HollyKing's Journal

As we all know I like to trade postcards with friends and new people via PostCrossing. I also have printed my own cards from photos I’ve taken. I have used two different services now and here are my thoughts about each of them. I would love to hear about anyone having experience with any other postcard printing service.

My first cards were printed at Vista Print (VP). With VP you upload a photo to their web service. Select a pre-made template or edit your own. Pick a quantity and make a payment. The post cards start at $24.99 for 100 cards or about $0.25 each. My order arrived quickly and without any problems. VP only supported one picture for the batch of cards and I chose the popular snowplow that I took in Alaska.

The next set of cards I printed via Moo. Instead of uploading photos Moo allowed me to chose photos from my Flickr account. Moo supports more than one photo per batch so I chose four (1, 2, 3 and 4) photos. Moo also has a selection of templates for the back and the one I picked included my userpic from Flickr. The cards from Moo are $19.99 for 20 cards or about $1.00 each. My order took a bit longer to arrive but it wasn’t a huge delay and they included some nice bonuses in the package.

While both companies had quality product I like the cards from Moo more. The stock is a bit heaver and the cards feel like they could handle abuse from the postal system better. Neither company prints standard sized postcards (4” x 6”). They were too short in one direction and too long in the other. This isn’t a huge deal because very few of the postcards I’ve collected fit in standard sleeves or pages. The front of both cards is nice and glossy. The back of the Moo cards has a better writing surface. I had fewer problems with smeared ink.

VP certainly wins in price. $1 each isn’t a huge amount for a custom postcards. It just looks like it next to $0.25 each from VP.

Moo has a much nicer UI. Using photos from my Flickr account meant I didn’t having to convert and upload photos before creating my cards. The ability to use more than one photo for a batch of cards was also a plus. I was able to pick one photo that included hollyqueen and I that I sent to family members. The rest of the cards are great for trading. Moo also offers a lot more options than just postcards. They offer mini cards, sticker books, note cards and greeting cards.

In the future I plan on ordering from both Moo and Vista Print. I’ll use VP for the bulk of the cards I want to trade since that will only cost $1.15 after you add $0.90 for international postage. Moo will get orders for small sets of cards that wouldn’t make sense to the general trader. For example the card that has a picture of us doesn’t mean much if you don’t know us.

In my spare time I’ve been working on a mash-up between LiveJournal interests and Flickr tags. Given a username my program pulls their list of interests from LJ and then asks Flickr for 5 images that use that interest as a tag.

The last piece fell into place this morning and I’ve been able create a few test pages on my local machine. It is very slow when I run it against a new user, which pulls the interest data from LJ. There’s obviously some bottleneck in how I add/update interests in the database.

I also need to create a scalable limit for the number of images returned. With the current default of 5 I get 715 images but someone like qt3_14159 only gets 5 images back. I’m thinking of something like 300 divided by the number of interests. Maybe less if Flickr starts complaining.

Anyway, here’s a sample pass on my interests. Should I keep going?