Hot on the heels of me pulling the shopping cart system was a big order of eyes which is a rush order for a tourist before they head home. I’m so busy with that, that I barely have time to be pissed off - which I am… very - about the whole shopping cart debacle. Suffice to say that I not only have to pull the shopping pages down, inform previous customers and rebuild one, but I may even be discussing things with the local authorities. A full account of this will be given later, once I’ve got more info.

But I’ve already got in mind plans for how I’m going to rebuild the shopping system. I’m not going to build a new one from an out-of-the-box package, and I can’t afford to hire a designer. So I’m going to let someone else do all the work for me: etsy. I will redesign one of my skins on the blogging software to get it to somewhat match what I had before as the home page. (The usual page links/logo/etc, plus four ‘latest products’ at the top, and the latest store news underneath; menu to the right with categories) I’ll add a product at etsy, then blog about it here - video and link/widget to buy at etsy. This already will be simpler than the system before. For a start, I can have video on the same page as the product info (because of SSL restrictions that causes errors between encryption and flash videos); the right hand menu can have drop down categories where you can immediately see what products are listed without having to go through all those extra pages; I won’t have to manually update the latest news on the home page, since home will be a blog and simply show the latest post. I haven’t worked out the details of how to sell the patterns yet (etsy doesn’t work with pdf files or zip files), but a solution to that may be in something like Lulu.com, which allows authors to sell ebooks, or even Amazon.

Obviously, all of this won’t happen straight away, and most likely be done after I get back from the US. This way it will allow me to go through and make sure all products are priced correctly, images are updated, old products removed, patterns edited to reflect URL changes, etc. I was going to have to take most of the products offline - before the debacle of the hack - while I was away anyway, I’m just doing it all a little earlier. Plus, I first have to sort out the issue of resolving the hack and pulling everything down before diving into all of that…

While we’re talking about eyes, this particular order is a first - I’m making up packs that are specifically for blacklight use. And it’s fun! I have some fleece and furry eyes that I normally sell, which come out great in blacklight. But I’m also making up some handpainted ones using neon colours. And they look pretty cool! Hopefully I can take some video of them before I ship them (although maybe not because I’ve misplaced my camera’s card). But even the blue candy eyes fluoresce, which I’m amazed at!

XX( sigh… I’m still very far behind so many trip planning things, preparation for commissions, an article … oh, and emails. Every non-important thing is on the backburner at the moment. But I think my new plans for the shopping system will at least relieve the burden that Cubecart gave me - heartburn that is - which has literally fouled up an average of once every two weeks since I implemented the software. Which was about this time last year. If I can get rid of the trouble it caused me, then I can go back to the fun stuff of making puppets and tutorials. And maybe start earning money instead of wasting it on something that doesn’t work. Estimated cost is something I don’t even want to think about.