Several whoopses

Fri, 12 Jul 2024

Not to bury the lede: you probably want to re-download the General Instructions.

The revision to the Flamingo Pack was supposed to come out Wednesday. But then I realized I needed to update the bunting text in the General Instructions to point out that sometimes the bunting came in a vertical version, for threading on book bands or bead pins.

So I postponed it to yesterday.

But when I went to the General Instructions, I realized - there was nothing about buntings there. In fact, it was a much older version with nothing about the filenames or anything. Clearly I had deleted or overwritten something. Not the end of the world, since I use a version tracker. But figuring out when I'd done that was going to be a challenge, and I had driven one of the kids all over South Jersey and had an eyestrain headache. (Nerds are not meant to be out in the sun so much.)

So this morning I went to track it down, and realized at some point Past Karen had decided the documentation belonged in the Demo Pack. Which it does, but I didn't realize that was the master copy and at some point I had been copying the old documentation out of the old location without actually looking in it. And nobody else noticed because they were either (1) people who already had the docs and never looked at them or (2) newbies who didn't know it wasn't supposed to look like that.

So. Plainly the Demo Pack needs a demo snap tab set, so I've put that in there and updated the bunting instructions. I think I'm going to separate the instructions out from the main packages, just so I can easily update them in the future.

Meanwhile, in the marketplace search. I may write a more thorough blog post on this next week, but I've been poking around at alternatives.

Ecwid (E-Commerce WiDget, clearly named by a nerd so I like it already) is promising. I want something that I can self-host (or rather, embed - I don't want something I have to worry about security on my own site for), and that does it. But my biggest technical gripe about Etsy is that you can't update files for previous buyers and, as the Flamingo Pack shows, I like to expand my products after the fact, and I don't want existing buyers to have to re-buy it.

So I asked Ecwid how that works, and got a very nice email in response. (With some discount codes, so now I'm going to make a technical "I'm thinking about switching to you" post to anybody before I actually move to them.) The answer is... sort of.

Ecwid does personalized download codes, of course, and new files mean they have to re-generate them. That happens when the status is changed to "Paid," and one could manually (or in bulk with a CSV file) change the order to "Awaiting Payment" and then back. The problem is that the change to "Awaiting Payment" will trigger an email to the user asking for money which, not good!

This is not a dealbreaker, I think. One, they're working on a fix for that, so if you're reading this blog entry sometime in the future, it may already be outdated. And two, I could have the Librarian set to only trigger the update on request, so the user will know the "Awaiting Payment" email is coming and can be ignored.