Chuck Grimmett

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Month: February 2022

  • Migrate your Etsy Shop to your own website

    Etsy recently hit sellers with a 30% fee increase on sales, not including the processing fees, listing fees, platform store fee, and marketing fees (opt-in) they charge. They are taking quite a cut from indie sellers!

    They do provide a nice service and a built-in community. But indie sellers that have their own social following or email list can do better by moving to their own website.

    Moving to your own website may be a hassle, but is probably best for the long-term growth of your business. Right now you are at the mercy of Etsy’s fees and they have almost full control of your customers. Moving to your own domain and building out an email list puts you back in the driver’s seat:

    • You can build a direct relationship with your customers
    • You can choose a store software like WooCommerce that has a lower fees
      • And if you want to use a different store in the future, you can do so without disrupting sales – Users will keep going to the same domain and you can change how it works under the hood.
    • You can pick a layout that is more customized to your brand
    • You can offer more options like subscriptions, gift cards, custom option ordering, booking consultation sessions, etc

    I strongly recommend WooCommerce because it is open source, I work at the company that makes it, and I have lots of experience with it, but even if you move to Squarespace or Shopify with your own domain I’d be happy.

    With WooCommerce you’d need to pay for a domain, hosting, and credit card processing fees (2.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction). No sales, listing, or platform fees. WordPress and WooCommerce are free to download and use! There are some paid extensions you can buy to add functionality to your store, but those aren’t necessary to get your store set up and start making sales.

    If you want to go with WooCommerce, here is a checklist to get you started:

    1. Purchase a domain.
      1. I use hover.com, but feel fee to use whatever registrar you like!
    2. Purchase WordPress hosting and hook up your domain to it.
      1. Costs vary here, but I recommend using a managed host like Pressable, WPEngine, or Flywheel. Managed hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, but they take care of software upgrades, handle security, and generally have faster hosting. Budget shared hosting like GoDaddy or Bluehost can be alright, but will be more work for you long-term.
    3. Install WooCommerce and go through the setup process. WooCommerce Pay is a quick and easy option for a payment processor and is powered by Stripe on the backend.
    4. Pick a theme.
    5. Download your products from Etsy and use the built-in Import tool to bring them into WooCommerce.
    6. Set up your shipping rates.
    7. Set up your homepage and about/contact page.
    8. Sign up for a free MailPoet account and start collecting email addresses for your customers. Set up email automations if that is your thing.
      1. Rumor has it that you can download your customer email addresses with a bit of tech-based elbow grease. Perhaps once you have the email addresses, you can send them a one-time email about moving to your own site with a coupon code if they want to re-order, and an option to sign up for future updates.

    If you get stuck and need help, drop me an email. I don’t do freelance work anymore, but I’d be happy to give you guidance. I want more people to own their domains and keep the web independent!

  • Thirty-two

    I turn 32 today, and since I’m blogging more, I’d like to kick off a tradition of writing birthday posts, a la ma.tt.

    This past year was incredibly challenging, both at home and at work. With the stress of the pregnancy, a difficult period at work, and the uncertainty of the changing pandemic situation, the past year really ground me under its heel.

    Thankfully, most of that is now behind me–Charlie is doing well and a joy to be around, my position at work has changed for the better, and I’m actively dealing with the stress and anxiety that cropped up over the past year. The pandemic is still here, but we are taking precautions and mostly getting on with our lives.

    Right now I’m on paternity leave, which I’m thankful for. It has given me time to be with Charlie and space to slow down, reset, and recharge. I’m mostly feeling like myself again, though with a new facet of being a father. I’m getting new ideas, have more energy, and am getting the hang of caring for a baby. Things are trending up.

    One thing in particular to call out: This time last year we were scared, anxious, and all we wanted was to meet and snuggle this baby. Now he is snoozing on my chest while I write this post and it is an incredible feeling.

