About Jay Jansheski

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  Ever Build An ECommerce Site? I'm Looking For Advice

  1 0 Looking at that site, they say they offer “shopping carts” as a feature, but I don’t see any way to find out what that means, so I can’t address their setup directly. It’s likely they have some sort of click-to-install e-commerce type widget, which may be fine for what you need. What I can do is tell you a little about what I found out when I was recently slogging through the world of low-end e-commerce for a project my Dad was working on. The e-commerce setup you choose will depend upon three things: What you're willing to pay, what level of complexity you need, and what level of design polish you need. So, what are you willing to pay? If the answer is nothing (which seems likely), that’s okay. There are free options out there. “Free” obviously doesn’t include things like fees for credit card processing and merchant accounts; there is no free where those are concerned. The bank will have its take. I recently took a look at all the low-end e-commerce systems for my dad, and the best thing I could find was WordPress with the WP eCommerce plugin. Both of those are free, and in my opinion they’re pretty easy to install and manage (relative to systems like Drupal and Joomla). The WP eCommerce plugin handles the highest level of complexity I could find at its price level (customizable shipping options by weight, product variations, multiple currencies, etc.) I also find WordPress to be really easy to customize if you know a little bit of PHP, HTML, and CSS. For a moderate sum (less than $100) you can buy a sharp (if not unique) template. There are so many WordPress template offerings out there that it is impossible not to find them, so I won’t bother listing them here. Google “WordPress e-commerce templates”. I SAID GOOGLE IT If WordPress won’t cut it for you, the best cheap-but-not-free options I could find were FoxyCart and Shopify. FoxyCart works by including their scripts on your website, which then open up modals and/or popup windows when people do anything commercey like click “add to cart.” I haven’t used it, but it seems very easy and good. Their cheapest (only?) plan at time of this writing is $19 a month. If you are like my dad, you will find that to be an outrageous sum and you will shake your fist in the air. FoxyCart will be easier to implement than WordPress. Shopify is a hosted solution, which means it’s not going to work on BigBytes; with Shopify, you sign in to their server and enter your products, and they do everything else. This is the easiest and most elegant solution, but also the most expensive of the acceptable low-end solutions I could find. ($29 a month! $29! shakes fist). Really, that is not very much money if you’re serious about setting up shop. If you know HTML and CSS you can customize your store as much as you like, but it will always be on their servers. All three of these solutions are stable, which is to say they’ve been around a long time and they probably will continue to be around for a long time. There are most definitely other solutions – there are literally thousands of them – but these are what I came up with. All three of these solutions will require understanding to some extent how products and shipping options and whatnot all fit together. This is my answer if you’re looking for a way to set up a little store online and sell some stuff. If you’re after a way to learn how to build an e-commerce website so that you can know how to build an e-commerce website, my answer would be completely different (short version of that alternate answer: play with wordpress to see what it looks like, then go buy yourself a book called something like “Build your own e-commerce website with (PHP/Ruby on Rails/Django) today!”) One last note: I know you didn’t ask for advice on hosting services. I don’t know anything about BigBytes (other than that their website gives me the wiggins) but I have had good luck with both Dreamhost and Site5. Two last note: Lots of people seem to do well selling their wares through systems like Amazon stores and eBay, so if all you want to do is sell things, that may be an option. Here’s a summary: Free solution: WordPress and the WP e-Commerce plugin - Pros: Free, sorta easy to set up if you know some stuff about clicking. - Cons: It’s the least easy of these solutions to set up. It will scale, but not without some effort and know-how. Less free solution: FoxyCart - Pros: Cheap, pretty dang easy to set up. It’s mostly your regular site that “pops up” for cart and checkout stuff. - Cons: More expensive than free, still takes knowing how to cut and paste, which some people do not know how to do. Even less free solution: Shopify - Pros: Very easy. - Cons: $29 a month for the cheapest plan (which is still very cheap, but not free). It’s not portable, which is to say you couldn’t tell Shopify to shove it and move the store to another hosting solution. Good luck! Jay Jansheski answered in Geek Week 10 months ago Answer and comment »

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  Where can I learn to make an interactive E-book?

