Hello there,

Getting late in the year, so I figured it's time to do a "holiday" post. I still haven't figured out what the blog portion of our website is going to focus on. I had thought we would try to stay away from the weekly thrift roundups, but it's been difficult to get out of that mindset. After all, we curently still find most of our vintage at thrifts and flea markets. Also, writing the long "authority" type posts and articles just takes a lot of effort, plus we still haven't recovered any readership yet so I'm not sure if it's going to matter.

David Weidman and Cathrineholm

I dunno - do blogs for vintage sellers matter any more? Showing my age here. I never recovered from the old school way of trying to rank in search engines, but at the same time I'm wary (and weary) of blogrolls, promoting websites, and trying to get noticed through commenting on other blogs. Instagram and social media have made it so much easier to get a bunch of likes, comments and faves. Been attempting to go that route, but it is slow. I mentioned I'm old, right?

The vintage product part of our site has been going a little more smoothly - slowly filling out the store with both new and older items, and adding some of the sold ones to the archives. We aren't going to add all of the old posts and products, so you might get an error message if you've arrived from one of the search engines.

I have some other plans for another portion of the site, hopefully will get to that early next year.

Side note - picked up some nice yellow Bitossi horses, but only recently discovered that the leg was cracked and reglued on one. Boo, but we'll still make money on it. We've been picking up more Bitossi and other Italian ceramics lately, some even at auctions where you've gotta put your money where your mouth is. Some blue Bitossi pieces are below.

I'm fairly excited about the lion/dog thingy, have only seen that a few times online. Got that one at the flea market which was a shock.

This is probably WAY past the end for true blogging - I think other (smarter) people are still going to make it work with some sort of amalgamam of social network promotion plus blogging, but I don't know how much relevance actual blog posts are going to have any more. The truer story is that I just haven't been keeping up with what needs to be done. Plus, I'm lazy. I haven't figured out how all the pieces fit together, let alone what the pieces are.

Maybe we just post some pretty pictures every day, and try to engage influential tastemaker Millenials on instagram. Here's a kitty cat with a Xmas tree, excuse me I need to check how many likes I have on that.

On a somewhat brighter and less sarcastic note, I did figure out how to integrate 3rd party comments into the newer blog posts. We're using Disqus for now, and though it absolutely kills me to give the comment reins to a 3rd party system, it was very easy to integrate. And if Disqus f*'s us over by implementing unrecoverable tech upgrades in the future (hello there Wordpress), we'll only lose the comments,which don't even exist on our own site, so it doesn't even matter SEO-wise. Yes, yes justifying everything here. But please do leave a comment, if only as a test to see if this is working.

LOL. I spent this entire post monku-ing about blogging, when I really meant to talk about the state of vintage buying and selling today and what it means to do attempt to do this full time. I guess I'll save that for next year. I promise to be more constructive, fitter and happier. Happy holidays everyone!