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Quillcards, the subscription ecard service that started life in 2007, is no more. The code was simply too old. It worked flawlessly for years, but in December last year the subscription module started to behave erratically, and the user database stopped recognising users. Finally, the website crashed and was impossible to resurrect.

For any subscriber who might wonder about security, the failure was a failure of the code and nothing was accessed from outside. After the site crashed and was impossible to fix, we deleted and destroyed everything.

Seventeen years – from 2007 to 2024 – is an amazing run for a website using the same code throughout.

For those that didn’t get a chance to use it, the service enabled users to log in to the website, choose an image from the built-in image library, write as much as a long letter, and send a unique link winging on its way. The recipient clicked the link and viewed the ecard on the website. And the sender received an email confirmation when the recipient viewed the card.

A perfect loop that everyone liked.

So the end of Quillcards is the end of an era. And we would like to thank the people over the years who enjoyed using Quillcards and told us how pleasant and appealing it was to use.

It may be that we will get it rebuilt. If so, you will learn about that here. Pending that, here is a screenshot of what the website homepage looked like. If we do get the Quillcards ecard service rebuilt it will be more modern because web design and code has moved on and continues to do so.

The Quillcards Blog

Boy, did we have fun with that. A lot of the posts came from our travels – from India to Austria – and several from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival from when we lived in Edinburgh. We both authored pieces and luckily we downloaded the texts and at least some of the images before the site crashed.

And while it is not a perfect reproduction of the originals, you can find posts on Quillcards.info where we put them to keep them from being lost in the sands of time – posts like this one about a woman with the stage name Bendy, who entertained the crowds on the streets of Edinburgh when she passed unstrung tennis rackets down her body.

The iNews newspaper of 19 July 2022 reports on page 34 that elephant tusks and pangolin scales had been seized in Malaysia

Malaysian authorities said yesterday they seized a container of African elephant tusks, pangolin scales and other animal skulls and bones estimated to be worth 80 million ringgit (£15m).

The Customs Department said in a statement it discovered the contraband hidden behind sawn timber following checks on 10 July on a ship coming from Africa. This included 6,000kg of elephant tusks, 100kg of pangolin scales, 25kg of rhino horns and 300kg of animal skulls, bones and horns, it said.

Investigations are ongoing on the importer and shipping agent.

Ivory tusks, rhino horns and pangolin scales are believed by some to have medicinal properties and are in high demand in Asia.

The World Wildlife Fund said the illegal wildlife trade threatens the survival of many species and has led to a 60 per cent decline in population sizes of vertebrate species.

I looked up how much an average elephant tusk weighs, and its 23kg. So 46kg per elephant – which means that someone had killed 130 elephants to get that haul.

And around sixteen rhinos at 1.5 to 2.5kg per horn.

There is a huge variation in the number of scales on pangolins, varying with species, and an average of 0.47 kg per animal is very approximate, but let’s say 200 animals killed to make the weight of scales found.

Is that a lot? The United Nations page on pangolin scales shows that 69.3 tons of pangolin scales were seized in 2019. That’s 147,447 pangolins.

The title of this piece is ‘Poaching for Elephant Tusks, Rhino Horns, and Pangolin Scales’, and the key word is ‘for’. The animal is ignored. An elephant is a tusk with a body attached, an inconvenient, large and dangerous body. A rhino similarly. A pangolin is easy – scales with an easy to manage body attached.

The hull of the Exxon Valdez ruptured when it hit a reef off the coast of Alaska on 24 March 1989. The oil tanker, owned by the Exxon Shipping Company, spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The result was that it caused the world’s biggest maritime environmental disaster.

In terms of volume of oil released it is second to the Deepwater Horizon spill of 20 April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico, but in terms of damage it is the worst by far. Despite a clean-up that went on for years, less than 10% of the oil was recovered.

Now, the Floating Storage And Offloading Vessel Safer (yes, that’s its name) is sitting off the coast of Yemen, rusting with 1.2 million barrels of crude oil in its tanks. That’s 50.4 million US gallons of oil, or more than four times the amount on the Exxon Valdez.

The FSO Safer lies 15° 07.0′ N, 042° 36.0′ E at the Ras Isa Marine Terminal (YERAI) between Yemen and Eritrea – and it has been there since 1988, rusting and abandoned. And since 2015 it has been a pawn in a game of chicken between Iranian-back Houthi rebels and just about everyone else. The Houthis want payment for the oil. The UN wants to avoid an ecological disaster.

Apart from the ecological damage at stake, to the south is the narrow Bab-El-Mandeb Strait (‘The Gate of Lamentations’ in Arabic) that gives out into the Gulf of Aden. Via the Suez Canal it is the shortest trade route between the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the rest of East Asia. It is one of the world’s major trade routes. 

So how is this going to play out? The Houthis agreed to let UN inspectors in, and then changed their minds. And meanwhile the hulk rusted on.

For months and months, and now for years – the IMO (an agency of the United Nations responsible for regulating shipping) has been trying to put a plan in place to try to make the SFO Safer safe or to deal with a leak if there is one. It reads like a bad dream. How could this be going on for so long. The Security Council Report for April this year reads:

There has been progress towards resolving the threat posed by the FSO Safer, the vessel moored off the Houthi-held port of Ras Issa in the Red Sea that is at risk of a major oil spill or explosion. On 5 March, the UN signed a memorandum of understanding with the Houthis and the Fahem Group (one of Yemen’s largest import companies) to transfer the oil on the Safer to a vessel that would replace the ageing tanker. The memorandum notes that the plan is contingent on donor funding and could entail an interim ship to hold the oil until a suitable replacement vessel for the Safer is acquired.

Now

The United Nations has been around cap in hand to every nation it thinks might have deep enough pockets to help pay to offload the oil. The nations say they have contributed as much as they can. The UN is still millions – maybe $20 million short. It has gone around cap in hand to individuals – and still there isn’t enough to pay to stop this ticking time bomb of a worldwide ecological disaster.