Started a T-Shirt shop

I have always been fascinated by a business like a market stall on a weekend. Since shifting to Germany, the chance of that happening is small.

So I started to look around the internet to see what is happening. I came across the concept of drop shipping. Drop shipping is a concept where you are selling the physical product, but the inventory is held by your supplier. The supplier also ships the product directly to the customer. Do a check via Google on what drop shipping. Plenty of information will pop up. T-Shirt is a possible avenue.

The T-Shirt bug started when I came across Tee Spring after hearing it on Mixergy. The thing about Tee Spring is that it uses the crowd funding model. You design a T-Shirt by putting some text and some graphic on a T-Shirt. Next you specify how many T-Shirt is your minimum quantity, and set your selling price. You will also need to specify the number of days it is on sale for. Once all these are set, it is time to launch it onto the market. The idea is to get the minimum of number of folks to sign up. When the time has expired and if the minimum number of folks have signed up, a production run of the T-Shirt is executed and delivered out. Some folks have had great success with this platform, unfortunately, I didn't

The next platform I tried was a spreadshirt. It is a more traditional model. You basically create a shop, upload or create some T-shirts, and start the marketing campaign. You can see what my efforts are at http://smartarsecomments.spreadshirt.co.uk/.

The one thing that I did which I should have taken sometime is the name of the shop. I called it "smart arse comments". In some ways, it portrays a red neck attitude for the shop, not something that I feel happy about. It also limits to what I can sell in the shop. The name of the shop should represent the type of T-Shirt it is selling. In the long term, I definitely don't want to see T-Shirts with smart arse comments on it.

Well, I have created 8 T-Shirts on it, any haven't managed to sell any yet. Today is the 8th since I started the shop. The next thing I need to do is to create more T-Shirts, and the start the marketing campaign. I hope that the type of T-Shirts that I have for sale is of interest to the general public.

Hacker News in various flavours

Hacker News is a news aggregator for news tidbits in the tech work about the hacker community.  In this context, hacker means someone who takes something and modifies it to be used in a different manner. The modifies aspect is the hacking activities.

So without further ado, the following is how some folks from the HN community likes to show the news items. 

Websites

• The official one from Y Combinator. Hacker News - http://news.ycombinator.com/
• A monthly printed magazine - Hacker Monthly - http://news.ycombinator.com/
• A weekly email newsletter - Hacker Newsletter - http://www.hackernewsletter.com/
• Scrape of all the showhn news items - showinghn - http://showinghn.com/
• With a different front end UI - an unofficial alternative hacker news interface - http://hckrnews.com/
• hn summaries - http://hnsummaries.com/
• hacker news mobile - http://ihackernews.com/
• hacker news mobile - http://hn.gethifi.com/#/
• hacker news daily - http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/
• hacker news rankings - http://hnrankings.info/
• hacker news for IOS - http://inoads.com/hn/
• hacker slide - http://hackerslide.com/

Browser extension

• chrome extension - autobahn- http://vlad.github.com/autobahn/

Twitter

• for items that reached 20 points - Hacker News 20 - @newsyc20
• for items that reached 50 points - Hacker News 50 - @newsyc50
• for items that reached 100 points - Hacker News 100 - @newsyc100
• for items that reached 150 points - Hacker News 150 - @newsyc150
• HN from Y Combinator - @hnycombinator
• tweet on the showhn - Just Show HN- @justshowhn
• News.YC - @hackernews
• HNTweets - @hntweets

Initial foray into Android development

I took a deep breath and jumped in. You know what, the water is fine.

I finally made the small jump into Android development. Although, I am just hacking about, I am determine to build something useful. Firstly, useful for me as the first customer, and the useful for anyone else.

The stimulus for getting started in the Android development is the release of the SDK from Google that is easy to install and to get started upon. The one thing that really threw me off to get started on development on the Android platform getting the development environment working correctly.

I have always had a low budget x86 PC as my home computer, and this is what I was going to use as my development machine at home. To get the Android development working nicely on this was a nightmare. I recently bit the bullet and got a Mac Mini with a Intel I7 core. Even with this modest setup, it proved to be the silver bullet for me to get started. The nicely packaged SDK also help enormously.

