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End of the year
Not everything we write needs to educate or explain. Sometimes we just want to catch up with news and notes, or plans, or whatever comes to mind. This is one of those times. We’re looking out the window at a cool, somewhat dreary day, but Mau-Mau the cat makes sure we remember he needs his […]
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Customer Stories
We like it when customers tell us why they want the cards they bought. It adds a human dimension to the process. It also, always, answers the question: who on earth would buy this card? So without revealing any personal details, here are a few of the reasons buyers have shared with us: * Dad […]
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You’re now on the web forever, if you weren’t already
We find postcards in all sorts of ways: our own travels, exhibitions, flea markets, yard sales, museums … and friends who keep their eyes open and bring back interesting and unusual additions for the site. It’s guaranteed, if we know someone going somewhere unusual–and we know, unusual for us may be usual for you–we drop […]
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Grades for cards
Vexing! We remember a 1964 debate within the United States Supreme Court when Justice Stewart was asked to define hard-core pornography. His reply was classic, and used to this day in so many situations: “I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so, but I know it when I see it.” And that is exactly how we […]
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Pricing
What fun this is. If only postcards could be priced like gold — market rate, standard. But it doesn’t work that way, of course, and when a piece of artwork more than 100 years old, with stamp and clear postmark, can sometimes be listed at only US$1, you know there are many forces at work. What […]
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Postcard categories: the sky’s the limit
You might think it would be clear right away. The card belongs in this category, or that one, just do it and move on. Right? Wrong. First, we need to explain something we mentioned elsewhere in the site, that the same card may be entered more than once. That’s why we mention “entries” on the […]
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Where the cards come from
It’s all about critical mass. We went into this knowing we would never compete with jumbo sites. But then, boutique hotels aren’t trying to compete with Hyatt, either. Finding a niche and exploiting it without masses of advertising can be tough. We’re working on it. Meanwhile, as cards go out, we need to bring more […]
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From our hands to your eyes
We like to think we don’t have the personality of the mythological Greek King Sisyphus, but getting cards into the website sure can feel like what he spent all his time doing. This is a labour-intensive process, usually going something like this: * Source cards we want to enter (much more on this later). […]
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What to say?
This will have to be the last entry under “Getting Started”, since we’ve already started. But it seems like a good place to write about what we will write about later … we’re not the New York Times or even the South China Morning Post so you probably shouldn’t expect late-breaking news. Over time (lots […]
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Better Late than Never
So here we are, six years into running the website, and we can start sharing the joys of running it with you. This blog will be about postcards, the website, technical things, sourcing, customers’ stories, our stories, and whatever seems right at the time. Would it surprise you, to get this far we had […]