  4 0 It depends on what you mean by "interactive." If you want to simply have links in the book to other parts of the book, you're in luck, because that sort of thing is very easy, and you can do it using software like iWork Pages or Microsoft Word. Here is a small tutorial with some templates you can use (this is the first result I found in Google, and I don't know this man or anything about his ebook, although he looks vaguely like Bronson Pinchot, who in my opinion is underrated.) The short version: Create a document like any other Pages or Word document (with some special formatting considerations) and export to ePub. Once you've got an ePub file you can submit it to whatever various e-bookstores (including iBooks, where it will then become available on the iPad) and then sit back and wait for the Pulitzer. This approach is easy, and lets you get the material out to the most possible interested parties with the least amount of effort and hardship. The downside: it's only "interactive" in the barest sense. If you want a paper doll of William Blake whom you can dress up in various outfits and who will giggle like the Pillsbury Doughboy when you touch his belly, that's harder. Some people mean this when they say interactive book, and if that's what you mean too, you'll need to learn some hard-core programming. That book is more an application than a book, and it was made specifically for the iPad. If you want to do that, you would need to learn Objective-C for the iOS app, Java for the Android app, and for the Kindle and Nook... well, forget it, they don't do that (nor should they, that's not what they're for). The app was likely put together by a team of people: programmer, illustrator, designer, Lewis Carroll. Unless you are one of those talented and hard-working few can do all of those things, or you are a leader of women and men who can corral some programmers, illustrators, designers and Lewis Carroll into doing that work for you (and you may be!) then this route may be too much to squeeze into spare time between the career you already have. But! If you're up for it, the University of Washington has classes. If you're not in Seattle, it's likely that the university nearest you has a similar program. If you want something between those things, you might consider HTML5 and Javascript. Check out this beautiful e-book written using HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Pretty, right? The upside of this approach is that it's available to everyone regardless of their platform, and you can do some fancy, William-Blake-paper-doll type stuff using only these tools. The bad news is that it's only really a "book" in that the words and pictures are framed by something that looks like a book; though it renders properly, this particular book doesn't really perform well on mobile devices. You could do something like this with one version for the web and another version for mobile devices, if you were so inclined. I'll leave you with my favorite William Blake quote: When ye set out to make an interactive book In pursuit of understanding literature Be wary ye don't look up in ten years and say "D'oh! I accidentally became a web developer!" Jay Jansheski answered in Geek Week 10 months ago Answer, comment & read 2 more answers »

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  Let's talk about money.

  1 0 I saw it as a collection of stories that was unapologetically about a group of upper-middle and just plain upper-class characters. I can only think of a couple of people in the book who are flat broke, but even they seem to me to be fugitives from the upper class: Scotty springs to mind, but even when he's flat broke it seems to be more a mistake than his his true lot in life, and all that was standing between himself and his status as a rock star was his own failure to see his true, prosperous self. Likewise Sasha, on the run in Italy, was only hiding out from her family who were reasonably well off, and the college students in the Chapter featuring Rob are college students, who live in a kind of alternate economic state that is a kind of combination between poverty and prosperity, which is to say that even if they're low on funds at the moment, they probably won't be for long. I don't mean to sound cynical here–nothing wrong with people who have done well for themselves in either real life or in fiction–but I couldn't see anyone who was flat-broke busted here. (No doubt just after I post I'll suddenly remember an entire section of the book titled "the trials of poverty featuring the ghost of charles dickens.") Jay Jansheski answered in Book Club- A Visit from the Goon Squad 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 3 more answers »

• Comment on Paul Constant's answer…

  0 0 You know, I think you're right- I think that I wrote this question ("is goon squad really a novel?") after the first time through, and I didn't really get a sense of sasha and bennie as well as I did going through it again. Though I still feel a kind of distance between the characters that I'm mulling over– in a sense, that's how it is in life, because who, at age 20, is the same person they are at age 40? If you were to take something like... I don't know, like a John Irving novel, in which the author really just lines up every year of a character's life into the most linear possible story, and then you cut out all of the middle part so that all you had left was a short story about a 20 year old, and then, suddenly, on the next page, a short story about that same person as a 40 year old, presumably it would feel as disjointed, or maybe more disjointed, than the transitions between characters in the various points of their lives here in the Egan novel (and also that character would be a wrestling writer who has sex with a bear). I have forgotten my point. Jay Jansheski commented 11 months ago

