launch
Yesterday, we finally launched the pre-sale for button-down bird's first book, When Comes What Darkly Thieves. Much thanks to Kyle Meyer for his excellent design work. If there’s anything not beautiful about the site, it’s definitely my fault. We are, of course, using Big Cartel. It’s a bit surreal for me using Big Cartel to actually sell something. Up until now, most of my usage has been testing whatever feature I’m currently working on. In any case, it’s neat to be finally using our software for what it was designed to do.
The publishing model for button-down bird is a bit different from what the rest of the industry does. Basically, if you want one of our books, you have to pre-order. In a way, this is less risky for us, as we know how many to print. The catch is that if we don’t hit a certain minimum number of orders, we don’t make any money. We will only ever do one run of each book, so go order your copy now.
This week, we dropped another behind-the-scenes feature for Big Cartel—CSS minification. One of the easiest ways to speed up web page load times is to keep down the number of requests for files by consolidating all of your CSS and Javascript whenever possible into a single file. You can then knock the size of those individual files down by removing all extraneous whitespace and comments. The trick is that to be able to do this for Big Cartel stores we had to do a massive, context-sensitive find-and-replace on each of our (many) customers’ files, a process certain to break some people’s styles even if my code worked perfectly. Overall, it took us three days to consolidate every store, but we’re still manually cleaning up individual stores as reports of breakage trickle in. Apologies to anyone impacted.
So, I’m in New York at the moment (alas, briefly) hanging out with the fine gentlemen of Urbanscale. Met a great many new people last night at Temple Bar—seems Adam and company are a magnet for incredibly smart, talented people. Fine conversation, generous cocktails, and I very much look forward to doing it again. Work continues apace on Transitflow, though most recently I’ve been thinking through the architecture of Urbanflow. Transitflow is a subset of Urbanflow functionality, so many of the decisions I make now will ultimately impact Urbanflow, a fact that both scares and excites me. I’m also digging into what it’s going to cost to fully develop and run the infrastructure underlying both services which is a bit of a challenge since no one’s ever built something like this. That said, as Larry Ellison likes to point out, it all comes down to computers attached to a network.
Back to Nashville soon.