The kayak painter learned to sell t-shirts
What this is about. A feature I built for designing kayaks grew into a t-shirt designer, the T-lab, on five of my sites. They all sell through one shop now.
Why. Run several sites on one codebase and sooner or later something has two truths. This is how I got back to one.
A kayak with sleeves
Rebel Kayaks has a page where you paint, or design as it were, a kayak in proper RAL colours for factory coating. Then it occurred to me that a t-shirt is just a kayak with sleeves.
A few sessions later the T-lab existed. You draw on a tee, pick a colour, pay at rugd.se, and a print shop prints it and posts it. I ordered one and it arrived, the right way up. As of this week it's also the only one ever ordered, which turned out to be excellent timing for tearing the plumbing apart. Because of course I didn't market it and of course I forgot to create a link for it on the site! Doing it now. Oh well :)
Five sites, five opinions
My opening message to the AI:
"the setup and infra sucks. It is way too complicated for any tenant admin, except me, with your help, to set up."
Every site kept its own copy of the garment list, and every copy aged in its own way. Somebody forgot...maybe the rubber duck? One site was proudly offering a sports tee the shop no longer sold. You could design it lovingly and then not buy it. How does this happen, I hear you think? Ah, a quick idea, no particular plan for scaling. You know, make a POC and see if it flies. or in code lingo: move fast and break things.
"The rugd shop can be an active "gate" but there can only be one truth."
The least trash wins
The AI came back with three ways out. One T-lab for everyone, every site reading the shop live, or keeping the copies and syncing them harder. I asked for the one that "leaves the least trash in code".
So the shop now says out loud what it sells, and every site listens. When the shop drops a garment, it vanishes everywhere at once. A site keeps only its own taste: which garments to offer, which colours to hide. A festival site can sell one tee. A shop site can sell all of them. Why this complicated, you think? Glad you asked! It is the exact same layout as a franchise. Now you suddenly know why it's worth it.
The robot took the boring jobs
Prices follow what printing really costs, plus a margin. Every night the shop checks its garments against the print shop and tidies up what changed. A cheeky 90% discount code now stops at what the shirt costs to make, instead of you paying people to wear your designs.
It wasn't flawless. The nightly check did its job perfectly on the first night and told nobody, so for a morning I thought it had never run. Now it announces itself, like a cat that wants credit.
Then it shipped, one site at a time, because shipping everything at once has bitten me before. The old way of syncing went in the bin, and deleting things is my favourite kind of progress.
What happened, and how else it could be done
Five sites each kept a copy of the truth. Now one shop holds it and the sites read it.
Way | Better at | Costs |
|---|---|---|
One T-lab for every site | Literally one copy | Every site loses its own look |
The shop pushes changes to each site | Instant | The shop has to know every site and chase the ones that are down |
Copies, synced now and then (what I had) | Works with the shop offline | Two truths, and steps that get forgotten |
Sites read the shop (chosen) | One truth, simple sites | Each site leans on the shop; a cached copy covers short outages |
The rule I'm keeping: if two places can disagree, they will. Make one of them a reader.