• Comment on annabee's answer…

  0 0 You know, I think both you and David Wright (who answered above) are right, and I think I totally mis-read that scene. I guess I took Scotty's talk about "power" up in the office as the gist of their meeting, and completely overlooked the ways in which he might be needy there. I'll have to give it another look and see if I can't read it with a less cynical eye. Thanks! Jay Jansheski commented 11 months ago

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  Did you like A Visit from the Goon Squad?

  2 0 Probably like a lot of other people I read it just after it won the Pulizter and a few weeks before the book club popped up, and my impression of it then was that I liked it but didn't love it. I have to admit that I prefer a single, sort of grand arc, and the chaotic timeline and mash of characters in Goon Squad left me feeling distant. But when the book club came up I took the opportunity to go through it again and fill in all the holes in my understanding of story and character, and the better I knew it the more I liked it. I don't often take a second run at books I bounced off of the first time, but I'm glad I did here. All of which is to say, I liked it quite a lot. Here is my one complaint, and the thing that might have turned it into a specacular book for me: As I see it, the chapter with the slides is meant to be Sasha's redemption, but I can't see the mother in that story as being Sasha no matter how hard I try. Since it feels like a different person, I find it difficult to feel the satisfaction I think we're meant to feel for her. And it's not that I expect a happy ending for everyone– I can think of any number of books I love that have melancholy endings for their protagonists, but this wasn't one of those. This was a very happy ending that somehow landed on the wrong character. It's absurd to be nitpicking, because it's obviously a beautiful piece of work, but I guess I find myself more willing to dish out criticism for things I find to be so, so close to being spectacular, and the closer it is to spectacular (without actually touching it) the more I want to know what's wrong with it. And so that's how I feel about it: it was very nearly something that would have gone onto my shelf of favorite things, but the tiny distance by which it missed makes me feel nitpicky. Jay Jansheski answered in Book Club- A Visit from the Goon Squad 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 10 more answers »

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  what the hell is going on with the slog rss feeds?

  5 0 This website is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! We had a glitch yesterday with the RSS feeds, should be better now (but please let us know if you're still seeing problems). You're always welcome to write us at webmaster@thestranger.com if you see anything amiss. Thanks! Jay Jansheski answered in Tech Support 11 months ago Answer and comment »

• Follow Following 1 Chapter 7: X's and O's Jay Jansheski asked in Book Club- A Visit from the Goon Squad 11 months ago by David Wright & 1 other answer by annabee…

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  Let's start with the dreaded structure question.

