Tomorrow night (Tuesday, January 6th), this site will be undergoing a complete overhaul and may be offline for up to 24 hours. I am switching from a CMS-based website to one with the primary purpose of e-commerce, with the CMS in there as an afterthought thing.
Hope to see you when the dust settles. Many interesting changes afoot.
So as you might have noticed, I haven’t been doing much with the website lately. There’s some reasoning behind that and it’s simple: the e-commerce package I found for Wordpress basically makes me apeshit crazy.
Since then, though, I’ve discovered Magento, which I’ll be using to run the new version of this website. I’ve been waiting on them to release version 1.2, which will support downloadable products (like fonts), and that’s due at the end of this month.
In the meantime, I’ve been preparing a template for the site, which will differ from what you currently see here, and I’ve been repackaging my fonts.
One of the things that’s always bugged me is that when you buy a font, you always need to pay for the different versions — Mac Truetype, Mac Postscript, PC TrueType, OpenType, etc., etc. I’ve decided that, as far as my own creations go, that I’ll be lumping all these font formats together into one file. So you buy the PC TrueType, you get OpenType.
Now, the more sharp-eyed reader will say “as far as your own creations”? One of the things I am seriously considering doing with the new site is using it as a venue for other like-minded font designers to be able to sell their fonts through, similar to what MyFonts does. That is still very much up-in-the-air, and I need to establish a lot of procedures, figure out how to split revenue (you’d get more from me than from MyFonts), and so on. If you’re at all interested, do drop me a line.
With Magento 1.2 coming toward the end of this month, and my having the last week of the month off from my day job, I should be able to get this going by early January.
Stay tuned!
Since I seem to be having a bit of a hard time getting the site back up and running, I figured I’d chuck a couple of slow pitches your way, via my Flickr account.
The first is a batch of iPhone Wallpapers that I threw together last night while in need of some serious art therapy.
Secondly, a few years ago, I put together a set of instructions on how to make your own font, using Adobe Illustrator and Fontlab. I’m working on a video version of this, as well.
So where are things? I just updated the e-commerce software yesterday and am going to hook back up to Google Checkout and run some tests. The rebuild of the old Casual Roman font is coming along nicely, and I hope to have that done and posted by the weekend. I’ll also be adding a bunch of my old free fonts, as well.
Tonight, I am going to be upgrading the e-commerce engine on this puppy and making some changes to allow you to set up your user accounts (important, as once you buy a font here, you can download it up to three times). This has to happen, however, after I address the issues of laundry, housecleaning and a haircut, all of which are much overdue. You’ve been waiting 7+ years for this site to get back to it’s glory days of 2000-2001…you can wait a few more days, dammit.
The holiday weekend is over here. I got some good bicycle time in, and there’s now video floating around the Internets of me “peeing” lighter fluid onto a grill (how I survived to adulthood is a debate we can have in a later posting). I played Scrabble and Rock Band and met my girlfriend’s mother this weekend. It was awesome.
Lest you think I’m neglecting my font duties, however, do note that I am taking the old Casual Roman and Casual Roman Smallcaps fonts, combining them into a single OpenType font, and re-spacing/-kerning the whole damn thing. Expect that in the new future…and it’ll probably have a new name, to boot. (Speaking of which, I’m renaming some of the older free fonts before I get those up and going.)
So, you may be asking yourself why things haven’t happened yet — at least in regards to the free font thing. And you’d be right to do that, given my repeated statements that I was going to upload those materials.
Well, here’s the deal: the e-commerce engine I’m using doesn’t support free downloads. Now, the thing is, I’d like to be able to track those as part of my system, and have them integrated into the same view as all the other fonts. Also, the developer says they’re working on it and that it’s a priority after the next version of the software. Here’s hoping that that happens soon. Until then, it’ll be a Paypal interface and I’ll be starting to upload the pay fonts, so at least those will be in-place.
…as you might have noticed. Or maybe not. The reason I haven’t been pumping more fonts onto this thing is my current fixation on the fact that the payment gateway interface isn’t working properly. Specifically, Google Checkout and the WP e-Commerce plugin do not appear to talk to each other. Tonight, I’ll be switching that over to Paypal (*gag*), so that’s working again, and then adding some free fonts.
Also, expect some changes to the layout in the near future.
Well, I guess you can say that Fontosaurus is officially back on the web. I just uploaded the Noonan font this morning, and it’s on sale for $10. I decided to lump every format together into one package rather than make things truly confusing and forcing people to select between styles.
I’m stoked! Tonight, I’ll probably post a new free font or two. And I have some clean-up work to do on the page layouts.
I should probably run a test and see if the font purchase/download thing works.
So here’s where things are at — last night and this morning, life pleasantly got in the way of my starting to load the fonts into this system. And today, it will, too — there’s the whole “office job thing” during the day, and tonight, I’ll be meeting my girlfriend’s father. These things are usually nerve-wracking, but I’m actually pretty calm about the whole thing.
Depending on what time I get home this evening, you may see a couple of my free fonts uploaded before I call it a night.
Current Music: “Damage” - Non-Prophets
Current Book: Mirrored Heavens by David J. Williams, and Groundswell by Forester Research
Current Video Game: Call of Duty 4 (PS3), Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass (NDS)
Okay, so I’m actually, finally, really doing it. Seriously. And stuff. Fontosaurus.com is coming back. I’ve got Wordpress installed. I’ve got a generic theme that I need to make a minor graphics tweak to, and an e-commerce engine to install.
I’ve also got a few new fonts in the works, mostly huge, sweeping OpenType epics with tons of alternate characters and ligatures and so forth.
But really. Doing it. Yeah.