    I don’t know what the next year has in store, but here are the vectors I’d like to guide my place in it:

    • Spend as much quality time as I can with Amanda and Charlie. Help Charlie learn, grow, and explore the world.
    • Read less news and social media; read fewer contemporary books and more old books.
    • Make more art.
    • Spend more time outside, tending to the garden, going for walks in the woods, and paddling on the Hudson. Get out in all weather, not just “nice” days.
    • Make more in the workshop.
    • Make some improvements around the house and yard.
    • Continue blogging regularly.
    • Take part more in the local community in Peekskill

  • Week of Feb 21

    Small seasons update: The beginnings of crocuses started popping up in the front flowerbeds, trees are starting to bud out, and taps are in the sugar maple trees.

    Thanks to a reminder on Instagram from my friend Erin Carlson, I sowed poppy seeds during nap time this week. Hungarian Blue Breadseed and Icelandic Grey poppies. I’m hoping to get enough seeds from the Hungarian Blue to bake with this year.

    Variable late winter/early spring weather this week. 60F one day, then snow and ice the next. We didn’t get as much snow as predicted, but we did get ice, so I went out and filled up the bird feeders. As I learned from Richard Prum this week, even though birds do fine even in negative temperatures if they have enough food, they can die in a single night without access to food (like after an ice storm).

    I had my first couple day stretch as a solo dad while Amanda traveled for work this week. It was tiring but Charlie and I did alright. There was nothing that I haven’t done dozens of times solo over the past six months—the only difference is that there were no breaks for a couple days. I’m learning to rest in the in-between moments and blog during naps. 90% of these posts are written during naps, the other 10% after bedtime.

    I went out for a 15 minute errand and popped a tire on a pothole this week. What a pain. I didn’t bring milk for Charlie because I thought we’d only be gone 15 minutes. He cried the whole time. Thankfully it was a sunny day, I had a tarp and furniture blanket in the car to kneel on, and the tire change only took me 30 mins, and I already had an appointment at the dealership the same day for an inspection, so I had a new tire put on, too. I’ll never leave the house again without a bottle, not even for “quick errands.”

    Never despair; Nothing without labour

    https://blog.lostartpress.com/2018/12/01/dont-despair-nothing-without-labour/

    I’ve added more content to my digital garden. Next I need to figure out how to use pages as the source for the RSS feed and create some meta blocks for published date and last updated date.

    I’ve been following along over at IndieWeb with the personal libraries project. Links:

    That gives me three ideas for my own Reading page:

    1. Revive the RSS and JSON feeds
    2. Connect the post type to the Open Library API to pull in info and link out
    3. Add a “to read” list to get my wishlist out of Amazon and reduce my Amazon purchasing

    I started brining corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day. I have two briskets in the soup and one will get turned into pastrami. I’m not Irish and not really into St. Patrick’s Day, but I will take any excuse to eat corned beef.

    My heart goes out to Ukrainians. I can’t imagine my life getting completely disrupted by war. The NICU babies getting moved to a bomb shelter really got me. When Charlie was in the NICU things were already scary and difficult enough. I’m very thankful (and often take for granted) that we live in a place with political stability and my family is safe. I’m holding Charlie a bit closer this week. Putin must be dethroned and defenestrated.

    I found this 360° view of how we got to the current war in Ukraine from Grid to be very informative. I’m appreciating context a lot more these days. Nothing is as straightforward as it seems and context matters for getting a better understanding. Beyond the obvious attacks and aggression, two things worry me about this war: The rampant online misinformation and the cyber attacks that preceded the invasion, both of which seems to be Russia-sponsored.

    Speaking of context, one thing to keep in mind before demonizing Russian soldiers en masse is that Russia has mandatory conscription, punishable by jail time for non-compliance. There is a high likelihood that the young Russian men on the ground in Ukraine didn’t enlist voluntarily and don’t want to be there. They have mothers, partners, and children weeping for them, just like the defenders of Ukraine have. War is such a tragedy.

    It is difficult to get a sense of how popular the war is in Russia without a free press there (no one doing that unbiased reporting and data collection, and misinformation being spread there by official sources to garner support.)

