Why I use Printfection

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Victoria

“There must be a better way.”

A few months ago, while I was working on the redesign of my website (trust me, it was an incredible improvement), I ended up in a conversation with someone who wanted to start selling a couple items and were interested in my thoughts on Print On Demand services that could integrate with their website.  Being in the throes of trying to do exactly that kind of integration, I could pretty much tell them that, if they needed seamless integration, I didn’t have a lot of options to offer. CafePress offers no options at all, and Zazzle’s SiteBuilder is pretty good but is not seamless – see the links in the navigation bar for the best I’ve been able to do.

I thought to myself, surely there is a better way, and went researching.

The other big name out there is still Spreadshirt, but their focus is way different, so they were out of the running.  Then I stumbled across a relative newcomer to the POD scene – Printfection.

Printfection came to print on demand through making promotional products – that is, printing those free tshirts and mugs and bags and other things you get when you buy something or volunteer for something.  This background makes them a little different from the others in some possibly unexpected ways.

I’m still easing my way into using Printfection, but here are some of the big selling points for me:

  • The potential for incredible integration
    Printfection gives you total control of the CSS and design of your shop pages, plus allows you to point a subdomain at your shop.  That is, you can have shop.yourdomain.com point seamlessly at your Printfection shop.
  • Wait, there’s more integration options!
    They also allow you to make over the invoices and packaging so that they also look like they come directly from you, with your logo and everything.  That is, the entire process can look transparently like they are buying from you directly.
  • Oddball items and wide color choices
    They’re missing some things (buttons and stickers), but make up for it by having a wide variety of colors and styles of apparel and some quirky things I haven’t seen anywhere else (like cutting boards).  The only thing they’re really lacking is black shirts. Correction: if you remember to upload images with transparency, you can get quite a few dark colors, including black.
  • Small, quirky company with cool culture
    They’re based out of Denver, Colorado (which I’ve spent enough time in that it feels like local to me), have ditched the office, and seem bent on changing the promotional products business model.  They sound like the kind of company I could work for.

For someone who really wants strong integration with their website presence (but doesn’t have a merchant account to do payments) or who plans to do a mix of online and in-person sales, Printfection’s worth checking out.

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Be who you are.

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Victoria

Today, civets made me dump out my jewelry box.

I swear this makes sense, if you’re really really associative, like I am.

I went wandering around on Danielle Nelson’s blog because she posted today about marketing and civet poop, and stumbled onto her post about staying small vs. playing big.  Which is good stuff, but then I got down to the first comment (from my friend Kate) and was kind of struck by this one sentence:

Be who you are.

It’s just the exact thing I needed to hear this very morning.

And it’s something I see almost every day and don’t pay enough attention to.

I am a bad nerd; I am often a late adopter.

See, about a year and a half ago, I bought my first vaguely modern cellphone.  Like a proper nerdling, I started poking around in the settings and discovered an option for a “banner”.  Eighteen characters that display on the screen all the time.

It was also at a time in my life when I was struggling with a whole lot of stuff about keeping my sense of self at a time when I was getting a lot of negative external reinforcement about who and what I was and could be, and also in the middle of moving across the country to a hopefully awesome but uncertain situation. (It’s turned out awesome, but still somewhat uncertain.)  I had eighteen characters to say something positive and reinforcing that I would see every day.

Eighteen characters isn’t much, as it turns out.  I kept trying to cut it down and cut it down and cut it down, until what I had left was:

Be who you are.

Every day.  Be the best of who you are right now.

I needed to attend to that message today, because …

Marketing blogs may be the death of this site.

It’s slightly sad to say, because I like some of the marketing coaches whose blogs I happen to read, but … reading those blogs often leaves me looking at this site and thinking “I’ve got to narrow it all down to one thing.  What’s this crazy flash fiction on Thursdays thing?  Why is it that every week you seem to add a new Category?  OH MY GOD IT’S NEVER GOING TO WORK.”

It’s because they largely all have one big message to say:

Pick your one and only passion and build your business around it.

That’s not who I am.

I am legion, I contain multitudes.  I am a dilettantepolymath.  I am a bad data point.  I am a generalist.  I go in lots of directions all at once.

So, heck with it.  I am going to be who I am.

(As one might see on my updated ‘About NCD’ page.)

Oh yeah … my jewelry box.

Well, in the moment of realizing that this was something I wanted toneeded to write, and thinking about what kind of image I would want to use for it (like one does) and how I might search online for that or look through scads of my photos … I realized I had an awesome metaphor upstairs.

contents of my jewelry box

I blame the civets

Yes, I made almost all of those.  They range from elegant to simple, to utterly whimsical (including the ones that didn’t quite make it in the shot – small black airplanes).  I made the tshirt I’m using as a backdrop.

I am all of those things.  Witty, whimsical, plain, down to earth, elegant as hell, sharp and spiky, complex, riotnrrd, and more.

I haven’t figured out how to sell that diversity yet, but it’s who I am.

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Everybody Hates a Weatherman (318)

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Victoria

The desert hates the rain. In the desert, there are no gentle, soft rainy afternoons, where nothing suits better than sitting in the window and reading and watching the blessing of the clouds.  The desert conspires to make the constantly needed rain as unpleasant as possible, crying “Turn not your face from my blistering, baking love!” In the desert, the approach of clouds is heralded by whipping winds and a steadily increasing oppressive heat – in a land where all cooling comes from artificially raising the humidity, impending water cancels out any hope of being cool.