  1 0 Hi, sleepy book club! I was thinking about this question and was having trouble putting everything together. I suffer from a tiny brain, and in this kind of scattered narrative I find it difficult to keep track of who is who and what goes where, and so here are some notes I made in order to make sense of it. This isn't an answer to the question, exactly, and I don't know it will be helpful for anyone else to read, but *making* the notes helped me tremendously in seeing the through-lines. If it's not obvious, spoilers abound. # Side A 1. Found Objects - Sasha (late 20's?) - Coz (Sasha's shrink) - Alex Sasha steals a wallet, hooks up with and allows Alex to shower in her kitchen tub with stolen bath salts. Includes a reference to "Rob, Sasha's friend who drowned in college." 2. The Gold Cure - Sasha (30's, Sasha is Bennie's long-time assistant) - Bennie - Collette, Bennie's executive producer - Chris (Bennie's son) - Stephanie (Bennie's ex-wife) Bennie goes with Chris and Sasha to visit a band about to be dropped from Bennie's record label. Bennie relives and silently freaks out about some of the shameful moments of his life. He eats flakes of gold to fight off impotence and anxiety, shares the gold with Chris and Sasha like it's candy. Drops off Chris with Stephanie, puts the moves on Sasha but is gently rebuked. 3. Ask Me If I Care - Rhea (in high school; the narrator) - Bennie, Scotty, Alice, Jocelyn (the other high-school kids) - Marty (the punk violinist, in college) - Lou (Older producer, mentor, letch) The kids act like kids, meaning they all long for each other in impossible combinations, complain about how the world sucks, perform disastrously in a hardcore punk venue. They meet with Lou, a record producer. Jocelyn runs off with Lou. 4. Safari - Lou (late 30's) - Mindy, Lou's young girlfriend - Charlene (Charlie) and Rolph, Lou's kids - Albert, the safari guide - Cora, Lou's travel agent - Mildred and Fiona, the older women who join the group on safari - Chronos, one of Lou's musicians - Dean, an actor friend of Lou's, who amuses Mindy by saying things like "It's hot" or "Weapons are necessary." The group goes out on safari, looking for lions. Albert and Mindy make goo goo eyes at each other, but are interrupted when Chronos gets himself munched by a lion. In the aftermath of the munching, Albert and Mindy become cool with each other. Rolph mentions to Lou that Albert and Mindy were acting weird, and Lou immediately gets what was going on. Later, Lou has sex with Mindy in order to show her who is the boss. Lou is. 5. You (Plural) - Jocelyn (the narrator) - Lou, old man in a hospital bed in his bedroom with tubes up his nose - Rhea Lou is old and dying. Rhea and Jocelyn are visiting him, paying their last respects. Jocelyn, who ran off with Lou at the end of Chapter 3, asks about Lou's son Rolph (one of the kids in the safari story); she has forgotten that he died long ago when he was 28. She has been long separated from Lou. Full of both pity and anger, she fantasizes about drowning him. She laments that when they first got together, Lou promised her the world and never delivered. 6. X's and O's - Scotty (somewhere middle-aged? I'm bad at guessing ages. Scotty is the narrator) - Bennie Scotty is washed up, doing part time janitorial work to make ends meet. He comes across an article in Spin about his old friend Bennie, now a big shot record producer, and he writes Bennie. They arrange to meet in Bennie's office. Scotty, who fishes to eat in the East River, brings a fish to the meeting. In Scotty's world, among his friends, the fish was a real accomplishment (striped bass!) but in Bennie's world, out of context, the fish is weird and vaguely threatening. They talk about Alice, who divorced Scotty long ago and about whom Benny was crazy when they were kids in Chapter 3. Scotty leaves, confident that he has intimidated Bennie with his fish and crazy gap-toothed smile, and that in spite of Bennie's fancy office and good fortune, Scotty is the boss of Bennie and Scotty. Just before he goes, Bennie puts a business card into his hand and tells him if he ever has music he wants heard, call. The next day Scotty hands the card off to a couple of junkies, maybe musicians, and tells them to call Bennie, tells them, say Scotty sent you. # Side B 7. A to B - Bennie (middle aged) - Kathy, queen bee of the country club - Stephanie, Bennie's wife, publicist of Bosco - Jules, Stephanie's brother and the journalist who attempted to rape Kitty Jackson, now out of prison - Chris, Bennie's son - La Doll, Stephanie's boss (La Doll is "Dolly," the General's publicist in Chapter 8) - Bosco, washed up superstar musician - Noreen, neighbor who peeks at them through the fence Bennie and Stephanie live in a country club community, but worry it means they sold out. Bennie refuses to participate in country clubbish activities, but Stephanie tries to ingratiate herself with the community by playing