I downloaded the SDK for Mac from Google. The download from Google installed a properly configured Eclipse and SDK in their correct location. I can simply start Eclipse and start following the Android developer's training. 

To round up the overall development, I signed up for a Github account. I also had to install Git, but that was pretty painless after following the instructions here. I have resisted installing any Git GUI client as I really like the command line interface.

Creating a landing page

If you listen to the many startup podcasts, the one thing that is consistently common among the advice from them when validating an idea is to create a landing page.

What is a landing page? Well, a landing page is a website that gives the visitor quick spiel of your idea and a spot for them to signup to it. The idea is to measure how much interest there are out there to you idea. There are no real measure for this except for the number of signups.

A measure of visitors the landing page is not a good measure as they are only considered as a casual visitors, and does not necessary show real interest in the product.

My landing page at launch.48translate.com was based upon the services of launchrock.com. It uses one of the standard template. I just updated the description and the background to give it a different flavour. Looking at it, it is unmistakeably a page from launchrock.com.

My landing page is my attempt to capture an email address which is a sign of the interest.

I could have gone with a different implementation by using something like weebly.com and embedding a widget from someone like mailchimp.com. Both solutions are free to get started on, but the weebly implementation requires two services, where as launchrock.com only requires the one services.

Some things to lookout for. 

1. When you first starting a landing page, make sure that your naked address and your www address also redirected to it. 
2. Get someone to review your text that you put up on the landing page. Make sure that it is correct. Nothing more embarrassing that publishing some action that you cannot support.
3. Have something on your landing page that could encourage visitors to signup.

csv.DictReader in python

I am playing around getting python to parse simple CSV files. In the past, it would get quite difficult no matter which language I choose to do it. PERL does some useful parsing of it, but python is dead simple. It becomes even simpler when usign the csv.DictReader. The following snippet of code illustrates the point.


#!/usr/bin/python
from optparse import OptionParser
import csv


parser = OptionParser()
parser.add_option("-f", "--filename", dest="filename", help="the filename of the csv file")


(options, args)=parser.parse_args()


if options.filename != None:
        csv_filename = str(options.filename)
else:
        csv_filename = "foobar.csv"
print "csv file is " + csv_filename


inputfile = open(csv_filename, "rb")
csvReader = csv.DictReader(inputfile, fieldnames=['create_ts','title','url','id','hn_discussion'], delimiter=',', quotechar='"')


for row in csvReader:
        print row['id'] + " " + row['url']


inputfile.close()

The first part just parses for an input from the console for a filename of the csv file.

The second part is the interesting part where it parses the file as per the given fieldnames. The fieldnames were given during the call of the csv.DictReader.

By the way, this snippet of code is more prototype rather than production. Much error checking is missing and exception handling is missing, so beware.

What platform for Mobile apps?

This is just a list of development platforms that I can use for mobile apps.


Google Android SDK - Only for Android, however supported by Google.


Haxe.org - Multi-target. Also needs the Google Android SDK as it generates C++ code. Haxe is a multi target language, similar to Java.

Googlecl, what the f*ck is it?

I was going crazy trying to workout a way to upload data into the my blogger account. Sure, I could just write a post via the post option within blogger, but I want to do this in an automatic manner.


My first was to sent an email via the command line to blogger. The problem is that while it sort of work, I came across the problem that the post is uploaded and marked as a draft version. So I still need to login and publish it. Another problem is that my posts have pictures in them. I am unable to embedded a picture in the email that I am sending via the command line.


The second attempt is to access the Blogger API directly. However, during my research in the Blogger API, I came across googlecl. 


googlecl is Google's answer to accessing data to their services. Their services includes Blogger, Picasa, Docs and many more.


googlecl is also able to upload a file. So if that file is a html file, it would be rendered quite nicely by blogger.


The commandline is


google blogger post --src [filename.html] --title "a title" --tags "awesome"


The article has some hints if googlecl docs are too confusing.