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Good afternoon Beverly: Something in your post caught my eye. We too are subscribers to nextdoor.com. So I wonder, if Nextdoor.com is just a local thing, then are you in the NorthEast section of the Atlanta Metro area? Maybe NextDoor.com services sub-division all across the USA and your group is not local to mine. Our NextDoor.com encompasses about 15 to 16 neighborhoods that all adjoin each other in North Gwinnett County.
Just wondering if we are neighbors?mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Oh I agree with you Jay. I meant and maybe wasn’t clear, if you have your own web site and have to SEO it from scratch, you are your own web master, then it is a fairly in depth endeavor, that I feel needs a good amount of study to be good at it. But not just for Ebay and filling in the keywords in the categories. In that respect you are correct. Pretty easy is correct. And I agree about it being low on one’s to do list if listing needs to be done.
Back then, I like Linda states below, changed a few back then and never got back around to it. It is still on my old “to do” list and still I haven’t gotten back to it. At least it is just the categories and if one doesn’t have too many then should not take long.
Sorry I wasn’t clear about that.
mike in Atl.
Jay here is the link to your posts about Key Word use back in 2015 along with some links that hopefully will still work.
Hi-de-Ho Scavengers…
mike in AtlantaHey Jay.. Yes we did discuss it back on Friday 4/3/2015. I just searched and found it among all of the 2,500 or so discussion of my saved favorite and interesting topics of yours. If you can search back through the old archives you will find several posts / discussions of key word updating. You even have a link to some Ebay pages that Amazing Taste posted that has the “rules” sort of how to do it properly, not get caught in spamming, how to list them and also the answer to other peoples questions on how to do it correctly.
I gave up on the discussion back then because proper SEO is a fairly deep and somewhat complex subject as e-commerce has suggested in past posts and I agree. I spent several years taking SEO courses, using SEO Utility Tools, KW Ranking, while building a few web sites and studying how Google reacts to them. Also Googles Panda and Penguin changes to it’s algorythem’s roll out caught a lot of people using black hat tactics and got rid of millions of garbage web sites.
Also many peole don’t kow, but Googles “spiders” and “bots” crawl the web constantly and there is som much out there it takes Google months to get around to crawling a web site or changes to it’s content. Don’t expect to change some keywords and then go and look on Google to see if you appear. It doesn’t work that way.
It may take 2 to 3 months for Googles “spiders” and “bots” to even find your site and meta tags. Then it will analize it for content. Then “proper” content, then once found will start to post it in results. Then if it will start to look for fresh content, thus “changes” you make. Google likes to see changes to content it has found by you so you can get an Alexia Ranking. Then They will also look for spamming, repeated words, no relevant content and just on and on.
Knowing just tons more on SEO that is one reason I dropped out of the discussions years ago, because proper SEO, site building, and the logistics is something that just can’t be taught or explained in a forum post.
As E-commerce is indicating between the lines, before making too many strong statements about SEO, I suggest that if interested you make yourself a student of it. Maybe take a class at a local community college or better still, pay some one to optimize your own domain web site.
It is a whole topic unto itself. This is one reason I have not proceeded with my Shopify Store as of yet. I own my own domain name and have it parked. But to go live with owns own web site you need to speed a lot of time and have the knowledge to drive your own traffic to your store, then convert it. It will take a lot of upfront work, then constant working your store by writing new, and relevant content almost daily. I am too old now and choose to work within the confines of Ebay’s infrastructure.I use Ebay because that SEO is already being done for me, but it is still Ebay’s traffic not mine. Ebay closes down, we all close down.
I think I will jump out for now.
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Hey Linda.. All I found on our subscription databases are stock certificates with his and Fargo’s names on them. The certificates runn from around $100 up to $400 +/- but who knows, that may be because of the stock as much as the names or signatures. Also maybe even the stock certificate number. But no signed photos. i will check again later and see if maybe different key words will bring up something.
mike in Atl.
