Starting Point
To start, I threw the site up on my Linode, using nginx. The server runs a bunch of other sites, in a variety of languages, all with pretty low volumes. The server has keep-alive enabled, but not much else has been tweaked.

Hosting-As-A-Service
I looked at hosting on S3, Cloudfront (amazon’s CDN), and Rackspace’s CDN. Using apachebench (from slicehost), I compared the performance between all 3 of those options, with my nginx as the baseline. S3 was the slowest (slower even then nginx on my little VPS). Cloudfront was comparable to my nginx, and Rackspace would spike to about double the requests per second of my linode, but would also dip to slower than my nginx. Rackspace also has two big drawbacks. It doesn’t let you auto-serve index.html when a directory is requested, so I would still have to run nginx for the html files (as opposed to amazon, which supports this). Rackspace also doesn’t support directories. There are work-arounds, but it’s a pain that I can’t just mirror my directory structure on their cloud. Overall, the cloud hosting solutions were a let-down, and I decided to just host it myself, on linode/nginx.

Testing Methodology
I used Chrome’s debugging tools (with browser caching turned off) to get a sense of pageload times. I would refresh the page several times, and make a note of the spread of times. Not entirely scientific, but good enough for a rough idea of the relative improvements I was making.

External Resources
I had several external resources being referenced. I was sourcing some images from my Etsy store, using a public CDN for jquery, google fonts, etc. I pulled all those into my own repo, rather than rely on whatever bandwidth these providers want to give out for free. I didn’t see any speed change from this, probably because the files in question were pretty small.

Minify CSS & JS
My site goes through a script to convert it from templates and code into static files. As part of this process, I added minifying the CSS and JS files. I combined all the JS files into one file, then ran it through yahoo’s yui compressor, and did likewise for the CSS. Javascript was compressed by 14%, and CSS was compressed by 23%. Page load times dropped from around 1 second to around 700ms.

Resize Images
The same images appear in a number of places on my site, and I was using CSS to change the size. I switched to having the script generate different versions of the image, for every size I needed. This drastically reduced the filesizes, and dropped the pageload time down another 100ms to around 600ms.

Asset Server Pool
The last thing I added was an asset server pool. Browsers limit the number of connections they’ll make to a given server. I made a CNAME DNS alias for the site’s url (so the same nginx serves both domains the same), and sent half the assets (images, js, css, etc) to the alias. This bought me another 100ms, and left me at around 500ms.

Pageload Accuracy
The pageload times I was measuring were definitely anecdotal, and heavily influenced by my internet connection, laptop resources, etc. They are used more to show the relative improvement, rather than as a reliable indication of the speeds users will see.

The Code
All the code and project setup described here is on github.

Goals
I looked at a few options to get my own eCommerce site up and running (Shopify, etc), but everything was really out of my price range (for the volumes I’m doing). There are some open source projects that look interesting, but nothing that seemed a clear winner. For my needs, I just wanted something simple, fast, and secure. Static assets with all the logic client-side gives me that.

Upsides
Static assets are served faster than anything server-side-dynamic, and they require less memory (from the server). Ultimately, the whole site could be thrown on a CDN backed by S3, and I wouldn’t have to manage hosting at all. Because I control the code and the hosting, I have a ton of flexibility for future goals, too (I have several ideas on my TODO list).

Downsides
Having a Javascript shopping cart means that I am not selling to people that don’t use Javascript. About 2% of people in the US have javascript disabled (lower in other countries), and of those most seem to be the super-security conscious or older mobile phones. Not supporting these groups is a price I have to pay with my setup. The other significant downside is that I have to do manual confirmation of the purchases (amount, tax, etc), because the requests could be tampered with. This problem is not specific to my setup, and is not a big deal with my volumes. It doesn’t take a ton of effort, so I imagine this strategy will scale for quite some time before I need to come up with something different.

Tooling
I looked at Jekyll (a similar tool for generating static blogs) for this. I have used Jekyll for non-blog sites before, but in this case I found myself not only wanting to skip the blog-specific features, but also add in eCommerce-specific features. I pretty quickly decided that Jekyll wasn’t the right tool for this, so I built Small Store. It takes a list of products and uses a template to generate product pages. It’s very much a work-in-progress, and needs a lot of cleaning up (and additional features). I’ve tried to pull everything specific to my site into config/ but I’m sure I’ve missed some things. Feel free to check it out if it might match your needs.

