guide.

Chrome is giving you more control over cookies so that you can avoid more targeted ads. Some point out this is not necessarily as user-friendly as it sounds - it means Google can stop other companies from tracking their ad performance while Google has all those records through Chrome & other tools.  

Facebook is also giving users more control over tracking for ads, & advertisers are not happy. 

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING 

You are going to be surprised that Russian search engine Yandex has a really good Webmaster tools package.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS 

Some people are comparing Walmart’s new online wedding shop to Etsy, "with tons of personalized wedding gifts to buy on a budget.”

The coverage of Amazon’s big announcement about one-day shipping with Prime (in the US) mostly missed the fact that Amazon can already deliver to 72% of the US population in one day. 

Amazon employees told some third-party sellers that religious items were banned from the site - but it wasn’t true. 

Big Commerce now has a plug-in for Wordpress blogs. 

As promised, Zibbet has added Etsy to its integrations, which allows you to list on Zibbet and it will automatically be added to Etsy as well. This is only going to be useful once they add other platforms (since Zibbet has no traffic), so shop around if you are interested in this sort of tool, as other companies are doing the same things. Indiemade websites completely integrate with Etsy, for example, and they have more website tools. 

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE 

With increased discussion of free shipping on Etsy recently, this is a good time to review some of the more recent studies & surveys on the topic.  One US report from January shows that buyer expectations in this area continue to increase. Shipping cost is a big factor in purchase decisions, & shipping costs are a common reason for cart abandonment. There are a variety of ways to calculate how to offer free shipping without losing money. (Thank you to Rebecca for the last link!)

If you want more shares on social media, this study on the top 5 reasons people share things online will be useful. But Americans are now more engaged by mobile games than social media, which has implications for app development and advertising. 

Googly eyes make people donate more.

Smaller online businesses tend to make very specific types of customer service mistakes that harm your ability to compete. Although there isn’t always much you can do about the fact that “37% of customers expect a response within an hour“.

Can everyone read and understand your web page? Easy-to-understand English is an important aspect of accessibility. 

Help Scout produces some fabulous material on customer service; here is a great article on value propositions, with examples, and another on how to collect customer feedback, including analyzing your stats package to see where customers are having trouble with your site. 

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour)

Trend alert: more professional women switching purses for backpacks. 

You can now control how long Google retains data on you. 

You can also join the class action against major US telecom companies that sold your location data. 

Another example of a company getting people to post photos so it can develop facial recognition technology. 

Some businesses are offering products & services based on your DNA & other biological markers. 

Most people worldwide over the age of 15 have a cell phone, although not all are regular users. 

If you are concerned about internet privacy, & hate tracking, the browser Brave may be worth a look. (I haven’t tried it yet, but it comes well-recommended from various tech people I respect.)

Burger King has trolled McDonald's in ads & social media posts for years, & it can be pretty funny. “When McDonald’s abruptly and surprisingly lost its trademark on “Big Mac” in the EU earlier this year, Burger King couldn’t help but rub some salt in the wound. BK’s Swedish operations decided to celebrate for a day by offering a menu of “Not Big Macs” such as “The Like a Big Mac, But Actually Big” and “The Big Mac-ish But Flame-Grilled of Course.”

[terrierbyteit]