Think you just discovered “DIM Weight”. It is not so much the weight as it is the size. 15x15x8= 1,800 cubic inches. The USPS regular Rates usually apply to packages around 1,725 +/- cubic inches [somewhere around there]. After that there starts to be a “added costs” that applies to extra cubic inches and the actual weight.
Goggle Dimensional weight and you will get tons of stuff about it. We also have had several discussions here Ryanne, myself and others over the past several years about it. That is one reason USPS stopped making Box “C” size which Ryanne and I and others also horded tons of them before they quit making them.
12 x 12 x 12 is about the cut off point and the largest priority box USPS furnishes now. For you quickly, is there room enough for you to trim your box down enough to have it fall under the dim weight size? If so do it. If not then other carriers are a better bet.
Go to our SL friend at http://www.flippertools.com. his site is a great and useful tool that will allow you to select the proper size box for your item and also will show you the best carriers to use for the best price. Then box your item accordingly.
I like Ryanne and others can do my shipping wieghts by memory except when it starts getting close to the DIM Weight. Length is not the issue so much as the LxWxd. But also there is a cut off of Girth + Length and if over 108″ [I think] USPS won’t even take it. UPS even makes a beaded chain they will give you to use to measure with. It has a “Large Bead” on the chain that represents where their Dim. Weight kicks in. All Carriers have it, but each carriers numbers are different. Then if the girth plus the longest length is longer than the whole chain, then they won’t take it. The USPS web site has all of the correct dimensions for you. But 15x15x8 = 1,800 cubic inches is probably your problem.
So, hit Google, read about DIM Weights, Max. sizes for USPS and certainly use the “Flipper Tool site.
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
Here ‘ya go. We have used this for several years. Just have to change the date each time. This shows the last date we used which was to go to visit daughter in Orlando this past Christmas. Made a bunch of Sales and two Canceled because they wanted quicker. Most just don’t see it in the listing because most people buy on their phones and don’t review the whole listing in the first place. So, this just reminds them.
Hope this helps
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta“Thank You” for your recent purchase.
As a courtesy reminder, in case you didn’t notice, that all items in our store are marked with an extended shipping / handling time, due to our scheduled vacation which started Dec. 19th, 2016. We will resume our shipping on or before Fri-Sat. Dec. 30th-31st +/-. The estimated time of arrival is calculated and posted in the listing.
If for some reason this does not work for you, let us know as soon as possible via Ebay Messages and request to cancel your order. We understand and will honor your request as quickly as we can. Once we have canceled, you in turn must also “Approve the Cancellation”.
If the stated delivery time is acceptable to you, no further action is required and we will ship upon our return.
Thank you for Supporting American Small Business.
Kindest Regards,
the team at MDC Concepts, Inc.
MDC Galleries & SmartParts Equipment divs.Shortcut.. you are most welcome, Glad to share knowledge. This is the only forum I would do so.
Here is a thought. Maybe a donation in your father’s name to an Aviation museum would be a thought. Forgo the dollars you may get in return for your dad’s name being displayed along with the piece and accompanying documentation.
I know there is a very large, an interesting museum at Fort Benning in my home town of Columbus, GA. But that is the Infrantry and Air Borne Museum. I am sure there must be an Air Force equivalent somewhere. Just a thought.Mike in Atlanta
Hey Shortcut.. Sorry for the delayed response.
Ok let’s take this one step at a time. First let’s validate the print itself.
From a distance [photo] it looks like a pen and ink drawing with “washes”. With many pen and ink drawings the art contains solid black areas that are composed of thin “contour lines” [outlines] and solid black areas. You have both in this piece. Next in order to get shading / graduated tones an artist must either use a process of cross hatching of criss crossing lines or “washes”. You have several tones of grey in this piece. It is obvious that the artist did not use “cross hatchings” of various types to create the greys we see. So he used washes. Washes are created by taking the “black india ink” and diluting it down into several varying shades of grey by controling the amount of distilled water that is used. It is done by placing a few drops of india ink [highly concentrated] into a plastic egg tray. If the artist wants 6 shades, he places say 2 drops of ink in six trays. Then each compartment he places water with the ink. He starts with one drop in the first space, 2 in the second, 3 or 4 in the fourth and so on. This creates an ink mixture that will gradate from a darker grey wash down to a very light transparent wash.
