Around Thanksgiving my simple idea for an online form to sell sawhorse jigs turned out to be unworkable. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Luckily there was no harm done. I resorted to a kludge at https://adaptivecurmudgeon.com/sawhorses/ and it worked just fine. I think my audience is a little more adaptive than the usual. If ya’ can drive a car with a clutch ya’ can cut and paste for an e-mail.
By the way, the sawhorse jigs and rigs are still for sale. I can make them at will and bought a pile of filament. They aren’t a Christmas only thing.
Another step on my Curmudgeonly voyage of self improvement is to sort out a better approach. I installed the WooCommerce “plugin” for WordPress. It purports to do everything I could ever want. It will take orders, accept the money, forward the order to me, calculate shipping, print shipping labels, it’ll detail my car, it’ll clean out my refrigerator crisper drawer, it’ll empty the cat box, it’s a slicer, it’s a dicer…
Is there anything this wonderous plugin can’t do? Yes! It can’t leave me alone. It wants to integrate everything. It wants me to setup some sort of captcha thing. It wants to know my PayPal account details, it wants to know where I was last night, it wants to crawl up my ass and take measurements, it wants… ok I’m exaggerating but only partially.
In order to do everything it needs to know everything. But I’m the kind of guy that doesn’t bother to already know everything. I can barely remember how to login to the various bits and bobs of my half ass online existence. Sorting it all out for a damn plugin is not my forte.
So, there’s a link on my blog that you may or may not see. It says “store coming soon” (or at least it does on my “admin” version of the blog). The store thing may happen, assuming I can jump through enough hoops. But I’m in full procrastination mode so don’t hold your breath.
Part of my delay is that I find the whole thing boring! I’ll happily spend hours trying to figure out the proper chamfer on a 3d part. That feels like a real life challenge and I love it. Configuring linked cascading software feels like a fake and gay simulation of a real task. It makes my brain fall out. It’s just a personality thing. It’s a task ideally suited to some permanently on-line social media addicted millennial with a cell phone glued to their hand. If I find one I’ll offer them an unpaid internship that offers massive “career building synergy”!
The long game is that I get an online “store” setup now so the next time I come up with a 3d printer idea (or maybe just something I make by hand) I can “go to market” with minimal drama. Wish me luck. Life is a learning experience.