Sales Goal
My goal is 1 sale per week. I picked this goal for two reasons. First, it is beyond what I am currently selling, but not that far off (some weeks I make a sale, some weeks I don’t). Second, the 1-week time period is long enough to try out a new marketing strategy or two, but short enough that I have to be really organized and diligent. As soon as a new week rolls around, regardless of the previous week I am ready to go gung-ho towards a sale.

When I Hit My Goal
Hitting a goal is great. It is encouraging, and renews my excitement about this project. I start the week really working hard on making a sale, so when I do make one, I sometimes take the rest of the week to relax and let some product ideas marinate. Other weeks, I spend my extra time working on more long-game marketing strategies, like reaching out to bloggers that might be interested in my product.

When I Miss My Goal
Missing my goal sucks. My week starts on Monday, so as the weekend rolls around I start to get really worried if I haven’t made a sale. I try less targeted marketing strategies, even though they never really seem to pay off.

New Week, New Goal
When a week ends, its success or failure is in the past. If I missed my goal last week, I don’t worry about catching up this week, and if I sold two things last week, it doesn’t make me any less hungry for a sale this week. This is really important for me to stay calm and sane, but on the other hand, if I have a somewhat sustained series of successes or failures, I’ll know I need to reexamine my goals.

Long Game vs Short Game
My goal of 1 sale per week is evaluated every 7 days, but I keep in mind that it is really a long-term goal (“1 sale *every* week.”). For sustained success, I have to look beyond the current 7-day period, so I usually spend some time in the middle of the week working on new product ideas. The new items won’t make it into the store during this week, but hopefully they will help me next week or the week after.

Celtic Knot Mirror

Sales
First and foremost, I got my first two sales at just under two weeks in. This is great, mostly because it’s encouraging. I am well beyond my expertise and comfort level in a lot of ways, so my first sales serve as a little confirmation that I’m on the right track. My first sale was an Illinois-shaped mirror, and the second sale was a custom-requested piece: a District of Columbia mirror. It seems like there could be some demand for a line of state mirrors, and I am working on California and Texas now. I also put two new pieces up for sale. The one I particularly like is the image to the right: the Celtic knot mirror. There hasn’t been much traffic on it yet, but personally it’s my favorite thing in my store. There’s no accounting for taste, though.

Traffic
I have nothing to compare it to, but my traffic feels generally positive. It’s tough to say anything conclusive with only two weeks of data, but it does seem to be trending upwards, as you can see below. There was a traffic spike on January 9, because I wrote a blog post about laser cutting which generated a little bit of interest.

Etsy Sales, Weeks 1 and 2

Marketing
I don’t know much about marketing, so I’ve enrolled in the Etsy advertising program, where they put your products at the top of on-site search results, and it’s cost me about $8 per week. From that $16 worth of traffic, I’ve gotten a little less than 40% of my views, and a little over 50% of my “favorites” (people that effectively “thumbs up” my stuff), and none of my sales. I think that’s pretty good, and will continue to advertise at this level for now (you can set the weekly threshold at whatever amount you like). Below, you can see the stats Etsy gives about the results of my advertising dollars. It shows impressions (how many times one of my products was shown in an ad), views (how many people clicked on the ad), favorites (how many people tagged me as a favorite, after clicking on an ad), and orders (again, from people that clicked on an ad).

Etsy Ads Results, Weeks 1 and 2

Struggles
My biggest issue right now is my supply chain. I have my designs laser cut and shipped to me, and I maintain an inventory which I sell from. The time from ordering to me getting the product is up to three weeks, which makes it really hard to plan for what might be popular. It feels like a big gamble to get several copies of everything, because I don’t want to spend my money on things that are gonna sit on the shelf. On the other hand, if something becomes popular and I sell out, I may miss out on sales while I wait for a restock. I’d love to find a laser cutting service that will drop ship (mail items directly to my customers), and I may end up going with Ponoko for that reason (even though they are more expensive). For now, though, I will try to manage my inventory as clairvoyantly as possible.