He then works from light to dark, painting in with a soft sable brush the wider, larger areas of light grey. The mixture of ink with the most water and let’s it dry. Then taking the next darker wash and fills in smaller areas, working backwards from lightest to darkest.Ok this now establishes the original, done by hand pen-ink drawing with wahses. What comes next though is the tell tale sign of what you may have. You said you have “photo evidence” of the artist signing it. Great, but you don’t have evidence of him creating the original. So the following is what you need to know and to find out.
Many artist create black and white pen and ink originals then reproduce then into either small limited edition or larger run prints. this is how you will be able to tell. The lines are too thin for a screen print in most cases, stone lithography would work, but is way to time consuming and most people don’t have the facilities to do it. I know how, but no litho studio. Etching is easy to tell because of the embossed indentation the plate leaves in the paper after it has gone through the process and other ways to identify the ink layer, which I will save for another time.
So this leaves us with the needed following observation work. First if an lithographic offset item or an original. Pen and inks are hard to tell the reproduction process but if this is a repro. it works like this. An orthographic camera is used to photo the original. Ortho film is used to create a metal offset plate that will be mounted on a litho press and be inked up and an edition print run. Ortho film WILL pick up solid black areas and reproduce them dead nuts on in the finest of details without any “mechanical” creation of the image. But add in variations of greys, then it fails to reproduce those. The printer results in having to break those varying, graduated areas into a series of dots, by using what is called a “halftone line screen”. These screens are overlaid in the large format camera during the photographing of the original in order to create films that are plate ready. These screens run in coarseness from about 35-40 line screening up to approx. 300 line screening these days. The most common being 133 line screen [most magazines], 180 line screen to 220 lines per cm for higher grade magazines, [Vogue, etc.], then 220 to 300 or more for fine art, full color repros.
Now, at 133 line screen or higher, it is almost unperceptable to the naked eye and everything loks like it is a “continious tone”, but maybe not. This is why I always carry my two loupes with me when I pick.
So the big question is, are those Grey areas in your print solid “washes” done from a brush with diluted inks directly on the paper or reproduced “tones” of the original. Usually direct washes causes the paper to buckle due to the large amount of water that is applied to the surface.
So, now, get a magnifier, best if 10 x power an up. I suggest you go online an order a 6x or up what is called a “LinenTester” for about $6 and keep it with you when you go picking. But, for now, look at the grey areas. Are they dots, if so you have a reproduction. They value drops drastically. You basically are selling the “autograph” of the artist and he is probably of a more secondary market artist.
Many people when pricing art forget that you can take $500 to $750 go to a New York art gallery and by an investment piece of art by a “known reputable artist” and it will maintain it’s vale and come with all sorts of documentation about the artist. I can get a Warhol, Lichtenstein, Trova, and many, many others, signed in an edition for $750 to $1,000. So be careful on your pricing.
Now on the other hand, pilots and other cross collectors may have an interest in the plane itself, but there are photos available of WWII equipment for those collectors.
So long story ended. get a magnifier and first determine if you have an original or repro. and then let us know.
I apologize for the long dissertation, but my art school teaching genes come to the surface and run amuck when I see posts here on the Forum about art and prints and I can’t control myself sometimes. LOL 🙂
Hopes this sheds some light on this piece and helps others to become aware of how to observe some of the art they come across in the field.
Respectfully submitted.
mike at MDC Galleries in AtlantaHey Sue.. Sorry for the late reply. Had Sales to tend to,, listing and still some tax stuff. You know the drill. You are right. I can’t find anything online, in our subscription databases, nothing on this hat or the logo. Just what the heck is it. Wife said maybe some sort of a foreign country’s local dance group costume hat, from way back when. But how to trace that is beyond us. Then the thought of some old lodge type of hat but no not that either.
