Unimpressive software

Last week, Sandvox was a runner up in Apple's Design Awards, so I decided to take a look at it to re-create my website. I really like the look of the websites; they look more professional than the basic one's created by RapidWeaver (which I've used for about 1.5 years). I spent about half a day yesterday reworking my ReceiptWallet website in Sandvox and am pretty pleased what I've done. I went to publish it to a test site and the demo limited me to publishing the main page, so I went ahead and purchased it (I had to purchase the Pro version for $79 as I have a few places that I have raw HTML) and proceeded to publish the full site. I use SFTP (secure FTP or FTP over SSH) to publish and kept getting errors about the encryption key. Not looking too hot for $79. After a few tries and changing some settings, I was able to publish the "full" site. I was about to switch my entire site over and make it live when I discovered that Sandvox only uploaded one of my graphics.

Wow, I've never had so many problems with one program in the first day of using it and having spent $79 on it, I'm a bit disappointed to say the least. I've spent them a few pieces of email and hopefully they'll have a solution soon. For a product that has been out for over a year, it seems like it still needs a bit of work. There are a bunch of hidden features that really shouldn't be hidden; for instance, I needed to change the file extension to .php from .html so that some of my PHP code would run which I could only do with a hidden preference; in addition, I wanted to change the Amazon associate ID to my own instead of theirs (at least I could do it).

I just discovered that they also embed a link to their Amazon associates stuff in my page that includes Amazon links; not cool at all.

So, at this point, my site remains unchanged and unimpressive. I also feel that I've wasted $79 on a piece of software that needs a ton of work. Oh well, live and learn.

That brings me to another complaint I have and that's the Apple Design Awards; this year they recognized several web design applications that frankly look better than they function. So Apple Design Awards must really only recognize applications that look pretty. Am I disappointed that ReceiptWallet didn't win? Yes, but now I understand why, it is extremely functional and doesn't have fancy pictures to make up for its shortcomings. Another lesson learned, don't waste time entering time year. Apple better send back my Pentax DSMobile 600 scanner I sent in with my entry to make judging it easier.

Dumped Sirius!

Today we finally dumped Sirius radio! We got it as a gift from my in-laws a few years back and they've been paying the fee since then which was fine, however, we got real annoyed at the DJs. In January, we got my wife a new car with a built-in XM receiver and she enjoyed the 3 months free. However, I held out subscribing until they sent me an offer I couldn't refuse (the dealer said to wait until they sent a good offer and they sent several offers). When I subscribed, it also came with free online access which was pretty neat. I found an XM Radio plugin for my Squeezebox and was pleased. I discovered that I could stream 2 XM stations at once, so I picked up another Squeezebox today (used) and hacked the XM plugin code to let me connect twice. Now we can stream 2 XM stations at once or have XM on one Squeezebox and MP3s on the other; this also works out well so that we can play children's music on one box and whatever we want on the other. Very cool. Goodbye, Sirius and the crappy DJs! (I hope things don't go downhill when/if the Sirius/XM merger is finalized.)

Sales tax on downloads

Today I went to purchase the professional pictures that were taken of me at the marathon last week and one of the options was electronic download as opposed to CD. This wasn't offered last year and would save me $16 (the $84 for the electronic download is already extortion). I got to the checkout page and saw that they wanted to charge me sales tax. Whoa...that doesn't fly in California. According to the California Board of Equalization's publication about downloads

Products electronically transmitted to customers
Your sale of electronic data products such as software, data, and digital images is generally not taxable when you transmit the data to your customer over the Internet or by modem. However, if as part of the sale you provide your customer with a printed copy of the electronically transferred information or a backup data copy on a physical storage medium such as a CD-ROM, your entire sale is usually taxable.

So I sent the company email and hopefully they'll fix the problem. I suspect that when they started offering electronic downloads, they didn't re-tool their store to reflect this or don't have a clue about sales tax on non-tangible goods.

This is a bit frustrating as I've had to do this in the past with another company. Let's get with the picture, folks! I've known about the sales tax on electronic downloads for 13 years when I first had to do research on it; things, luckily, haven't changed with respect to this.

You can never have too many backups!

Yesterday I went to open up my website that I created in RapidWeaver and found that my site was all screwed up; I didn't realize this until after I exported it to my server. Luckily, I was able to quickly restore what was on the server as I have a week's worth of archives of my server in tar.gz files. However, getting the RapidWeaver file back required me to go back to the previous night's backup. The problem seems to have arisen from the upgrade from RapidWeaver 3.5 to 3.6 where it converted the data file. A 3.6.1 update was released, but it appears I had already done my conversion before the update came out.

I had a momentary scare, but with my paranoia about backups, there was nothing to worry about. Worst case was that I had to grab the files from the hard drives I store in my safe deposit box; there were only a few web site changes since that backup.