Update 2: As of Saturday morning July 17 the mysterious “PCC Blog” seems to have vanished- but never fear! We saved a copy of it!

It’s probably not what you expect to find on what the US Postal Service refers to as its “award winning” web site, but there it is- an article entitled “Residential Water Heaters Buying Guide”:

Whether you are building a house from scratch, remodeling a home or simply trying to replace the broken water heater, knowing as much as you possibly can about residential water heaters is important. Many people are not aware that there are actually two main types of water heaters for the home. There are electric and gas water heaters.

… and so forth. I came across this item, along with “Studies on Diabetes I Found Interesting” and my favorite, “shop til you drop at the post office” while visiting the USPS’s PCC Insider web site. The May 19 Special Edition has a link labeled “PCC blog. Click here”. Click on the link and you are presented with the advice on water heaters!

The articles aren’t actually on USPS.com- the link takes you to 2pccblog.com, which is not registered to the USPS. A casual user (or PCC member) wouldn’t know that, however, since the link doesn’t even use the standard USPS.com “exit” page which warns you when a link takes you away from the USPS site. Ironically, the PCC Insider page with the link to the water heater blog also features a picture from the National Postal Forum that just happens to include Bob Bernstock, the guy who awarded a $4.5 million no bid contract to some former cronies to “to help modernize the Postal Service’s Web site”.

Update: It looks like the water heater blog is pretty important! We’ve found links to it from other USPS PCC sites, the 2009 Comprehensive Statement on Postal Operations, and in a press release on National PCC Day 2008, which heralded the site as “the first official postal blog”. The press release is dated September 17, just a week after the domain 2blogpcc.com was created by a Garth Williams of Portland Oregon, who is still listed as the registered owner. The first entry in the blog’s archives is dated September 26, 2008, and is entitled “how can the postal service better meet your needs” (capitalization as in the original). The post begins:

I am recovering from Mid-Terms{which BTW we, as students, did not do very well on. More about that later.}… I will be studying and re-working items for my return to school after “Spring Break” which is this week. HoHummm…

While resting my mind from Graphic Design I found the following:

Idchicks193 In a remarkable speech over the weekend, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recommended that Americans start storing canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds as the prospect of a deadly bird flu outbreak approaches the United States. {see link} : You gotta be kidding me… “Under our Beds”?

One of the press releases describing the site promises “links to local PCC locations, to the Postal Service’s Rapid Information Bulletin Board (RIBBS) and to the National PCC site.” Sure enough, there is a blog entry at 2blogpcc.com headlined “business service network links usps and customers”. Here’s how it begins:

Pcsnowman ~Does anything sit on your computer? If so what is it and why is it there? I sit at this machine much too often and I needed something fun smiling back at me. That’s my PCsnowman over there. I collect snowmen… :-} He is a little beanbag guy that I can place in many positions. {don’t ask which ones} Wish he could talk or sing!

Curiouser and curiouser…

There are lots of free tools available these days for creating and enhancing web sites- I rely on a number of them every day. This blog uses WordPress, for example, while postalnews.com uses Google’s Blogger. Google also provides my email, and for some time now, I’ve used Firefox as my web browser. Using Firefox is what caused me to be blissfully unaware of the fact that a number of users were unable to view my sites yesterday afternoon.

Another free tool I (formerly) used, Sitemeter, a hit-counting service, upgraded some of its scripts yesterday but apparently failed to check them out carefully enough. And then, I’m guessing, Sitemeter hopped in its car and took off for the weekend. Meanwhile, web sites across the country started dropping like flies.

I didn’t find out about it until a reader emailed me to let me know- after all, the site was loading just fine in Firefox. The folks at Sitemeter were apparently still in the dark about the problem, because their own web site was producing the same “operation aborted” error message that their product was causing on mine. When I checked their site using Firefox, I could find no mention of any problems.

According to The Reference Frame, the culprit was actually a known bug in Internet Explorer 7. If you use a newer or older version of IE, or better yet, Firefox or Safari, there’s no problem. Sitemeter’s statistics tell me that 54% of postalnews.com’s readers use IE7, though, so I didn’t have any choice but to remove the code from the site.

The fact that the bug is actually a Microsoft error mitigates Sitemeter’s guilt a bit I suppose. But even so, it’s hard to believe that they’d change code without (apparently) testing it out thoroughly with the browser that, like it or not, still has the lion’s share of the market! (And how could they not know that their own site was dead for 18 hours?) I guess the bottom line is that despite all the state of the art free tools available, there’s still some truth to the old saying “you get what you pay for”!

Rochester, NY (PRWEB) December 7, 2007 — Kodak, the world’s foremost imaging innovator, announced an new arrangement between Kodak and multi-channel technology specialist Indros Group. This arrangement includes an integration between Kodak’s Darwin VI Authoring Tool and Indros Group’s Easy Personalized URLs (www.easypurl.com), a popular platform for creating personalized URLs and customized landing pages for direct mail that is used by many of the nation’s top agencies and printers.

This integration will enable users of Kodak Darwin VI Authoring Tool to add personalized URLs to their direct mail campaigns using Indros’s solution. Personalized URLs allow prospects to respond to direct mail by visiting a web page created expressly for each individual respondent.

Kodak Darwin VI Authoring Tool converts documents originated in QuarkXpress and Adobe InDesign into variable data documents in which all elements — text, graphics, colors, layout, charts, backgrounds, personalized images and even entire pages — can be dynamic. Darwin VI authoring software can create complex campaigns with many changes in variable elements without the need for scripting or programming, working with very large databases of recipients.

“Darwin VI Authoring Tool users will (now) be able to add URLs for personalized landing pages to direct mail pieces, providing an immediate response mechanism for recipients. Adding this web function drives better conversion of prospects, increased response, profiling and more effective tracking of campaign results,” noted Gershon Alon, Director, On-Demand Applications, Kodak’s Print On Demand Solutions. “The cross-media capabilities enabled means commercial printers can now offer their customers the opportunity to increase responses to their mailings while shortening response time, using the web to offer prospects the ability to visit a personalized website.”

“We are excited about this integration,” explained Tej Kohli, Executive Vice President at Indros Group. “Darwin VDP software customers can now gain access to our Personalized URL technology in a streamlined manner, allowing for an integrated campaign workflow. Additional, our robust reporting interface will provide users of Darwin VI detailed analytics in real-time. For agencies and printers, creating personalized multi-channel direct mail campaigns has never been easier.”

The Indros Group solution works with the Windows version of Darwin software (v.2.0). To test the latest version of the Darwin VI authoring tool, visit

www.graphics.kodak.com/darwin.