There is no markings on it at all anywhere? Nothing to go on?
Sorry .. but seems like a strike out this time. If I get a revelation I will check again, but nothing at this time.
mike in mdc galleries in AtlantaI am with you Lee. I do a quarterly inventory of shipping supplies on a spread sheet and order what seems to be below my min. in each size. Every size is over the min. / max. levels. I have 478 boxes in stock, hundreds of poly and bubble mailers and 80 rolls of tape. I just order more tape and the new tissue paper, which was a dumb move.
I also posted way back about the tape’s quality level and how to break it down into MSI [thousand sq. inches for pricing]. You can go find that somewhere in past posts. But in any case it makes our boxes look like a “jack in the box”. Like a carnival box. And the tape is only a half of a mil. of adhesives and 1 mil in thickness. That is why they put 75 yards on a roll is because it is extremely thin. That is why Ryanne gets it coming loose. If the adhesive layer was thicker, it would migrate down into the porous fiber and give a better bond. It is so thin it is just giving a surface stick to the higher placed fibers. It will adhere better if you burnish it down but who has time for that.
I think I will follow Nancy’s process and after I get my next order, post it all for Sale and go buy what I was using before. Boxes will look more professional, will hold / stick better and we will feel better about our packages going out.
The tissue paper is too costly also, 240 sheets at $18.99 = $.08 a sheet. Maybe I will just use it up as dunnage stuffing and not buy any more of that either. I can get larger sheets of nice newsprint for half the cost.I concur with Ryanne and Nancy above. Being in printing for decades, both screen printing and lithography. We used fixed racks like these for small run print editions to dry prints on. Also we used them in our shipping dept. to collate advertising materials. Place a thick stack of sheets into each space. Start with page one in top slot, then page two, page three, etc. going down the column. Then we had two employees start at the top and work there way down by pulling one page at a time and when finished you have a “collated set of pages #1-whatever”. With two employees one goes down the first said then goes to the other side of the table, then the second employee starts on side one. this way you have two people pulling and stacking sheets at a time.
I would suggest and look at how the shape of the rack is and the dimensions to see if it is sized for an 8-1/2″x11″ or 8-1/2″ and 11″ to support the piles evenly. If larger then I would opt for the drying rack. Of course we had large electric conveyor belt dryers and also large rolling racks with 50 flip up racks per unit. But I think maybe use a combination of keywords.Hope this helps… mike at mdc galleries in Atlanta.
Hey Shortcut… I do have a couple of comments on the airplane print but have a few Sales we need to take care of. Maybe tomorrow after mid-morning shipping has gone out.
mike in AtlantaThanks Whiskey for the Kudos. Appreciate the fact that some do enjoy the details of some topics I comment on and that you took the time for a shout out.
Thanks,
Mike at MDC Galleries in AtlantaWell it got me. I made an early morning sale on Bonanza. One of very few I do get. I went to my Seller Dashboard to complete shipping and was Greeted with tiny voices singing Jingle Bells. Took me a few minutes to click through all the Tabs I keep open in my browser looking to see if I had some sort of unwanted Java Script running. Finally closed the Bonanza tab and it stopped.
If it was an April Fools joke, they also have several other jokes, like auto discounting sales we make on there when we are NOT running a sale, also charging $.95 per shipping label we create using the Bonanza label printer and the fact that when we print a Bonanza label it is always oriented wrong for our printer set-up for Ebay and have to re-format to print their labels, then format back to an orientation for Ebay [always loose a sheet or two of labels with Bonanza]. I will stop short of saying Bonanza itself is a joke because we do sell maybe one item a month on there, but OK I did get a smile hearing Jingle Bells from a falsetto Chipmonk voice. Ha-Ha.
mike in atlanta