When the clouds finally arrive, if the heat relents far enough to allow the raindrops to reach the ground, the wind blows without ceasing, tossing branches, debris, and dust in the air. The rain bands together in huge droplets, so that their mass can hold them together long enough against the parched air that they might impact heavily on the surface. Otherwise, they spend their molecules in the atmosphere, high above the needy soil. The wind makes sure that in the moments before the water evaporates, dust turns it to mud, for a lasting reminder.

I only vaguely remember what a real rain is like, as in a dream, or from too many movies. Then and there, the rain fell like a benediction, like a friend. Late at night, I would sit on my window ledge, my feet hanging out in the air, and sing to the rain. It brought the world in close without suffocating, warm without overheating, and cool without chilling. In my memory, rain is all things pure and honest and simple.

Here, I open the window a crack, filling the room with the desert’s impotent anger, and press my face to the glass with longing. I want to be outside, not in these harsh, bitter rainfalls, but in the open-ended rainy afternoons of my youth.

You can never go back.

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Photography and me

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Victoria

Back in the day, I dabbled in photography.

By which I mean that I did black and whites and could do my own processing.  I rarely did the usual holiday snaps of people with their arms around each other in front of something – I was far more into still lifes, places, and occasionally portraits.  I still have a developing canister and a few other bits of hardware, though I’m sure all the paper expired years ago, and I haven’t got access to a darkroom.

It turned out that, once I didn’t have access to a darkroom, developing film got to be a bit more expensive than I could afford for a tertiary hobby.  At the same time, digital cameras had come out, but good ones were well beyond my means as well, so I pretty much stopped taking photos.

But then I started bringing lunch to work.

About three years ago, two things happened about the same time.  First, I got a decent digital camera (a Kodak 8MP miniDSLR with optical zoom).  Second, I started making boxed lunches for work and documenting them for my own amusement.  Instantly, I was back to fussing with angles and lighting.  I kept an eye out for a tripod at the thrift store until I found one for ten bucks.

My photos of a trip to Carlsbad Caverns were about 90% rocks and vistas, and only 10% the rest of the people with me.  On a trip to Philadelphia and England, I took an absolutely insane number of photos at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – not just of the art itself, but of the plaques – and even more in England, at the Tower, the College of Arms, a 12th C church, and my favorite non-existent historical location, 221B Baker Street.

What I discovered, when I looked at the museum photos later, was that the camera could see better than I could.

I’ve been wearing glasses for about twenty years now.  Once I went without new glasses for so long that I forgot that objects could have sharp edges.  The day I got that next pair of glasses, I wanted to shake people and point at the corners of tables and scream at them about the awesomeness of clarity in vision.  That night I went out in the desert and cried because I could see the Milky Way again.  I had forgotten the stars.

So you can see (ahem) why I might have been a bit excited when I discovered the potential for the camera to act as a magnifying glass that records.

I’m fascinated with macro photography … plants, flowers, textures, the patterns of light.

closeup of a foxglove plantYou can see why … I mean, did you know that foxglove flowers have little hair-like bits?

Did you know that many medieval painted portraits show ultra-fine details such as seams?  They do. (I just can’t show those photos here, since museums tend to get sticky about that kind of thing.)

The usual thing would be to set up a web gallery or post to A Popular Social Network or That Popular Photo Sharing Site and let all my friends ogle them to their hearts’ content.  That’s not how I roll, though; I put them up on Zazzle instead as Ninth Circle Photography.

Expect to see more photos here though, along with more chatter about photography.

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The programmer wore satin

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Victoria

Ada LovelaceWhen you think about hardcore, serious computer programming nerds, just remember …

The first computer programmer in the world wore corsets and dresses.

For that matter, she didn’t have a debugger.

… or a chance to test-run her code.

… because the machine she was writing for didn’t exist yet.

So, when somebody wants to look down on you as a programmer because you don’t look like a real computer programmer or talk like a real computer programmer, just remind them that Ada Lovelace didn’t do either of those things either, and she’s way more hardcore than they are.

I mean, do they have a computer language named after them? She does – Ada was written for the Department of Defense in the 1970s and is still actively updated and developed.

I mean, have they been reinvented as half of a crime-fighting duo in a webcomic?  She has – The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, aka “2dgoggles“.  Notice who gets top billing here?  (You cannot imagine how much I want to put an image of her character in this post, but I do try not to appropriate other people’s stuff.  Seriously, my desktop background is the 2dgoggles one of Ada inside the machine.)

I mean, do they have a Day named after them?  She does – and today is the third annual Ada Lovelace Day.  To learn more about it, check out the Finding Ada site: http://findingada.com/

So, my nerdy and creative and generally awesome friends … which women in nerdery inspire you?

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This Is Only A Test (117)

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Victoria

This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test.

If this were a real emergency, such as an invasion fleet of aliens, the Attention Signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions.  There is no official information or news, especially as regards alien invasions.  There are no official instructions, especially none suggesting you flee all major cities, stock up on ammunition and food, and join up with your local resistance fighters.

There is no emergency.  There are no aliens. They do not come in peace.

This station serves the Downingtown area. This concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

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