Taimapedia – The 420chan Wiki Is Here

Taimapedia is the 420chan Wiki. We’ve been working on it on and off for the past little while, and are now opening it to you all. There’s already Wiki/Board crosslinking set up, you can enclose a word in ~tilde~ characters to link to an article on Taimapedia.

Feel free to use Taimapedia for all of your board FAQs, guides, and information on topics relative to the boards. There’s already plenty of activity going on, so join in!

The 420 Store – Daily Update #1

It’s been over 24 hours now since I let the public start poking around the store. How are things doing? Let’s have a recap.

• Three separate bugs related to payments were found and fixed
• Several missing countries were added
• Drastic speed improvements bringing page load times from 15 seconds down to 2-3 on average
• Lots of whining

That last one brings me to my next point. E-commerce solutions are a gigantic pain in the ass to work with, especially when you’re doing it all yourself. The amount of work required to add a single shirt design to the catalog involves repeating the same steps 40-50 times to account for every variant, as every size, gender, and color difference is counted as a separate product. Those 40-50 variants take close to 2 hours to add and set up. Multiply this over several designs while you’re still working on dozens of other things at the same time. Not only is launching an effort like this expensive, it’s also a ton of hard work.

Speaking of expensive, a lot of people are complaining that the prices are too high. Most of them aren’t noticing the bold text stating “All prices are in Canadian Dollars”. Subtract about $4-5 from the items and you have the price in USD. The other group of people are assuming we have a large pool of funds and the equipment to make selling shirts for $13 an option. We’re just starting this store, and the entire purpose of it to begin with is to replace the old tired routine of having to ask for donations to pay for the place every month. This is our way of giving back to you, for supporting us. This is also why we refused to use anything like Cafepress – that would be taking the easy way out. No real effort involved, it wouldn’t really mean anything, and that’s exactly what we want to avoid. We’re working our asses off for you.

Some of you, however, still want the ability to donate. We have something planned to accommodate this.

Sometime this afternoon there’ll be new threads posted about the store, and we want to collect as much feedback as possible as we add more items. Constructive feedback, not dumb crap.

Lastly, as soon as the majority of the current planned catalog is added, we’ll begin to display the store more prominently. Some people were wondering why we haven’t announced it on the front page or put any banners up or anything. We want it to be complete, first.

The 420 Store is Now Open

http://store.420chan.org

This is a slow launch, making sure everything’s working before adding the full product line. Shipping rates are also much more sane now.

I’m going to wait a few hours before posting threads about it – I want this to be a gradual launch.

If there’s any problems or your country is not available, post a comment and I’ll get it added ASAP.

Update 1: More stuff added.
Update 2: Payment issues fixed, forgot to change from the developer account to the real one. You can all try again now without issue.

420chan’s Store Opening For Pre-orders Tomorrow

I’m happy to announce that (barring any further complications) our internally run store will be slowly opening for public use sometime tomorrow. As there might be kinks here and there, we’re starting off with a small selection of items. There’s going to be more added over the next 2 weeks, so keep your eyes peeled.

This was supposed to happen 2 nights ago, but there were some issues with shipping calculations and we ended up having to manually input various shipping scenarios dozens and dozens of times. Fun stuff.

Pre-orders are going to go on for a few weeks, and we plan to begin shipping items in early to mid-August.

We’re beginning with basic items, no smoking utensils as our current payment options do not allow them. Once the store is somewhat established, this will be possible.

Stay tuned for more details!

420chan Firefox Extension Updated

Everyone on Firefox 3.5 can now use it fine. I took the opportunity to clean up a few bugs but there’s still some fixes eluding me – any Greasemonkey or jQuery users around to help me sort them out?

There’s a new function called the Discussion Map. This shows you every reply to a post. You’ll find the Reference links beside Quick Reply.

The extension now works under HTTPS. It’s been available for a while now, originally meant for staff purposes but is also used by some tinfoil hat wearing users.

There was another feature I was trying to work in for this release but unfortunately the original author of the script never tested it on 420chan, so I’m still debugging it myself.

Oh, those aforementioned bugs, I can’t figure out for the life of me how to make jQuery events fire outside of their normal scope – this is related to spoilers not working right in expanded threads.

Don’t use the 420chan Extension? Go here to get started!