    I am very glad that Trump isn’t the one making decisions in the White House about what to do right now. I’m not a huge Biden fan, but he is more stable and clear-headed than Trump, who I regard as a loose cannon. Plus, Trump’s ties to and support of Putin are worrying to say the least.

    The Russian cyberattacks bring up something that has been on my mind recently: How does one personally prepare for a massive internet outage? Cyberattacks could bring outages, as could coronal mass ejections. I’m not a “prepper”, but I do think it is worth trying to mitigate the downsides of the three biggest ways the Internet affects my day-to-day life:

    1. My income (I build websites!)
      1. I can do physical jobs for a bit, I’m pretty handy
    2. Access to money (Can’t swipe a credit card if the pipes are down)
      1. Mitigate by storing some physical money somewhere
    3. Access to information
      1. Mitigate by investing in more offline reference resources, mostly books. I’ve already made a start here, but there is more I can do.

    Who else is thinking about this? 🤔

    I’m reading and appreciating Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan a lot more than I used to. I don’t always agree with them, but I find them to be clear thinkers who are willing to take intellectual risks and update their priors based on new evidence.

    What I’m listening to this week:

  • Week of Feb 14

    Last week I posted about writing descriptions of the small seasons in the lower Hudson Valley. I now have a page going for that with two entries. You can find that over at https://notes.cagrimmett.com/outdoors/small-seasons-of-the-lower-hudson-valley/

    Ice melts, daffodils start to pop out of the ground. Stink bugs wake up.

    Small Seasons of the Lower Hudson Valley

    Speaking of: After kicking the idea around in my head for over a year, I planted a digital garden. You can check it out at https://notes.cagrimmett.com. It is very much in its early stages and I have a lot to add, both in terms of functionality and content.

    The coffee cherries on my coffee plant are starting to ripen! This is the first time in the 10 years that I’ve had this plant that it has produced cherries. I’m very excited!

    The local bakery, Signal Fire Bread, has baguettes each week now, so I picked some up this week and made jambon buerre sandwiches for lunch (ham, butter, and homemade pickles, though I also added cheese and mustard because I’m an American, after all.) I think this might turn into a regular Friday occurrence.

    I’m starting to sway back and forth to the rhythms of paternity leave. I’m getting more used to working around naps and Charlie started rolling back to front consistently this week, slept completely through the night once, and developed a new habit of blowing raspberries. He is eating more real foods now, including yogurt, banana, sweet potato, carrot, and apple sauce.

    My 41 day Wordle streak ended with Wordle 244, then it took me 6 tries with #245, the first time it has taken me 6. I’m going downhill.

    Twitter recently added a feature that prompts you to read an article before sharing. Good on Twitter for adding it.

    I got it when I was about to share a comment about the Neuralink animal testing article and not wanting to give a computer access to my brain. But when I read the article I realized that I hadn’t considered the possibilities it opens up for people with disabilities. Animal trials still suck, but I’m not as anti-computer/brain interfaces as I was before reading the article.

    I posted a guide to understanding my favorite podcast, Conversations with Tyler.

    The WordPress.org photo directory I posted about last week is now a proper Make team! I joined a call with some of the folks on Friday to discuss the path forward with the photo directory and am excited about being a part of it. It is also cool to see first-hand how the governance and decision-making process works.

    I enjoy sketching patterns with p5.js. I saw this one on a door in The Witcher and had to sketch it.

    What I’m Reading

    • Two posts on creating watercolor-esque graphics with code
    • Chris Hardie’s Unlocking email content into RSS feeds redux with WordPress and Postie
      • Last week I posted about using Feedbin’s email address for newsletters. Chris Hardie’s approach here is convenient for things that should have a public feed but do not, and I’ll keep this in my back pocket for future projects. Chris also had the great idea of using an email address at a domain he controls and aliasing it to the address for a service like Feedly or Feedbin. I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of that, but I’m now switching my newsletter subscriptions over to an address I control and aliasing it to Feedbin.
    • Kevin Kelley’s list of Contemporary Heresies. Lots here that would be on my list, too. I should jot down my own soon.
    • I really like the Big Here quiz Kevin Kelly posted about, too. I don’t know all of the answers for where I live in Peekskill, but I intend to find out and publish the answers in my digital garden.

