You may or may not have realized that I have been, in a sense, ‘absent’ from this site for a couple of weeks. No forum posts, no blog posts and no tweets. I was away on vacation for 10 days and then I returned to a need to get some new functionality running on the site that consumed me for a few nights. During that time, though, I’ve been here behind the scenes keeping the site running through the care and feeding it requires. While physically away from home, I did much of it via my wife’s iPhone. It’s amazing what you can do with that little device and I could pretty much run this entire site through it.

It has been a long time coming but my biggest accomplishment over these few weeks is that I finally have stickers for the TWF ‘club’.

My personal deadline to get them done was May 1 and I made it! But, not with out a lot of help from Delgen Press. I worked remotely with them after I couldn’t find a good local option that was affordable. Judi from Delgen was great.

I had them in my physical possession earlier this week but, shortly before that as I waited for them to come, it hit me that I needed a way to coordinate the payment and distribution of them. My original plan was to give them away for free if I could get them for $100 or less. But, given that I had to go with a larger quantity to have them professionally printed, I decided to charge a small amount to recover my costs.

The web site changes I did earlier in the month provided me with an easy way to do that. To my new Drupal-based site, I added an e-commerce module called UberCart over the course of a few nights. With Ubercart, I devised a pretty cool solution that uses Paypal for the payments so I don’t have to do any credit card processing or store any financial data. It is expandable in the future in case I decide to offer my own merchandise instead of using Cafepress.

Now, as I write this, I don’t know if it will actually work on the first try but I have solicited some help to test it out. I have extensively tested it on my own submitting Paypal transactions through their sandbox site. But, we all know about glitches which occur because you can’t emulate every variable. In my real job, we like to joke that there is no test like production.

I may never sell the 250 that I purchased but I am encouraging the purchase of more than one through a discount for quantities over 1. Once I get a few successful transactions through the system I will open it up to everyone.