Site Preferences and T-Shirts

Thursday, 17 August 2006

A few meta notes about the site:

Preferences

Back in April 2004, I added a Preferences feature to this web site, the primary feature of which is an option to specify the font size for article text. (There are also options for switching to the Canadian and U.K. Amazon sites for the occasional Amazon referral promotions I run, and an option to show referrer listings on article pages, which feature is currently disabled due to a complicated back story that I won’t get into here.)

So, anyway, down in the footer of every page on this site is a link to the Preferences page. The preferences are all stored as cookies in your web browser — but it ends up there was a bug in my code, such that instead of expiring the cookies a few years from now (as I intended), the cookies were instead expiring at the end of your browser session (i.e. when you quit your browser).

As of yesterday, this should be fixed. So if you’ve ever tried using this feature to specify a custom font size and found that it hasn’t stuck, please try again. And I figure now is also a good time to point out that the feature even exists, for those of you who aren’t paying attention to the minutiae in the footer. (There’s a site-wide search box down there, too. Update: And I just added to the footer a link to Amazon’s home page using my referral kick-back code; use that link whenever you want to shop at Amazon and support Daring Fireball.)

T-Shirts

Ever since my announcement back in April that I was trying to turn Daring Fireball into a full-time career, t-shirt sales have been amazingly good. Shirt and membership sales have been helping to keep this operation afloat, whilst I write and continue working behind the scenes on upcoming initiatives to generate more moola.

My thanks to everyone who has supported my work — especially to those of you who had to (or continue to) wait a bit longer than “several weeks” for your shirts to reach you. Right now I’m catching up on orders placed in July through August, and to that end, I’m on the cusp of re-ordering one last batch of the new “Your PC Is a POS” and “I✪DF” shirts.

The “classic” shirt design will remain available going forward, but in the interests of simplifying my inventory, the “POS” and “I✪DF” shirts are being discontinued. So if you want one of these but have been procrastinating on ordering, you’ll need to place your order by the end of the day tomorrow (Friday August 18) to guarantee availability.

It might also be worth noting here that the “daringfireball” tag on Flickr marks dozens of photos from happy DF readers sporting their t-shirts. Still haven’t seen one that tops Eric Case’s, though — he took his DF shirt to the 20,000-foot-high summit of Stok Kangri in northern India.

My sincere thanks for everyone’s continuing support (and patience with regard to shipping delays).