  • Understanding Conversations with Tyler

    I’m catching up on podcasts I’ve missed from the past few months. In the Conversations with Tyler 2021 Retrospective, producer Jeff Holmes challenged long-time listeners to put together a guide to understanding the podcast for new listeners. CWT is one of my favorite podcasts and one of only three podcasts that I’ve attended a live taping of. I want more people to listen to it, so here is my guide.

    1. This is the conversation Tyler wants to have, not the conversation you want him to have. Tyler used to say this at the beginning of early episodes, but has dropped it from recent ones. View episodes as a curious person exploring their own interests rather than someone trying to give a well-rounded introduction to their guests.
    2. Tyler wants to learn as much as he can as quickly as he can. Time is scarce. Tyler does a lot of prep work for each episode, including consuming most, if not all, of a guest’s published work, so he tends to jump right in without wasting time explaining the context.
    3. One of Tyler’s goals with the podcast is to teach people to ask better questions. He models this in each episode and chooses his questions carefully.
    4. A major theme in Tyler’s questions is: How well do our current models explain the world and where do they fall short? He applies this at all levels from big picture macro trends to micro interactions of songbirds.
    5. Reading Marginal Revolution is helpful for gaining context about Tyler’s interests and how he approaches topics. Reading MR will help you understand CWT and vice versa. Not necessary, but certainly helpful.
    6. What’s up with Overrated vs Underrated segment? I see this as Cowen both wanting to understand the world better and to learn what makes each guest who they are (see 7). Whenever something is not correctly rated, there is a mystery to uncover. And this segment is rapid fire and fun!
    7. What about the [Guest name] Production Function segment? Context matters. In this segment Tyler asks questions to gain context about the guest to help us understand where they come from, what drives them, what paths they took that lead them to where they are now, and how they work.
    8. Transcripts of each show are available at conversationswithtyler.com. Use them! Sometimes the questions are rapid fire and I don’t catch something a guest mentions, so I’ll either pause and rewind or pull up the transcript and take a note. That is one of the benefits of the podcast medium: Pausing and replaying is built-in and expected, and links are available in the notes section of most popular podcast players.
    9. How I like to listen to the show: I listen while I’m doing auto-pilot tasks like laundry or dishes so that I can focus on the conversation. I often pause the episode and jot down a few phrases to research further, books to buy, music to listen to, and movies to watch after I’m done listening.

    Two other guides from CWT listeners:

  • Week of Feb 7

    It is warm enough again to take Charlie on daily walks in the woods, which I’m excited about. I’m glad to be able to introduce him to nature early. We saw a couple of robins this week. Apparently not all robins migrate, but I haven’t seen others this winter, so I’m taking this sighting as a good sign. We also saw the first skunk cabbages popping up in the low wet areas of the woods. The eagles are out around here too, which typically happens late winter. These are all good signs of spring.

    This reminds me of the Small Seasons guide, which I admire and have been brainstorming ways to visualize. I think I’m going to write my own descriptions for these seasons in the lower Hudson Valley and lay them out on a page with illustrative photographs. Maybe it morphs into a small print version, too.

    Prior to the Gregorian calendar, farmers in China and Japan broke each year down into 24 sekki or “small seasons.” These seasons didn’t use dates to mark seasons, but instead, they divided up the year by natural phenomena.

    https://smallseasons.guide/

    Paternity leave is teaching me to slow down, discard schedules, and take things as they come. I usually have multiple irons in the fire and make lots of plans, so this is a big shift. It is going well so far, though. I’m loving all the time with Charlie and having the time to cook more. He loves being involved, so I put him in the carrier facing out and talk to him while we cook, do dishes, laundry, etc.

