Category: Web

Yelp Snafu

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On January 8th I tried posting a review on Yelp and got the following error:

I wondered if maybe the business that I had recently reviewed (downgraded from 5 stars to 3) got angry and somehow convinced Yelp to delete my account after 14 years and 700+ reviews.

Needless to say, I was very upset.

Some people take themselves too seriously on there, and while I do want to leave an honest review, for me it’s more about having a centralized place to track what we’ve tried, including photos, and keeping a list of places we’d like to try in the future. In fact, I have been invited to join Yelp Elite or whatever it’s called over the years but have no interest in it.

Yelp makes it particularly difficult to contact them which made the issue even more frustrating. Back when I wanted to ask them about adding a feature I couldn’t even find a way to do so.

I searched my e-mails to see if they had sent me anything, but the only e-mail I had gotten from them recently was in mid December about changes to their terms and conditions. I have a random secure password so I was doubtful my account was hacked.

Getting nowhere, I took to Reddit to see if anyone else was having issues and low and behold they were, and they were (rightfully) pissed off. I found an e-mail someone on Reddit used to contact them so I sent one there inquiring what happened to my account.

In the meantime it came out that they were suffering database errors or something that was causing people to think their accounts had been deleted when they hadn’t (which explains why I could still see my reviews on businesses I knew I had reviewed).

On January 10th my account was restored, but I didn’t get an e-mail from Yelp until the 12th:

Thanks for reaching out.

Please note that our engineers were aware of the issue of being unable to access your account and it should now be resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

If you experience any further issues accessing your account, please let us know so that we can further assist.

Thank you for your understanding.

I have been building my own database of our favorite restaurants and what we’ve ordered, whether it was good, and what we’d like to try in the future, if anything, in case Yelp goes kaput at some point. I also downloaded my Yelp account data. I guess I will have to do that periodically while I cautiously continue to use them.

Things I Don’t Understand

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Facebook
Why does Facebook work perfectly fine on my devices but takes forever to load on a desktop computer, regardless of the browser being used? Half the time photos or comments won’t even load. Messenger and Instagram on a desktop is crappy too.

My Library
How did I get an email this afternoon from our library to let me know that a hold is in if they’re closed all day? Is there a full day delay between when they actually put the item on the holds shelf and when they email the patron to let them know? Is someone still working there when they are closed to the public? Is it magic, like Joe suggested?

Yelp
I don’t know what is more aggravating – the fact that I cannot search my own reviews on Yelp via the Yelp app or their mobile website (and ONLY via their desktop site), or that I cannot find a way to contact Yelp to ask them to make that an option in their app. Surely I cannot be the only one who has hundreds of reviews and cannot remember the name of a place they went to and wants to search their own reviews to try and find it, right??!?

And what is with companies not wanting any contact with their users? I guess because I’m not a business paying for Yelp I don’t matter? Even though it’s users like me who keep the site going indirectly by engaging with the content???

Google Reader

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Yesterday it was announced that Google Reader will be no more as of July 1st. I couldn’t be more disappointed, as well as pissed off at Google. I’ve always disliked Google to a certain degree because they seem really inflexible. It’s part of the reason why even though I have two gmail accounts I still use Yahoo for my main emailing. A lot of my dislike stems from the fact that the company I used to work for had arrangements with them to provide a service for which they would not accommodate any of our requests which made it difficult to make a profit. In fact last I heard they were coming up with other ways to bill our clients for the services we were getting from Google because the reports they provided did not allow us to automate the invoicing, thus it wasn’t making us any revenue.

In any case, I use Google Reader constantly. I do mean constantly. If I’m not checking the updated feeds via the Google Reader site in Firefox I’m checking it through Feeddler on my iPhone or iPad. I can’t imagine a better way to keep on top of the newest posts from my favorite sites and being able to keep my progress and starred articles synched. It seems a lot of people would agree, and on top of that, there really aren’t any comparable alternatives right now.

I understand that RSS feeds aren’t as popular as one might hoped, which is apparent from the crickets I got in response to my Facebook update yesterday bemoaning this development, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful or appreciated. They’d probably be utilized by more people if they understood what they were, or more importantly, how beneficial they are. Who reads articles on actual websites anymore? I rarely do. I get the majority of my news via Google Reader and Twitter, and with Twitter I send the articles to Pocket to read later.

Needless to say I’m really upset about all this and will likely delete my Google+ account soon. Might as well before Google decides to do it for me. Besides, it’s not like it’s going to end up being the Facebook killer they hoped it would be. Oh, and I might just switch to Bing for my search needs as well.

NaBloPoMo November 2012

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Hey, look at me, I’m going to actually participate in something! November is National Blogging Month and I’m going to post an entry each day for the entire month. I don’t think I’ve ever done that in my entire blogging existence so it should be interesting. Probably more so for me than you since some days I’ll probably have crap to talk about, but on those days I’ll pull from the topic of suggestions on the site. I’ll have to set a reminder in my phone or sure as my name is Nicole I’ll forget one day and have failed before I even really began.

So today’s topic/question is: If you could live anywhere, where would it be?

Well, it would probably be easier for me to tell you where I wouldn’t want to live: Indiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, oh the list goes on. I *think* I might like to live in Colorado, Utah, or Oregon, but seeing as how I’ve never visited any of those states this is merely a guess.

Ideally I’d like to live somewhere close to shopping and destinations but tucked away with enough land that I can’t see, smell, or hear my neighbors. I love quiet, but having lived in apartments and a townhome my whole adult life I have never enjoyed any such luxury. I grew up in a house in Chicago but houses there are very close together so you still had to deal with neighbors. And while statistics claim that less than 50% of the population smokes, we have always lived in-between smokers – my home growing up, the apartment Joe and I shared when we first got together, and now in my townhome. WTF?!? I read that the smoking rate in Utah is the lowest in the nation so that alone makes the state all the more appealing to me.

In any case we wouldn’t even considering moving to another state until the kids are older and are out in the world doing their own thing as we don’t want to miss out on spending time with them.

Well, I think that’s a good start to this whole blogging every day for a month endeavor, don’t you? Good thing I happened to post about Halloween yesterday since I didn’t learn about this challenge until today! “See” you tomorrow!