Evening again got on with more of the bathroom just to let you know I hate silicone it did not go to plan lol all sorted tho. Right before I continue here is your important reminder that its tonight the clocks go back an hour as winter in the uk looms here come those darker nights. So D.Y.K what happened on 27th October??. . Where to start tonight? Umm okay right October 27th 1980 Saw The First Major Network Crash, the Four-Hour Collapse of the ARPANET Occurred, The ARPANET, predecessor of the modern Internet, was set up by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Initially it had linked four sites in California and Utah, and later was expanded to cover research centers across the country. . The network failure resulted from a redundant single-error detecting code that was used for transmission but not storage, and a garbage-collection algorithm for removing old messages that was not resistant to the simultaneous existence of one message with several different time stamps. The combination of the events took the network down for four hours. . Our second piece now from 1999 Dell PC Sales Were #1, Dataquest, a company that monitors PC sales, has shown a trend that Dell had maintained a 5% lead over Apple for 2 consecutive quarters. Therefore, Dell had become #1 in computer sales for 1999. Of course, a recent report mentioned that Apple could now buy Dell if it so inclined. . That's all for tonight I'm afraid folks but a massive thanks for reading have a great evening Don't forget your clocks. . . . #TerrierByteIT #Wifeidge #computerhistory #computer #technology #history #computerscience #tech #computerhistorymuseum #computers #retro #vintage #retrotech #trivia #oldtechnology #techhistory #technologyhistory #computinghistory #oldcomputer #oldschool #informationtechnology #thisdayinhistory #internethistory #historyoftechnology #retrocomputer #oldtech #museum #vintagecomputer https://www.instagram.com/p/Bpc_Z5Llul2/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1ce8y7suehj8c

[my-never-ending-nightmare]

05/27/2021 (II)

In other news…

…and this was supposed to be good news…

The other week I was browsing YouTube and noticed I had a shit ton of notifications -  I usually just ignore them but this day I decided to go through them for whatever reason. Turns out that I had a ton of viewer engagement on one of my videos from two years ago. Last I had checked it was at like 1,500 views, but that day it was up to 21,000. 251 likes vs 2 dislikes. Holy shit, I thought, the YT algorithm randomly decided to choose me. What a blessing lol. So I checked my other content, and of the 40 or so videos I had uploaded, 4 of those were at over 5,000+ views with an equally positive like to dislike ratio. According to my channels stats, 17,000 views were from the previous week alone. And I had gained 150 subscribers in the same amount of time.

This was incredibly happy news for me. I had never really imagined any of my videos getting that kind of attention as I had only uploaded sporadically over the course of two or three years as a hobby of sorts. My content was mostly just me playing various video games, with a couple videos of me firing vintage firearms. But seeing my audience grow in such a short time really encouraged me to pick up that hobby again. Not only do I enjoy playing video games, but I found editing and creating content for YouTube to be very relaxing and enjoyable.

So I uploaded two more videos in the following days – and both received 1,000+ views within three days. Incredible, I thought. I might actually have a chance at growing this channel to something respectable. I was under no delusion of becoming the next big YouTuber or anything, but I thought I could easily get a couple thousand subscribers and a steady audience. I started feeling very creative again, and was brainstorming ideas for future videos.

But, paradoxically, I had doubts in the back of my mind. Do people really like these videos, I thought. All the self-doubt and lack of confidence began to kick in, but I was doing a pretty good job at keeping it at bay. It’s strange, though, because the thought that I should just delete these popular videos or even my entire channel kept creeping into the back of my mind. So much so that I made notes about it on my phone just two nights ago because it was keeping me up at night.

I wrote about how this has happened once before, years ago, when the very first video I ever uploaded to YouTube managed to get 32,000+ views with a very positive reception in the comments and likes/dislikes. So I deleted the video, because that self-doubt fucked with me. It’s like, imposter syndrome. I start to convince myself that whatever I’ve created actually sucks - even if nobody else thinks so – and I get this strange fear in the back of my mind that eventually I’ll be exposed and people will see my creations the same way I do. And that imposter syndrome BS always leads me to self-sabotage. Whether it be work, relationships, or even just YouTube – when things start going well I feel like I either don’t deserve it or haven’t actually earned it, so I end up just fucking everything up deliberately.

Which got me thinking about how I had created a Twitch channel back at the beginning of this year at the behest of a good friend of mine. I started streaming pretty regularly and literally within my first week a clip of mine was featured on a popular YouTube channel – just look up EFT_WTF ep. 297 and you’ll see me in there. 47,600 views at the time of writing this. I won’t sacrifice my anonymity by saying which clip in there is me, but I’m in there lol. So that was kind of shocking to me, and within a month of that I was up to 29 followers on Twitch. I know that’s by no means a lot or impressive, but even just that was enough to start fucking with my head and making me doubt myself. So I just abandoned streaming because of it.

