Anyways, a few minutes after recovering from my e-postpartum e-depression I was checking my email, and I had a new message from the sender service@us.clickandbuy.com with the subject of “Click&Buy email-verification”. I couldn’t imagine why they would want me to verify my email if I wasn’t buying anything from them, so out of curiosity I opened the email. It read, and I quote:

WTF!? As if there isn’t enough spam out there on the Interweb! Now I have to deal with emails that occupy my inbox only to tell me to ignore them! I can easily do that without your help thank you very much.

ClickAndBuy is a 3rd party e-commerce service provider. Whatever online store I was using at the time obviously uses the ClickAndBuy services, something I would recommend against to any aspiring e-tail store owners. Look elsewhere for a provider that doesn’t send useless emails to non-customers. In my book, that’s called spamming. And spamming is bad mmkay?

Open Audio Player

[Chorus]

Su-preme people living with they backs aligned
Up against the wall cause these days are asinine
Living in a money matrix, How cats survive
Some will fade away and wither, others will blast a 9
Kings and Queens working 9 to 5’s
And making nothing searching for a deeper purpose in life
This CAN’T be life…
With all this work this can’t be right…
Without no money in my pockets I just can’t see right
I used to try to preach to younguns like, “Do right kids”
Now-a-days all that I can say is, “Get it how you live”
Live how you get it, shit!
Don’t nobody wanna get…
A promotion up to fry cook like little Calvin did
Some would rather take a gamble, hey they might do bids
The allure of fast money in this hell-bound system
Got you lookin at two-hundred bucks a week
Versus, like a thousand in a day
Tell me what makes more sense to these…

[Chorus]

Trapped like rats in mazes for the cheese
Every natural resource is here, We don’t really need money
But certain people need power over people
They act like that cause they’re trapped inside their EGO-sphere
And now you can’t feel free
Without material possesions, you can’t just be
And without ‘em you’re left stressin, so anxiously
So you grab the Smith & Wesson, then aim, then squeeze
To get what’s comin’ to ya
The block’s so hot, it blew the top off the thermometer
The rush for drama is more appealing than a plain life
Cause life is insane, so insanity is a sane life
It’s so easy to see, simple as day and night
SU-preme people born out of the way of the light
In the darkness, trying to fly straight
To some folks it’s like being a fish swimming with sharks… shit!

[Perhaphs not since men turned their ears the preachings of a mere prophet
2000 years ago have the words of humble men reached so many with such force
And perhaps because it has been burning for long, now smoldering
Now bursting into hot flames, now hastily covered over to smolder again
Until the next outbreak.]

[Chorus]

SU-preme people only want the best and uhh
SU-preme people won’t settle for less then uhh
Straight from royalty put inside projects and uhh
Capitalist system that don’t make sense to ya
SU-preme people put against the fence, Get a
bit irate and hostile if you aint fixing the…
Problem you created that make these condition up
A little reparation for your acts are sent to us
SU-preme people ride to die to get the bucks
Some by any means so, hey, lock your benzes up
Tuck your chain and watch and keep your defenses up
All they wanna do is live it up like you, cause they’re…

Notice anything? No? Good! You pass. The brilliant minds over at TJ’s decided not to include a single set of directions on how to prepare your soup! And why should they!? It’s soup damnit! It’s as if they are sending a sublimnal message: If you can’t figure out how to prepare a can of soup, you should not be handling a can opener! As a matter of fact, if you are standing there with spoon in hand, staring at the can, and you find yourself perplexed on how to get the contents of the can into your stomach, you shouldn’t even be handling that spoon!

Yet we still do it every single time. We’ll just be sitting there, doing whatever it is that we are doing at the time, when all of a sudden our brain decides to remind us that an hour ago we were hungry, and oh yeah we put that pizza in the ov… OH SHIT, THE OVEN! And we LEAP up from whatever it is we are doing, make a mad dash to the kitchen, hurdling over any sleeping dogs or small children that may be in the way, and go sliding across the kitchen floor in our socks only to discover that your meal is ruined!

It’s as if we think that one day in the future, if we keep practicing that mad dash to the kitchen, we will somehow be able to reverse earths magnetic field and turn back time to the point that the food was just right. Hey, it’s possible!

