Soliciting Fame

Apparently I really suck at maintaining a blog. Wait, I knew that when I started Soliciting Fame over 100 posts ago…

Anyway, again, I’m still here. Midterms are done so I guess there goes my excuse for not posting. The cafe is still hanging in there and the Free WiFi Project is slowly growing. I need to really pound the streets in order to get some more nodes out there but finding the actual time during regular business hours is pretty tricky.

In other news I started yet another company, this one is named Campus Cards. We specialize in business cards for students. Cool idea, eh? That’s what I thought. I think that student business cards is a pretty untapped market segment so we’ve got a pretty good chance of doing well. The cool thing, in my opinion, about Campus Cards is how I set the site up to use fillable PDFs embedded in the page. Students fill these out and then pay through PayPal and I get a nice email with a PDF attached which is all ready to hit the printing press.

I started Campus Cards when I, in my position as “Director of IT” (yes, that’s in quote because I really just look after the website) with the School of Business at the U of A, was asked to look into helping our students get business cards. Realistically there are no printers around that will give you less than 250 colour cards for less than $30. Even if you find someone who is willing to do meet that price point you are still going to get dinged with design fees when your print ready art isn’t perfect and also shipping if they aren’t local. At Campus Cards we are offering students across Canada 100 colour business cards for between $15 and $20, inclusive of all GST and fees, and shipping is free.

This is sort of a unique opportunity. Doing the cards manually is time consuming, but I’m doing my best to streamline the process. Outsourcing isn’t really an option because of shipping costs. That’s one thing you can count against globalization: small transactions won’t survive international shipping fees.

Anyway, back to work at my new “home office” in the condo I recently moved into.

Running multiple businesses and being friends with similar people we all know how expensive it is to have any sort of signs made. We’re very much do-it-yourself kind of people, so we bought a vinyl cutter.

First off, this thing was cheap. We shopped around and found a cutter from US Cutters on eBay (don’t buy from their website). After negotiating my own shipping the end price door to door was around $505. Not too shabby for a 36″ vinyl cutting monster.

The cutter itself is about 50″ long and it comes with a stand. Along with the tiny little cutting blades there is a pen plotting attachment that you can use to draw with.

We’ve cut a few things already, mostly stuff for Rob’s farm as you will see in the pictures.

Applying vinyl is pretty straight forward as long as you think things through in advance. It’s really sticky and once it’s on whatever surface you are using it’s not really coming off without being destroyed.

Anyway, with the amount we spent it’ll save us a fortune in sign making costs. Since cutting a few yards of vinyl ourselves will cost about $4/yard and having a shop do it would cost 10 times that.

Many people, and a lot of my friends, complain about their “private data” being made known to large companies. Facebook, Rogers, and other huge companies constantly get flak for collecting personal information about their clients. But they do this to make advertising and your overall user experience MORE RELEVANT. Sears however, sucks at this:

This is a prime example of why I don’t care if a company has my demographic information. It’s not even that personal. Hell, there needs to be some sort of “OpenCookie” standard where I can plant a cookie in my browser that says I’m 23, male, and from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada so that the next time I search for coffee equipment I’m not being hit with bra advertisements that are completely irrelevant to me.

I’m going to start developing sites using a CSS framework. I’ve read lots of arguments for and against and I feel like I won’t be delving into super complicated content anytime soon and therefore a prebuilt framework should speed things up a lot.

That’s really the goal that myself and Rob and going for, speed. We’re aiming to create inexpensive, customized, and well designed websites for small businesses and organizations. In order to keep prices down and profits up that means we need to be fast. I think that using a CSS framework will help me out.

I watched Yahoo’s YUI introduction video by Nate Koechley and it taught me a lot. Yes I have to submit to their div names and whatnot but I think it’ll speed things up.