kerravonsen | Threadless Balloon (Reply)

As I said in Popping the Red Bubble, I'm freezing new uploads to RedBubble.

And now I'm buried deep in writing Perl scripts.

Because I have now decided on a place to move to. Whether I remove my shop completely when I complete the move, or just leave it there sitting static, I haven't decided.

So where am I moving to?

I have decided to move to Threadless. My new shop URL is: https://fluidvisions.threadless.com

Why Threadless?

They actually answered my questions on Twitter.
They have explicitly stated that they aren't ever going to introduce fees. Of course, that promise is utterly worthless if they ever change hands (given what happened with Etsy) but it's okay for now.
They have been around for 20 years, so that seems reasonably solid.

I only have a couple of things up on Threadless so far, as I'm learning the interface. And I'm impressed there, too, their user interface is more consistent, more stable than RedBubble's interface.

I had a question about whether it was possible to do such-and-thing (expecting the answer to be "no") and they replied and said "yes, and this is how you do it". Whereas I've had bug-reports I sent to RedBubble which, while I thought they responded quickly and nicely, turns out that it was the "customer service" people who responded, and while some of the bugs I reported have been fixed, some have not. (sigh) Not that RedBubble is as buggy as Etsy. Etsy is a nightmare. But I can tell just by looking at the inconsistencies in the RedBubble user interface that they desperately need the code to be refactored. Whereas Threadless... well, I can't quite speak for their code, but their HTML is actually clean, which is a rare thing.

And where do the Perl scripts come in?

Well, I have a whole suite of bash scripts which I wrote to automate the resizing of art pieces to suit specific (RedBubble) products. And I've decided to rewrite them properly in Perl, also changed to suit Threadless products (which, while similar, are not the same as those of RedBubble).

The fundamental problem is that one size does not fit all; not all rectangles are born equal. Some are squares. Some are long and narrow. Some are short and fat. Some are wider than they are tall. Some are taller than they are wide.

While with some pieces of (abstract) art, it doesn't matter which way up you hang them, most art has a specific orientation: it is (a) Landscape (most paintings of landscapes are wider than they are high), (b) Portrait (most portraits are higher than they are wide), or (c) it can be a square.

The problem arises when you try to print that piece of art onto many different products, because each of those products also has a specific orientation: landscape, portrait, or square. Mouse mats are Landscape. Phone cases are Portrait. Throw pillows are Square. And so on.

Yes, one can upload one single image and plaster it over everything, and that's what most people do. But it won't look its best on everything. Bits may be chopped off to make it fit, or it may not fit at all. Yes, for most products one doesn't have to alter things, but there are some troublesome items which look awful with the default, depending on whether the original art is Portrait or Landscape or Square. So I wrote scripts to use programs like imagemagick to extend, mirror, rotate, enlarge, shrink, and crop my original art images to fit the size and shape of various products.

And, as I said, I'm currently re-writing them.

There are also other scripts related to the print-on-demand stuff which I will also need to update, rewrite, or create.

A web-scraping script which will semi-automate most of the upload-a-new-piece-of-art-to-the-shop process. I have hundreds (yes, about 500!) of pieces of art in my inventory and moving them all to Threadless would drive me mad if I had to do everything by hand. This one is a case of updating an existing web-scraping script to add in a module for Threadless, and that is mostly done.

A script to download and rename the product/promo images from Threadless. That's one drawback there compared to RedBubble: with RedBubble, the product images were named for the art AND the product; the Threadless images are just named by the art. And unfortunately just renaming them when you download them won't work, because they are always put into a .zip file, and the files inside the zip file are not renamed. So everything will get overwritten. This is going to have to be written from scratch, it's a new script.

Maybe I should put in a feature request to Threadless about the promo image names. Hmm.

Related to (B), I need to update my script which takes the promo images and adds titles and captions and tags to them, so that they are ready to be posted to social media, see (D).

A script for posting to social media. I already have such a script, but I think I'll need to expand it to cover more places and/or to post by itself on some sort of regular schedule. Basically because I've been using Tailwind to schedule posts to Pinterest, but that costs $$ and their interface is slow and annoying, and rather than speeding it up, they keep on introducing new features that I don't need. I'm paying for things I don't want, and I do not like that at all.

It makes me wonder what the heck other print-on-demand artists do, they who do not have an iota of programming skills and have to do every single thing by hand. Either they spend a heck of a lot of time on it, or they do the absolute minimum possible. Like never adjusting their images for their products, or only designing for t-shirts (which seems to be VERY common; the way people talk, it's as if t-shirts are the main thing and everything else is an afterthought), or only posting one promo image to social media, or only posting to one social media platform... Except that it seems to be working for them; why am I such a fail-worm?

I've also decided to retire a bit over a fifth of my inventory: (a) the oldest pieces are too small for many products, (b) fewer art pieces to have to upload, (c) opportunity to get rid of pieces I don't like any more.

So I have been, and continue to be, quite busy.