Affiliate program for BoundlessGallery.com

We are in the final stages of adding an affiliate program to BoundlessGallery.com. We plan to offer 10% on any sale that comes through a person coming off your webpage to ours. If you are using our artist webpage feature, it will be built in automatically (just sit back and earn). If you have your own webpage, you just add a link with some special HTML code from your user account. We are going to use standard internet technology, driving the system by adding information to the end of the URL.

The whole thing seems to work well and we are in final testing.

As always, your comments are welcome.

Best Christmas Present? Blended iPod?

I have been busy at work with all the Christmas Season orders and general chasing around, so didn't have much deep to say on the blog. I keeping with the spirit of nothing deep, here is a youtube.com staple - WillItBlend.com's version of an iPod in the blender.

Merry Christmas everyone! May the coming year be less confusing then why putting things in a blender is interesting.

BoundlessGallery.com through the years.

A friend sent me a link to a copy of our original webpage. You can see a more complete list of what we have been up to or a view of other popular websites by using the "Wayback Machine".

Doing translation can be tough.

I have lead a few efforts to translate products into other languages over the years. This was always my worst nightmare. No, not that the translation was wrong or funny, but that it might hit the internet and not have my company's name next to the mistake. :)

Don't you ever wonder if there is a secret message in art that you own or see that you don't understand. Kind of like the "DaVinci Code" (The DaVinci Code is down to $.01 used on Amazon!).

There was an article in Fine Woodworking about secret drawers and how to build them in your own pieces not long ago, so I guess it appeals to everyone.

Anyone want to fess up that their art has a message that is hard to see and educate us on how to do it?

Crazy as it sounds, I have switched to a Mac.

In 1993, I started working on Microsoft's campus and stayed there for the next 4 years. After that I moved off campus and continued working directly with Microsoft for several more years. What I did was help Microsoft (always working for their partners) port their operating systems and compiler products to different platforms and CPU's. I learned a lot about how these systems work and can figure out most anything I don't know fairly easily. But, I still just bought a Mac and moved my life onto it.

My wife got an iMac 6 months ago and I started to fool around with it. The user interface is so much better, I realized that only working on Microsoft user interfaces for so long has limited my view of what was possible. This had led me directly to redoing the BoundlessGallery.com interfaces to work better.

Finally I decided that the Mac's systems were simply better. Better designed, easier to use and way more elegant. But, it would mean that I would have to learn a whole bunch of new things to get the machine to run. I figured I was up to the challenge.

The biggest problem I have faced was getting my email out of Outlook and into a mail program on the Mac. Found an article on the support systems about how to do that and did that dance. I also can't get my Air Port (WiFi) to work at the office, though I have WiFi working fine a home. Have to figure that out next week.

I'm up and running on a MacBook Pro. It hasn't crashed yet and I have never had to reboot it yet. I guess this is how software people have a little adventure in their lives. Now I need to figure out what else I can do with this beast.

Fixing our Quick Browse feature.

We added a new feature several months ago to allow quicker browsing of art. The problem was that people decided to take a closer look at some piece of art and clicked on it. They went into our detailed view of the piece, then would buy it or more likely hit back to browse some more.

We didn't like the time it took to hit back and get right back to the spot you were browsing in before. With some experimentation we found that we could insert the detailed information about the piece right inline in the browse page. We thought this was very cool.

So, we started to work on this feature and found another problem. If the user hit the back on their browser, they didn't go where they were expecting to go. The reason they hit back was our "Close" button wasn't visible enough and we didn't explain how the feature worked.

Today we put a box that will pop up one time and tell the users how our "quick browse" feature works and put the close button in a better spot and used a better color. Hopefully this will make that feature work a little better.

We think we have the working right, what do you think?

The picture is of "Shooting the Breeze" by Maggie Stiefvater.

New Browsing Feature - Lists

As the site started to grow in number of artists and painters, we have been doing our best to help buyers find the art they are interested in (Art Finder) and now keep track of the art and artists they like and don't like by using our "List" feature.

To get started go and browse the art on Boundless Gallery (or search) and mouse over one of the pieces. When you do, you will see an "Option" box appear. If you click on "Option" you get the choice of saving the piece or artist into your favorite list or you can decide to never see that artist or piece again.

Give it a try and see what you think. We are looking for suggestions about how you think it works.

Upload a room and you are going to buy some art!

We have been tracking our "View In A Room" feature and it seems to sell art. People who take the time to upload a photo of their own room (we don't use your photos for anything else, completely private) almost always buy some art. You can find this feature by clicking on a piece of art and looking just below the big picture.

Check it out, this will help you to see which art will look good in your house.