The second issue I’m struggling with is taking good photos of my work. I’m not terribly happy with the ones I have so far, which is especially disappointing because I consider myself moderately good at photography. Other than simple lack of experience, my photographical challenges are: 1) poor lighting (I generally have to shoot at night, after work. Natural light would be better but I have a hard time catching it in these winter months, and seem to be so busy on the weekends), and 2) poor setup (my apartment isn’t terribly photogenic, and I haven’t found a corner that looks good, especially because when photographing mirrors you can see the stuff behind you, too). I have been reading up on photographing mirrors, and product photography in general, plus doing lots of experimenting. Hopefully I’ll tend towards better results in this area.

What’s Next
Up next: new designs, same marketing. I feel good about how things are trending, two weeks in. I have some new designs in the works which should be out in the next week or two, and I try to get a couple prototypes completed every week (not all of them make it to the store). As for promoting my work, I like the Etsy ads setup, and will continue that at the same rate for now.

Keep Informed
If you want to stay up to date with the business-side of my store, sign up for blog updates to the right (“Follow Me”). If you want to stay up to date with my products, add me to your circle on Etsy.

Laser Cut Flower

Why & What to Laser Cut
Laser cutting is awesome. You create designs in some vector-based art program (such as Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator), send them to a giant computer-controlled laser, and out pops the shapes you drew. You have a ton of precision to play with, and a huge variety of materials to choose from. You can give your two-dimensional designs some depth, or create interlocking pieces for a 3D result.

Musical Notes Accent Mirrors

Software
I started out using Inkscape, an open source vector-based art program. As I got into it a little more, I switched to Adobe Illustrator, and it makes things a ton easier. I love and support open source software, but Adobe does a really good job with their products, as far as features and ease of use. The nice thing is that there are a number of portable file formats, to transfer documents between programs (such as SVG).

Cutting As A Service
I initially sent off the same design to two different cutting providers: Ponoko and Pololu. Ponoko has a very slick website, and has instant quotes, which is awesome. Pololu’s site was more of a barrier to entry for me, since I was uncomfortable with the process and unsure how to proceed. That said, the functionality their site provides is good, and there is some great info on their site if you can find it.

I now use Pololu exclusively, for two reasons. First, when I originally sent the design to both providers, I got the package from Pololu a little over a week later, and already had them working on an updated design before Ponoko even told me my design had been started. From that experience, I’d say Ponoko is heavy on style, and Pololu is heavy on substance. Gotta go with substance. As a bonus, the first thing Pololu does when you send them a design is to have a tech go over it, for the layout and quote. For an inexperienced designer like myself, having a trained pair of eyes on my project before anything gets cut is invaluable.

Profit
One cool thing about laser cutting (like other CNC fabrication machines) is that once you have a cool design, you can systematically iterate on the design to improve it. When you have something you like, you can reproduce as many copies as you like, and often simple alterations (like scaling the size) don’t require a ton of work. As I work on my designs, I’ll update my Etsy store with what I’m working on. Check them out and let me know what you think!

Code
The code is open source, and you can find it on github.

Controller
I’m using a wii nunchuck as a controller, which is a cheap way to get 2 buttons, a joystick, and a 3-axis accelerometer, all in a molded case. For this game, only the right & left directions on the joystick are needed, but the controller has a lot of potential for future games.

Goals
My goals for this project are simple:

1. Proper syntax highlighting
2. Compile & upload code from within editor

Syntax Highlighting
I use Johannes Hoff’s syntax file for this. Just put arduino.vim in your $HOME/.vim/syntax directory.

Compile & Upload Code (From The Command Line)
In order to compile and upload the code from within vim, I first needed to figure out how to bypass the IDE and access the required toolchain from the command line. I followed Martin Atelier’s guide to figure it out. I won’t repeat his content here (you’ll want to get the latest version from his blog), but one thing not mentioned there was that I had to include Wiring.h at the top of my header files (not the main PDE). When make runs, it prepends your PDE with #include <WProgram.h>, which gives you some nice Arduino stuff (like the constants HIGH, LOW, INPUT, and OUTPUT). This #include also includes stdlib.h, which gives you lots of C++ stuff (notably, types like uint8_t). To use any of this in a bundled module, you can just drop #include <Wiring.h> at the top of the header. After that, make and make upload were able to compile and push the code to my Arduino.

