Feb 12, 2016 — This week I focused on moving our Android App towards the finish line. I’m so excited but there are a million little things to do before we can release it. Also…
When I cleaned up our website templates a few weeks ago, I introduced some bugs that have now been squashed. There was some missing spaces on the front-page cards. Also, the zoomed-modal had some really bad spacing/alignment of the title and image. Squished.
Thanks for eagerly expecting our Android app and bearing through the bugs this week!
Feb 1, 2016 — One month into the new year and I’ve already done something that embarrasses me.
I accidentally deleted a lot of old shirt sales; about 20,000 of them. This doesn’t really affect much because Day of the Shirt is about today, but it’s the matter of “accidentally” that concerns me. The deletions were an unexpected side effect of cleaning up some other code. I could still restore the deleted sales from backups, but I realized there was a lot of other cleanup that’s much easier to do now that I don’t have a huge pile of old sales lying around.
To make lemonade from lemons, I also did some intentional cleaning and removed 25 old t-shirt websites that were still in our database but no longer exist on the Internet. I’m planning to write a blog post in remembrance those old t-shirt websites.
When writing last week’s update, I realized that my triple-hyphen wasn’t automatically being turned into an M-Dash. So I updated the formatting (I use Markdown) to also convert special characters.
What is your biggest t-shirt-related mistake? Maybe it’ll make me feel better. Email us at [email protected] or tweet us at @dayoftheshirt.
Jan 25, 2016 — This will be a brief one with many small changes.
Nothing should look visually different, but I rewrote the HTML+CSS for displaying shirts on our front-page. Shirt permalink pages—where you go when you click the “info” link—have been rewritten too. The code is cleaner now and definitely more maintainable and flexible for future changes.
Last week I noted the choice of a new set of words to describe on sale as “promoted”. I spent more time rewriting things to be consistent.
In regards to this “News” section, I made the column of text wider because I found the previous narrow column difficult to read.
We had some issues updating sales from Tee No Evil and ShirtPunch. Those issues have been addressed.
Do you have ideas for tweaking Day of the Shirt better? Email us at [email protected] or tweet us at @dayoftheshirt.
Jan 17, 2016 — I started the week by doodling on a neon-green sticky-note a list of things I wanted to do this week. I accomplished half of them. This is that half:
Three years ago, Day of the Shirt added a RSS feed that simply listed the day’s t-shirt sales with a thumbnail of the design. It was simple but required a lot of scrolling to see all the designs. A year ago, I spent a lot of time creating a grid of thumbnails that could be embedded in the RSS feed to require a lot less scrolling to see all the designs. Each thumbnail in the grid had a small number in the corner and below the grid was a numbered list of links to buy the design. It was clever, but after using it for a while many subscribers pointed out that it still required scrolling up and down to cross-reference the designs. So I undid it. This week, Day of the Shirt’s RSS feed returns to a simple list of clickable thumbnails.
When you share a Day of the Shirt page on Facebook, they scan the page for the page’s title, description and thumbnail. Facebook does this so they can show a preview of the link you’re sharing. We can hint certain parts of the page to make it easier for Facebook to find what it’s looking for. We’ve always had the hinting, but it turns out we could hint even more. So we did.
There is a saying that “naming things” is one of the only two hard problems in Computer Science. I’ve struggled to find a good word that can cover the various grammatical forms of “on sale” for our internal database columns and functions. For the past 5 years, I’ve used “today”, but “today” can get confusing when you need a past participle (“todayed”?) or negation (“untoday”?). So this week I chose a new word: “promoted”. It has plenty of forms like “promote”, “unpromote”, “promotes”, etc. It probably won’t ever appear on the front-end of Day of the Shirt, but adopting a more flexible word has helped clean up a lot of oddly named code.
What do you think of the old-is-new RSS Feed? Do you know a better word than “promoted”? Send us your suggestions at [email protected] or by tweeting us at @dayoftheshirt. And definitely share Day of the Shirt with your friends on Facebook.
Jan 10, 2016 — This week was filled with maintenance and a bit of writing.
Even though it’s not visible on the website, I did a lot of housekeeping behind the scenes on the website code: fixing inconsistencies and streamlining the code. Code can get a bit messy when developing new features and it’s smart to revisit it with fresh eyes. Reworking the code makes it simpler to understand thus making it easier to modify in the future when developing new features.
I also fixed the t-shirt collection code for Pampling after they tweaked their own website design.
I find that many of the emails I receive contain the same questions or comments. So I created an About page that should answer some of those common questions. That page will also serve as a starting point for adding more information and color to in the future.
Please check out our new About page and send us an email if you’re still left wondering about anything on Day of the Shirt.