So, I kinda wanna make some T-shirts. And sell em here. It's just a nebulous thought right now so I don't really have a plan. All I know is, I wanna keep the whole thing as DIY as possible. So that means no "E-commerce platforms" or Shopify or anything like that. No dis to anyone using those though, but like I said. I want this whole endeavor to be DIY AF. But only to an extent though.

The last time I did some T-shirts, I went Super DIY. I started with blank white T-shirts, got some bulk fabric dye to get the exact colors I wanted (cause blanks companies usually have bogus colors), bought and learned how to use a four-color screen printing press, and did all the designs by hand (with a little help from a camera and The Gimp). I even designed a fabric tag and sewed them into the backs of the shirts. My mom taught me how to sew just so I could do that. Of course I had to mess up a couple of shirts, but it was worth it.

This time, I'm not exactly sure to what extent I'm gonna go DIY with the actual shirt production. I've still got my old screen printing setup but honestly, I think I'm gonna find a local print shop here in my city to handle that part so I can put more effort into the shirt designs and the web experience.

So yeah, Did I mention how DIY I am? This whole site was coded from scratch, so that gives me a lot of flexibility to add whatever I want in the exact style that I want. So the other day, I got to work on coding up an e-shop. But man... I'm not even gonna lie, it's a lot more work than I thought. So yeah, I DO NOT blame anyone for using a pre-made solution. The hardest part is actually the database schema because there are a lot of entity relationships that have to be done right to get the kind of experience that I want.

The easiest part of all the datbase stuff is the product data. That's pretty much just gonna be the name of the item, a description, a photo... maybe a few of those idk. But then I was like. "I wanna be able to have different variations of the same product, of course". So like, different sizes and different colors. Ok, cool cool. But then how do I map those to particular skus so I can keep track of what I've got in stock? Then how should I map the different product photos to the different variation selections? Alright, alright. I might be over-thinking all this, as I tend to do quite a bit. I could simplify this a lot by just having one color per shirt listing or whatever. But I can't lie, it would be dope to get all this functionality and I technically know how to do stuff like this, so why not? (Actually, don't answer that)

There's one big piece I'm definitly not gonna be able to DIY though. As always, it's the payment system. damn. Crypto was supposed to solve that (and failed IMO), but let's not get into that... So back to the almighty centralization we go! And online payments is VERY centralized. It's pretty much a Duopoly with Paypal and Stripe. I've heard of Lemon Squeezy but that's about it. Stripe feels the most modern so maybe I'll go with that. Paypal does have that whole 'old internet' thing going for it, so that could be cool too. Anyway, I'm not there yet. First thing is to add the infrastructure here so I can post stuff when I create it, and yeah of course also to create it. That's the most important part.