Despite being six months into my international travel odyssey, I’m still quite tied to the good old US of A.  As my stubborn “mispronunciation” of words like tomato, oregano, and Nissan indicates, I’m a stranger in a strange land.  I can’t help but to think of every price tag I see in US dollars, so things like American bank accounts, credit cards, and good relations with the IRS are still integral to my existence.

The Internet makes so many elements of my trip easy as, but for some reason Citibank still wants a physical address to send me useless garbage and balance transfer checks that I can never seem to opt-out of.  What’s a boy to do, short of having a friend or family member sort through all of his mail?

Enter Virtual Post Mail, a web service which acts as a magic portal between a physical mailbox and your email inbox.  I have a nice Los Angeles address to give to people in the US who have no idea that I’m overseas.  Envelopes are scanned as they come in, and emailed to me for review.  I can trash my numerous T. Rowe Price investor reports and death threats without reading them, or opt for the more interesting items to be opened and scanned.  I’m paying around $10 per month for a plan which more than covers the volume of mail that I receive.

The ability to quickly check my mail without building up a pile of papers is useful.  Usually I’ll opt to save the scanned images and have Virtual Post Mail shred the originals, but once in awhile something comes through that I need a physical copy of.  One of my credit cards recently expired, and Citibank sent me a replacement in one of those boring, generic, “Attention Mail Thieves: This is definitely not a credit card!” envelopes.  Opening boring mail is one of my favorite things to do when it only takes one click, and a few hours later I received an email with a scanned photo of my new card.

For under $5, I had the new card shipped to me here in Australia via USPS First Class International mail.  It arrived a few days later, and I promptly put it to use to buy things that I don’t need.

Overall I like Virtual Post Mail and it has been well worth the money, but not everything is puppies and rainbows.  The website could use a bit of iPhone love… it’s a bit cumbersome to log on and manage my mail when I’m not at a computer.  Also, it’s a bit of a pain to sign up for the service, but that’s probably not the fault of the company:  The USPS requires notarized documentation saying that you give permission for a third party to manage and open your mail.  Leaving this until my last few days in Los Angeles was probably a bad idea… I had a few frantic hours rushing around to find a notary public that didn’t charge a million dollars.

Verdict: Far better than flying home to check a P.O. Box.  Far less embarrassing than giving a friend or family member access to my credit card statements.

If you’d like to send me a postcard, love letter or death threat, just let me know and I’ll give you my address w/ mailbox number!

This presence should be publicly accessible (sure, it can link to private things such as your Facebook profile, but it can’t be your Facebook profile), and have a short and sweet URL, which you’d potentially be willing to print on a physical calling card.

As someone who recently printed up some Moo MiniCards to hand out while traveling, the decision of what information to actually put on the things was not as easy as it could have been.  If I only get five lines of text to work with, what deserves to be printed?  My email address?  My website URL?  Phone number?  My Twitter, Facebook and Flickr URLs?  What if I change my mind later?  Having a single, easily-editable hub for all of these things would make life easier.  I’m not the only one to notice this, and now there are a number of online services trying to fill this niche.

I tried card.ly in the past, and while it works well, it felt too impersonal… more “business card” than “calling card”.  It felt like something a “I swear I’m cool — look guys, I’m TWEETING!” sysadmin would use.  The cool kids were never going to jump on this bandwagon.

After launching my personal website, I came across Flavors.me, a similar service which is getting major traction with the online crowd who demand style with their substance.  The site allows anyone to create a visually appealing online hub for free, with additional features available for $20/year.  Within minutes you can throw together something that looks reasonably professional, while highlighting your creativity — you unique Brooklyn snowflake, you.  Sometimes you are uniquely defined by a photo you took of a sheep pissing in a field, and Flavors.me is not going to deny you that.

A very important aspect of Flavors.me is that it attempts to go beyond simply linking to the web services you want featured.  The default behavior is to actually show your Facebook/Twitter/Flickr content on your Flavors.me page, which requires you to authorize Flavors.me with each of these services’ APIs.  I have no problems doing this for sites like Twitter and Flickr where I consider all of my data to be public, but I was not pleased with the idea of letting strangers read my Facebook content via Flavors.me.

I’d like an easy option for basic linking to these external sites, as opposed to giving yet another 3rd party access to my data.  Let Facebook handle the task of deciding who is allowed to see my Facebook data… hell, they’re bad enough as it is, without letting someone else into the mix.

Another gripe I have is that many users are using high-resolution, high-quality background images on their profiles, which take forever to load.  What is this, the new MySpace?  I get it, you’re a quirky person with a talented photographer friend, so why wouldn’t I want a 1.8MB JPEG of you?  Flavors.me could easily throw up some warnings or add some basic functionality to resize and adjust image quality on these uploads.

Despite the bad, I may continue to play with Flavors.me … I probably won’t upgrade to a premium account since I have this site, but I’m glad to see that it exists. Browsing the directory for coolsies kept me entertained for over an hour, and chewed up some serious bandwidth.  Oh Australia, metered broadband still makes me laugh.

Image via The Big Caption

I’m still fixing up some bugs and making some tweaks, but here it is: a personal website that hopefully won’t suck.