This time, however, I wasn’t going to let my insecurities fuck with me. I was going to continue creating content for YouTube, and return to streaming. Even if my content turned to shit and nobody liked it, I was going to keep trying nonetheless. And I was excited enough by it that I even started messaging friends telling them the news, and they only helped to encourage me more.  

I had realized that my fears stemmed from the fact that it feels like my online footprint is my legacy. That whatever I create and put out there is going to long out live me and will thus be how I’m remembered. So that’s what would get me fucked up anytime something I created was received positively – the fear that I’ll just die and this content will eventually be seen as cringe or shit or whatever lol. Like, it’s pretty fucked but even just a playlist on Spotify that I created getting likes/listeners or a review of mine on Steam getting hundreds of likes and awards is enough to make me feel uneasy lol. But I decided to stop overthinking things, and just be me – to put my creative energy to use and put myself out there whether people like it or not. I started seeing that “legacy” in a different light, I wasn’t afraid of it but instead I wanted to make the most of it. I’ve got this Tumblr, Spotify, Youtube, Twitch & Steam. And two of those are completely anonymous. So I was going to plug away at the other three especially hard.

“My online footprint feels like my representation of my soul. And it’s time to stop hiding that from the world.”

I wrote those words just two nights ago.

Then I woke up yesterday to find that my YouTube account had been terminated at exactly 8:20AM without warning or explanation. I was panicked, but I’ve been hit with violations in the past, and successfully appealed 6 of the 7 of them. So I figured I just needed to chill out, calm down, and submit an appeal and then YouTube would do the right thing and reinstate my channel.

So I did just that – I appealed. It’s rather difficult to plead your case, however, given they only allow you to type 1000 letters and they didn’t even tell me what rules I supposedly broke. But I did my best, and sent it off. I got the usual automated email straight away telling me that they’ve received my appeal and will review my channels contents but to expect it to take at least 2 or more business days.

Then just 30 minutes later I get another automated email informing me that my content has been reviewed and YouTube has decided to uphold my termination. WTF? 30 minutes? How the hell could anybody have reviewed hours worth of content in 30 fucking minutes? And they still haven’t even told me what I did wrong.

So I submit another appeal, with the exact same results within the same amount of time. So I tried again. And again. And then I gave up.

If somebody had told me I’d one day lose my YouTube account I just would have shrugged and said oh well, but now that it’s happened I feel absolutely devastated and heartbroken. It honestly makes me want to cry just thinking about it. I had that account for a decade – 10 years worth of playlists, comments, purchases, subscriptions, and 2-3 years worth of my uploaded content just gone. Erased. In the blink of an eye. Without explanation. So much of that aforementioned legacy gone forever. And what’s worse is that I’m getting absolutely zero customer support from Google or YouTube – it is literally impossible to actually speak to a human being and instead I’m forced to deal with fucking automated messages instead. I put so much of my time and money into that channel and now it’s been taken away from me by a faceless, soulless corporation that refuses to even speak to their customers let alone help them. I’m going to keep fighting tooth and nail to get my channel back, but I honestly don’t have much hope that I will. But I’ll continue to try exhausting every means at my disposable. I won’t give up on this, it’s sparked the stubbornness within me.

I guess worst case scenario I can just create a new YouTube… but then I’d be having to start everything over from scratch. And, since I’m now banned from ever owning a YouTube account for life, I’d be in constant fear of having my channel terminated again regardless of my content simply for being me.

I’ve lost so fucking much this past year – why the hell did I have to lose this too? I was so proud of my content, even the more cringy stuff, and I was so damn excited about the future. Now it’s all collapsed around me, just like everything else that was good in my life. Fuck.

I literally wrote about all of this just two nights ago. And the very next day I lose it all.

Why is life like this?

Why is my life like this?