Compile & Upload Code (From Vim)
Once the toolchain works from the command line, it’s just a matter of deciding what vim shortcut you want to trigger it with. I have am to make, au to upload, and aa to do both. Drop something like this in your $HOME/.vimrc:

map <silent> <LocalLeader>am :!make<CR>
map <silent> <LocalLeader>ac :!make clean<CR>
map <silent> <LocalLeader>au :!make upload<CR>
map <silent> <LocalLeader>aa :!make && make upload<CR>

The Hardware
I previously wrote about different types of LED strips. For this project, I went with the cheaper (HL1606-based) strip, because I am probably going to use up a lot of the ribbon, and it’s significantly cheaper. The downside to using this over the more expensive strip is that I’ll have fewer colors, but I think that’ll be ok for the projects I have in mind. To make the array, I cut an LED strip into 8-LED segments, and then wired those segments serially. Electrically this means there was no change, but it allowed me to lay the strips side-by-side, to form an 8 LED by 8 LED canvas, where each LED is individually controllable by a microcontroller.

The Protocol (Low Level)
Because the strips alternatively go up and down, I am able to use adafruit’s HL1606strip library. The only difference is that every other segment gets written backwards, since it is oriented in the opposite direction.

The Library
I’ve introduced an additional layer of abstraction for this platform: HL1606grid (requires the external library HL1606strip). The API is (hopefully) straightforward. Once you instantiate the grid, you set a particular LED like: grid.setLEDcolor(row, col, RED);. If you’re familiar with the 1D HL1606strip library, that should look familiar.

Example
The library comes with an example project, which you can see running above.

Get The Code
The code is open source, on github. If you make something cool, please let me know. Bug reports & pull requests encouraged!

How Telegraph Sounders Work
Mechanically, they are very simple, which is the reason that, even though they have moving parts, you can still find old ones that work quite well. The way mine works is that there is a lever, fixed at one end. Halfway down the lever, there is a cross-bar which sits just above two large electromagnets (one on either side). When the magnets are activated, the lever is pulled down, causing the far end of the lever to hit a stop on its underside. When the magnets are released, the bar raises (due to a spring), and hits a stop above it. On both the up and down motion, the stop it hits is metal, and gives a satisfying clack.

The Electronics
I found some great tips on this blog, but to be honest I kinda half-assed the electronics and just hooked it directly one of my arduino’s digital output pins. The voltage is a little higher than suggested by the blog, and the current is a little low. I’m not sure how bad this is (it works). Hopefully running it for a few minutes like this doesn’t harm the Arduino or the sounder. I have a larger project in mind, and I’ll figure out some saner electronics for it then.

Update on electronics, from the adafruit forums:

The digital output pins are good for about 20mA. A bigger danger here is the kickback spike from the coil. You should use a transistor to handle the current and a diode to snub the spike. Search for circuits to drive a relay. They have exactly the same issue.

The Code
The code is open source, and available on github. I followed the protocol notes from wikipedia, but if there’s something inaccurate I hope someone will let me know.

Introduction
The strips are flexible ribbons of PCB material, with LEDs periodically fixed on them. They come in two basic varieties: addressable and non-addressable. With an addressable strip, you can control each individual light independently, but with a non-addressable strip you control the whole strip together.

Addressable Strips
These are the cool ones. You can individually control each pixel, and can program some cool effects. I haven’t seen many projects using these, though. There are two different versions that I know of: LPD8806 & HL1606. Both use RGB LEDs, which let you display a variety of colors.

Addressable Strips: LPD8806
These are awesome. They have built-in pulse-width modulation (PWM), which gives you access to more colors than are differentiatable by the human eye (7-bits for each Red/Green/Blue). These are the priciest at $30 per meter (if you buy 5 meters). You can pick some up at adafruit. In the video, you can see that there is a gradual transition between the colors.

Addressable Strips: HL1606
These are not as cool as the LPD8806, because they don’t have built-in PWM. You can do some manual (CPU-intensive) hacking to get it to work, but without that you are limited to 1 bit for each channel (so 8 colors total). The big win here is that you can get it cheaper (around $20 per meter, on ebay). In this video, you can see that there’s a much rougher transition between colors, because you don’t have as many to play with.

Non-Addressable
I’d imagine these are good for car effects, under-cabinet lighting, and similar projects. These are two basic types that I know of: RGB and single-color. You can get some RGB ones at adafruit ($25 per meter). I haven’t picked up any single-color ones, but it looks to be around $5 per meter.