tennis with Kathy, queen bee of the country club. She hides her tennis games from Bennie as if she's having an affair. She says she's going to pay a business visit to Bosco as cover for her tennis game, but when her brother Jules invites himself along she decides visit Bosco for real, if only to cover her lie. On the way to Bosco's place, Stephanie asks Jules what the hell he's doing with his life. He doesn't know. Bosco tells Stephanie and Jules that he is going revive his career with a comeback tour, a "suicide tour," which means he's going to go on tour with all-new material and party like he did when he was young, which he expects to kill him, which will make a great documentary. He says the album will be called "A to B". Stephanie is dubious, but Jules, who up to this point was cynical and shiftless, becomes rapt and full of purpose at the idea of writing about Bosco's comeback and/or suicide. When she returns to the house, Stephanie finds a bobby pin in her bed and realizes that Bennie has slept with Kathy. In distress and hoping to hide from her family, she wanders out into a far corner of the yard and has a strange little conversation with Noreen through the fence ("I like to sit in this spot," Noreen says. "I know," Stephanie says.) 8. Selling the General - Dolly Peale, publicist for the General - The General, genocidal dictator of some country somewhere - Lulu, Dolly's daughter - Arc, assistant to the General - Kitty Jackson, charismatic, troublemaking starlet Dolly is the American publicist of a genocidal dictator known as the General. The General has hired Dolly from afar so she can improve his image in the international community where opinion of him is less than favorable. Dolly has taken the job out of desperation; her career was ruined after she accidentally spilled scalding oil all over the guests at an A-list party she organized, a crime for which she served six months for criminal negligence. Dolly communicates with the General through Arc, his assistant, via fax and phone calls. She advises him to make superficial changes, for example she urges him to wear a certain kind of hat. She decides later that he needs to have his picture taken with an American movie star and she chooses Kitty Jackson, super famous starlet whose career is nevertheless on the ropes because since she was attacked by the journalist Jules during an interview (which is about to happen in Chapter 9), she can't tolerate the Hollywood scene and frequently pitches fits on set. Dolly, Kitty, and Dolly's daughter Lulu fly to whatever country the General is the dictator of. Dolly is extremely nervous because Kitty acts like a brat all the way up to the very moment they meet the General, and then suddenly she turns on her superstar charm, the faux-candid pictures of the General hobnobbing with the starlet are taken, and Dolly is relieved and proud of herself. Moments later, however, Kitty starts asking questions like, "Is this where you bury the bodies? Oh, was I not supposed to bring up the genocide?" The General's men take her away. Dolly and Lulu fly back to the states without Kitty. The photos hit the paper and are a smashing success; the General gives Dolly a large cash payment and then terminates her services. The General and Kitty are seen together at other public events. I really do not understand what Kitty is thinking at this point. Dolly receives offers of employment from other genocidal dictators but she turns them down and instead opens a cafe. 9. Forty Minute Lunch - Kitty Jackson - Jules Jones (the narrator) - Janet Green (Jules's ex) Jules writes an article about an interview with Kitty Jackson. Throughout the article he makes copious references in footnotes to his own failed relationship with a woman named Janet Green. Near the end of the interview described in the article, Jules attacks Kitty and attempts to rape her, and the article is revealed to have been written from prison. 10. Out of Body - Drew - Sasha - Rob Freeman (the narrator, who speaks in two-word sentences) - Lizzie (age 20) - Bix All the kids get stoned. Rob is recovering from a recent suicide attempt. He reminisces about meeting Sasha, about swapping secrets with her (Sasha: had a problem stealing, ran away to Europe with a musican who dumped her and subsequently made her living stealing and turning tricks. Rob: experimented with gay sex, but he's not gay, really!). Rob is Sashas best buddy nonsexual guy friend, wishes he had made a move on Sasha but now it's too late because she's with Drew. But truly it's Drew he has a crush on. At some point the gang goes to see the Conduits in concert. The Conduits are the band that Bennie discovered and will later make his career on, and they are the band that Bosco will later become famous with. Sasha meets Bennie for the first time at this concert and peels away from the group. By morning, it's only Drew and Rob left together. Rob says he wishes that he and Drew could live far away in a cabin together, and Drew deflects by saying how much he would miss Sasha. Rob says, okay, well, Sasha was a pickpocket and prostitute in Europe, did you know that? Drew says fuck you, get away from me. And then exasperated, strips off his clothes (the sight of which is a thrill which Rob had been longing for) and goes swimming in the East River. Rob follows, but he is a weak swimmer and he drowns. 