    We are working on sleep training this week, which seems to be going well so far. It was difficult the first couple nights, but as we shift more of his calories to the daytime Charlie is sleeping longer at night.

    My canelé baking plans got put on the backburner this week, but I did bake a big loaf of banana bread today with the overripe bananas that Charlie didn’t eat. I used this recipe from Serious Eats as a base, but used turbinado sugar and added nutmeg and clove to deepen the flavor.

    Apparently moving the blog back to a dedicated page instead of the homepage made Feedburner start picking up my posts again. My WordPress install used to be in a subfolder (/blog), but is now in the root folder. I just happened to make /blog my posts page, as one does. So people who subscribed in college are getting my posts again after not getting them for many years. Hi, old friends! 👋

    I’ve been submitting photos to the new CC0-licensed WordPress Photo Directory. I’ve had 40 accepted so far, many that I haven’t put online before. Related: I’ve long been wanting to contribute more to the WordPress community, so I joined the moderation team for the photo directory. I spend about 30-60 minutes a day moderating new submissions.

    I can’t imagine that Spotify’s podcast acquisitions will go well after this Joe Rogan debacle. What shows worth acquiring (read: bringing in audience + revenue) would be willing to give up their independence to Spotify now? Gentle reminder that walled gardens are rarely the answer. Regardless of what you think about Rogan’s show, podcasting as a whole thrives when podcasts are independently hosted and have open RSS feeds.

    In 2011 I took two photos of some friends smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Threw them up on Flickr with an open license. They now get used in news articles about marijuana legalization at least once a month. I was big into exploring off-camera lighting a la Strobist at the time. The latest instance: https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/nationworld/report/020422_marijauna_banking_bill/us-house-advances-marijuana-banking-bill-though-final-passage-uncertain/

    New indie games I played this week:

    • Globle. Guess a country, then each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a color indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.
    • Nerdle. Guessing math equations.

    Keep them coming. Let a thousand ____le games bloom!

    I recently ran out of my favorite dot grid A5 notebook from Muji. I haven’t been able to find them for over a year now (they’ve been discontinued, but I had a stack) and have been looking for worthy replacements. Mark Frauenfelder over at Cool Tools apparently used similar ones (though A6 and with a clear cover instead of cardboard) and recommended ones from Yansanido as a replacement. I’m liking them so far!

    Speaking of notebooks, Amanda got me a recipe journal from Moleskine many years ago and I seldom wrote in it, but now I know what I want to do with it: 1) Write down the recipes that I always have to look up and 2) Write down our favorites that have evolved over time and I make from memory. Examples: Pancake mix, cast iron waffles, red curry chicken soup, sweet potato curry, Japanese curry, meatballs, our template for bowls (grain + protein + veggies + sauce).

    I fixed my reading page. I wrote a custom template in my previous theme to lay it out grouped by year and I couldn’t replicate it with the query loop block, so I added the PHP template to the twentytwentytwo theme. It took me a little while to figure out why nothing else in the template was loading, and it turned out that do_blocks was the answer. h/t to Carolina Nymark for writing a helpful post about using PHP templates in block themes.

    I also took the time to add the publication year to each of the books on my reading page. One of my goals this year and going forward is to read more old books (I tend to read a lot of contemporary books), so having the publication year will help me keep track of my progress on that front. I plan to add an average publication year for the whole page and each year, which I hope will trend down over time.

    Currently Reading

    I subscribed to a couple more paid newsletters this week: Al’s Cocktail Club (actually a renewal of a gift) and A Piece of Cake by Bill Clark. Al’s Cocktail Club also provides access to the online archive and a members area, which is cool. A Piece of Cake is a Substack that I’ve been following for a while, and I’ve made a bunch of his free recipes, and I decided to subscribe because there are more of his recipes I want to make behind the paywall. I like supporting indie content creators.

    An aside on Substack: I don’t prefer it, but I understand why it is so popular. It is fairly easy to use on both the content creator and the subscriber front. It allows writers to make money, which I’m all for. I’m noticing that they are finally allowing writers to export their posts and subscribers, allowing custom domains, and RSS feeds for public posts. This is a big improvement over when they first launched.

