Don’t go to the Post Office

An important lesson I recently learned since I started actively selling on eBay is that no one should have to ever drive to the post office. It doesn’t matter how close you live to your post office, USPS should come to your house daily if necessary, except Sundays.

We all know that mailing a letter is as easy as putting it in our mail box, right? Well, I hope so. 🙂

The internet has made mailing packages just as easy. If you sell through eBay, this service is tightly integrated into their system. Once a sale is done and payment has been received, all a seller does is click on a link labeled, “Print Shipping Label.” From there we are sent to PayPal’s shipping center where we enter in the package’s weight and our preferences. The final step is to print out our “save a trip to the post office shipping label” and stick (clear packaging tape is necessary) it to the package.

What if you want to ship something that wasn’t sold through eBay? Can we still ship our packages using this method? The answer is YES! My uncontrollable excitement for this answer is the reason for this blog. All you have to do is follow this link…

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_ship-now

Oh, of course, you’ll at least need a PayPal account to this service.

There are many benefits to doing things this way:

1) you’ll save gas < — hello my name hurricane IKE
2) you’ll save time
4) you can stay in PJs
3) you’ll save with delivery confirmation, which cost $0.75 at your local P.O. and $0.18 online.

You don’t want to use PayPal? There is still hope. Go straight to the USPS.com website and sign up with them, just click on their “print a shipping label” link. The drawback to this is you are limited to Priority or Express Mail only, which cost much more.

Final notes… you’ll need a scale of some sort to accurately see how much your package weights. And if your packages is a big one, you might have to take it in to your local post office. If you aren’t sure what is or isn’t too big, I’d visit USPS.com for their say in it.

I hope this helps someone because it has helped me tremendously; especially for the non-eBay items.

The Dilemma, What would you do?

As an IT expert, I try to do whats best for family, friends, and clients all alike. I give them all the same advice. However, I have been having a dilemma with a specific piece of software.

I am talking about the Firefox plugin, named Adblock. What it does is blocks virtually all ads while you are surfing the web. What this means is faster surfing and less annoyances. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without it… as a constant web surfer. But as a website developer, I know those very ads sometimes pay for the site’s cost.

So far I still tell everyone to use it as normal, mostly because my sites are either hobbies or so small that their cost doesn’t mean much. I could just imagine the big time players running multiple servers and their cost.

What would you do?

WordPress CMS

WordPress as a CMS, its do’able but not so obvious; finding or understanding the information on how to do it can be quite complex.

For example when you search using these keywords: WordPress as CMS…

1) you’ll find premium skins like Remix 2 ($75) that’ll do it for you but to me that going against the whole open source “thingy”
2) you’ll find WordPress how to(s) and discussions on the matter and examples of it being used as a CMS
3) you’ll find how to(s) on how to do it the right way with special coding, lol

Simply put you’ll find everything but…

1) go to your setting page
2) find your “Reading” settings
3) now set your front page to a static page

Now, you will need to make that specific page before you can set it as the frontpage. Please don’t tell me that what I am suggesting is simply a work-around. To me the only difference between WordPress and any CMS is the homepage’s content.

Beg to differ? Comment Away.