Well, it’s May now. I guess I should just start shooting for a quarterly update, huh? That seems to be about the best I can do with updating these sites. I should probably just teach a robot to do it and call it a day… Anyway, things are going well. The job is still great; learning tons and working with really awesome people. I do have a few side projects / crazy ideas bouncing around, so here’s the good old brain dump of what I’m thinking about these days:
- Automated T Shirts – I’m really dying to get into a new 4-Hour Work Week style project, and I think setting up an automated t-shirt company could be a good candidate for that. Setup would consist of a website, payment gateway (probably PayPal), API integration to the print company, and designing a few shirts. From there, all orders would be automatically processed and shipped through the site. I would *most likely* do this on Magento just to have my own Magento store to play with, but I’ll also need some other services from the store (like handling downloads and subscriptions), so using Magento would probably be useful in the long run (even though it can be a pain in the butt). Weekly work would be updating and reviewing google/facebook ads and working on overall SEO/SEM.
- Subscriptions/Donations – I think i would like to build a section of site full of applications that you can subscribe or donate to in return for access. These could be anything from page scrapers to stock watchers, tide logs, etc. I am always developing small applications to help make life on the web more efficient. Some of these can be a little black-hat, so it will probably be a small, contained group of folks.
- Custom POS – A good friend is opening a beer garden soon, and I’m working on a small POS system to use with lots of backend tracking and analytics. Primarily focused on beer taps and some retail, but the real focus will be on management, automation, and simplicity.