    I’d love to have a private feed URL for my Substack subscriptions, but I have a workaround. I pipe my newsletter subscriptions to Feedbin via their email address functionality and read them via RSS. NetNewsWire is my reader of choice.

    Cool Tools posted about the Weird Old Book Finder, a tool that searches Google Books and returns one random result for your query. Pretty cool! If found an old price list of Stanley tools from 1892 with excellent illustrations and a book on woodworking for “teachers of woodwork” that starts with a general bibliography, which I think is an excellent practice that all books should include.

    All for now! See you again next week.

    p.s. Do you write weekly updates? Send me a link, either in the comments, as a webmention, or via email. I’d love to read them!

  • Week of Jan 31

    Thoughts

    Charlie turned six months this week! He is growing so quickly and gaining a lot of core strength and coordination. I bet he’ll be crawling in the next month.

    Public education suffers from many things, chief amongst them is the complete lack of autonomy most students face for the majority of their childhood. The effects can be devastating and have long-term consequences. (Inspired by this Twitter thread.) More student autonomy is desperately needed. We each want to feel like we have more say over the directions of our lives.

    We renewed our vegetable CSA (community supported agriculture) share for our 9th year. We are going with Roxbury Farm this year, similar to the last two years. The vegetables and variety are great, the pickup location is convenient, and they send out an informative newsletter that we enjoy each week. I love the challenge each week of making meals with the local seasonal assortment of vegetables we receive.

    I went to a funeral this week for the first time in six years. A close friend’s father passed away unexpectedly. It was the first Jewish funeral I’ve attended. I found the Hebrew chants quite beautiful (though I didn’t understand the words). I was also moved by how the filling in of the grave is a physical communal act that brings a sense of finality to the ceremony. One isn’t just watching someone get buried, but actually doing the burying. I participated, then after the other attendees finished their shovelfuls, I helped my friend and a couple others finish filling in the rest of the grave. It was an honor to be handed a shovel and asked to help. The experience was on my mind all week and it will stick with me for a long time.

    I’ve been making a lot of website updates. I switched to twentytwentytwo and went all-in on FSE. I’m slowly updating templates and template parts and dialing in mobile. Also taking the opportunity to add more pages to the site about various projects I’m working on. I’m making these updates primarily when Charlie sleeps, so changes will be gradual.

    I got a Work Sharp Mk.2 and it beats every other knife sharpener I’ve used in terms of speed and the level of sharpness you can get in such a short period of time. My kitchen knives are razor sharp after just 4-5 mins per knife. I first heard about it on Cool Tools.

    I got my smoker out for the first time in a year and a half. (Has it really been that long? Pandemic time is mind-bending.) I smoked some pork for tacos arabes. I decided to leave the smoker out so that it lowers the barrier to using it. High on the “in the next month or two” list: Pastrami (which I’ll make when I cure corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day), beef for birria tacos, Canadian bacon (needs to be cured beforehand).

    Everyone is thinking about Wordle’s acquisition and indie games. I have an idea for a number game that I’d like to hack on soon: Pick a random two-digit number and figure out how to combine 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 with any operators (+, -, /, *, sqrt(), ^n ) to create the number. Share your time and whether or not you used all 5 numbers to create it.

    I found my canelé molds in the basement this week. I want to experiment with making small batches of canelés and dial them in. They are my favorite coffee break snack.

    It is almost time to start seeds again! The leeks didn’t work well last year, so those are out. I want to grow some jalapeños this year (which I haven’t in a couple years) so that I can make some fermented hot sauce and smoke some to make my own chipotles.

    Reading

    I’ve been reading so much recent stuff that I forgot how great Project Gutenberg is for old books. I just downloaded a bunch of Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers to my Kindle.

    Recently finished: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

    Continuing: The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse and The Control of Nature by John McPhee

    Articles I’ve enjoyed this week: