Category: Technology

I’ve written only recently about SmugMug, and expressed my frustration as a developer who built an open-source tool for their platform. This has led me to try to get my data out of SmugMug as I was considering moving away from it as well… Only to discover that some of my video data is lost and/or not being made available. This applies only for videos. Both the quality is potentially degraded, and the metadata that is available on SmugMug cannot be downloaded or exported out of their platform.

If you upload a video to SmugMug, they don’t actually store the original video for you. Here’s a quote from their official page:

Originals

We don’t keep a copy of the original video you upload. We make high-quality display copies, which are probably altered from what you send us.

I’m not sure what this high-quality display copy means in actual terms, but I won’t be surprised if some quality is lost in the process. For a company that prides itself caring for photographers, where quality and reliability is key, I find it rather vague and disconcerting.

Furthermore, what isn’t mentioned on this page is that if you want to download your videos again, those videos would be stripped-out of the original metadata as well. This metadata includes information about the Camera you used, the date/time of the video, location information etc. All of this data is still stored on SmugMug, but you can’t get it back when you download it. It’s locked-in. For me, personally, this is even worse than losing video quality. My video memories are very tightly linked to the time and location of those original scenes. Without this info, the videos are next to useless. I just can’t find them (without going manually through hundreds or thousands of dateless and location-less videos, that is)

Prepare for a somewhat ranty post, but it doesn’t come from a bad place. I honestly want Fastmail to succeed. I’m eager to see more alternatives for email hosting, and clients (and there are scaringly few).
I also acknowledge that some of the problems I bumped into are quite specific to my own setup, which isn’t common. So in some ways, it’s not about you, Fastmail. It’s me. Make your own judgement.

TL;DR – Fastmail is pretty neat, but their support sucks. Their support ticket system sucks even more, and their product is not clear enough to work without support. From my personal experience anyway.

I haven’t noticed it much before, but it’s becoming a pet peeve once I started paying attention to it.

We LOVE homepages. Like eyes being the key to our souls, our homepage shows who we really are. What we stand for. They turn random visitors to loyal customers. They inspire trust, build an emotional connection, they bind us together… ok ok. You got the picture. Homepages are great.

But once I’m sold. I’m in. I gave you my email. I’m a loyal customer. I go to your site every. single. day. Do I really need to see your homepage again??! Do I actually care that you changed the photo on the frontpage and highlighted another benefit to potential customers? Or most important – do I really have to click the ‘Login’, ‘Go to my app’, ‘Dashboard’ or whatever other link you give me to get started?

It’s not all about the technology. Stripe does one thing that makes it light-years better than its competition: Time to market. Or in simpler terms, its activation process to allow you to receive actual payments.

My wife and I run a small website selling vintage items from Germany to Japan. So far, my wife was asking all her customers to pay via bank-transfer. This is naturally time-consuming and for most of her customers, Japanese housewives and arts & crafts lovers, inconvenient. A few months ago I suggested to her to introduce credit-card payments on her website. How difficult could this be to implement?