11. Good-bye, my love - Ted Hollander - Sasha (Late teens, age 19) - Beth and Andy, Sasha's parents - Susan, Ted's wife Sasha is in Naples, Italy, marooned after having been dumped by the globetrotting musician she ran off with. Ted is her uncle, sent to Italy by Sasha's parents to find her. After some days of hardly trying to find her, he stumbles upon her as she's buying cigarettes. She is polite but is anxious to get away, but in the end agrees to have dinner with him. In the hotel room waiting for dinner, Ted thinks back to when he was in college and spent the summer with Sasha's family. Sasha's father was abusive and fought with Sasha's mother, twice dislocating her shoulder. Ted felt protective of Sasha and somtimes took her out to the lake to occupy and distract her while her parents acted crazy inside the house. Specifically he remembers taking her to swim, remembers that she wanted to go swimming, she was afraid of swimming, she was rebellious about trying. At dinner, Ted and Sasha both are having trouble coming to terms with the fact that Sasha is an adult. She's got a limp from a recent accident, she's cutting her own arms, she's got a tenuous relationship with her friends. She says she fantasized about her Father coming to look for her; when Sasha asks her Uncle Ted why he's in Italy, he lies to her and says he's come to look at art. (Why does he say that?) She is upset but swallows her sad face and invites him to dance. Once he's dancing, she disappears with his wallet. He manages to find her in her apartment the next morning, and her situation is even more desperate than he thought: it is evident she has no friends and no money either. (Rob, who drowned in Chapter 10, revealed that she resorted to prostitution during this time). They argue, but they reconcile. The chapter ends with a flash-forward: Ted, an old man, visits Sasha in California where she lives with her family. 12. Great Rock and Roll Pauses - Alison (the narrator) - Lincoln (Alison's brother) - Sasha - Drew, Sasha's husband, the same guy Sasha dated in Chapter 10 Alison describes her family: Her brother Lincoln is autistic and meticulously graphs the pauses in songs. Her father, Drew, has a difficult time – much more difficult than Sasha – coming to terms with Lincoln's obsessions. Alison, an anxious empath, is overly concerned for each member of her family. Sasha and Drew are both haunted by the drowning death of Rob, and so by extension is Alison. Drew comes to terms with Lincoln's music-pause obsession and it is unbearably sweet. 13. Pure Language - Bennie (in his late 50's) - Alex, the guy Sasha got together with in Chapter 1 - Rebecca, Alex's wife - Lulu, the daughter in the 'General' story - Scotty, Bennie's old friend who brought him the fish Bennie has quit the big record label he founded in a huff over artistic integrity. Alex (of Chapter 1) had hoped to work for Bennie as a mixer, but Bennie instead hires him as a kind of viral marketer. Alex's wife knows he didn't get the job he wanted, but he hasn't told her that he was hired for the marketing job because he's afraid she'll see him as a sell-out. Lulu (of "Selling the General"), now a young adult, is a kind of Machiavellian overachiever, and works for Alex doing fake grassroots style marketing. The event they're working to promote is a concert by unknown Scotty Hausmann (Scotty of the fish in Chapter 6). Scotty has been writing and hoarding songs, and Bennie has decided to make him famous. Thanks to the work of Alex and Lulu there's a large turnout for the concert, but Scotty is nervous and freaking out and doesn't want to perform. Bennie and Alex are trying to wrestle him into submission and it's going very badly when Lulu appears, instantly charms Scotty, and leads him onto the stage. The event is a success. Afterward, Bennie and Alex remember Sasha and wonder where she is these days. Her old apartment building happens to be nearby, so they walk over and ring the buzzer but nobody answers. They hear someone approaching but it isn't Sasha; it's someone else, another young woman who is just starting out in New York. Jay Jansheski answered in Book Club- A Visit from the Goon Squad 11 months ago Answer, comment & read 6 more answers »

• Comment on Algernon's answer…

  0 0 The Imperfectionists! I knew I was missing one. I haven't read Prague, but while we're on it, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is another example. Jay Jansheski commented 12 months ago

• See all of my 2 Questions , 16 Answers and 8 Comments