Or maybe, just maybe it’s just a conspiracy hatched by the clever minds at Trader Joe’s and Maytag! Maybe they designed a pizza that goes from perfectly warm and crispy to black and charred in less than a nanosecond. Yup. it all happens in the blink of an eye and is triggered by motion sensors in the oven that sense when someone is running towards the kitchen to rescue the perfect golden pizza. Shazzam! Burnt to a crisp. Hey, it’s possible!

Now, herein lies the problem. On the Order Tickets page are 4 sections for the user to fill out (see screenshot). First they ask the user for an optional “Access Code.” OK, I have no idea what that is, but it’s optional. Let’s skip it. Next we have the “Type Of Tickets” area. Umm, this is just an empty area of the screen. Must be optional as well. Skipped this one too. Next up is the “Delivery Type.” Pretty straight forward here, even I can figure this one out. Let’s go with the mail option to save ourselves a buck-twenty-five. We’ll use that to buy a soda at the show. And finally, the classic “Terms and Conditions.” Blah, blah, first born child, blah, blah, blah. Yup looks pretty standard. I agree. Check. Let’s add this bad boy to our cart!

*thunk*

Huh!? Waa happened? Oh an error message, I musta goofed.

Ah ha! I need to select the quantity of tickets I want to purchase me thinks to meself. Let’s see, I must have overlooked that field the first time through. Hmm, scanning. scanning. scanning. Huh!?

*dur*

Nope, no field for quantity. Nothing. I’m stuck. Can’t buy tickets. Crap. OK, time to fire up the trusty ol’ “Contact Us” page and send off an email to the ever so helpful man behind the curtain. I crafted a well documented email explaining the situation and my inability to purchase tickets. Clicked the Send button and now we just sit back and wait….

Surprisingly only an hour or so later I had a response waiting for me in my inbox. And it read:

Thank you for contacting TicketWeb. If it does not allow you to select the number of tickets yo wish to purchase, it means that there are no longer any tickets available. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us.

Please go to [URL removed] to let us know whether you would like to accept this resolution.

HECK NO I DON’T ACCEPT! You’re website made me feel like an IDIOT for not being able to figure out what I was doing wrong. Pssht, the fact that it made me even question myself and my ability to figure out a simple e-commerce website is totally unacceptable.

TicketWeb if you are reading this I have an idea for you. Check it. If there are “no longer any tickets available” how about TELLING THE USER that there are “no longer any tickets available”!?
Genius! I should win an award for that idea.

To any other companies that run websites for the sake of making it EASIER for your customers to conduct business with you, just tell us the the truth, and yes we CAN handle the truth Jack.

“Make it easy for me to give you my money.”

Well a year later, and here I am with a new site and a new blogging engine. This website you are reading right now is managed by the WordPress engine. And for what it’s worth, WordPress RULES! Just some really really smart development by the WP team, and by far some of the best software documentation I have ever seen. It is well organized, lots of references, lots of examples and sample code. Just about any question you could have about the platform is answered in the docs. I imagine that must help keep the tech support queries to a minimum. Well, that is if people actually took the time to look for the answers in the docs.

My new found interest in WordPress was sparked by a new task at my job with BLITZ in which I was asked to research WordPress theme creation and templates. You see we have a company blog that covers the more technical aspects of what we do, and in the near future we will be launching a new homepage design. Along with the new design of the website we will be fully integrating the blog to be a more integral part of the website, and allow us to show not only the technical aspect of what we do, but also show a bit more about the personalities of the great minds that make up the BLITZ team.

The install of WordPress took less than 30 minutes. Why? Great documentation.
The setup of WordPress took less than 30 minutes. Why? Great user interface.
The building of a fully customized them took about 5 hours (not including design). Why? Because of great documentation.

OK, I know this is probably a bit boring, but the truth is I needed some actual content to test out this new theme, and so I figure what better way to kick off this blog than with a rave of the WordPress documentation.

Note: I will be adding comment functionality to the blog shortly, but wanted to get something up and running as quick as possible. It’s as the brilliant folks as 37 Signals say “release early and release often.”