Shipping in March: Weeks 2 & 3

So, anybody paying close attention may have noticed I’ve skipped a week on updating my progress on shipping in March. There wasn’t much to report in week 2 aside from I was busily updating my Nifty Digits site. This hasn’t yet gone live, mainly due to some restrictions on current client projects and publishing about my previous work. I hope to be able to publish it before the end of the month. I spent approximately 3 days on this, 1 on client work and 1 on working on Hourglass.

This past week however I’ve been working on a revamp for Fair & Bare and breaking out the shopping software I built for it into a new product. The reasoning for this is two-fold – we have stock for Fair & Bare we want to rave about and sell and I spent a long time building a shopping cart system that’s only ever been used by me! It makes sense (at least to me) that making this byproduct available (as per the 37signals mantra). Fair & Bare has existed for 7 years now and it’s backend has barely changed in that time and it’s still happily taking orders. This week has been an opportunity to rebuild it in a more robust manner, with more features and without everything that annoys me about current checkout systems.

Granted, it’s currently small and will probably won’t compare in terms of the number of features to cart provider’s that already exist – but what I hope it will provide is a simple, easy to manage way of selling stuff online. I’ve had a huge amount of thoughts on what would be the best way to package it, but have settled on a SaaS based system, rather than self hosted. I’ve been able to use stripe to simplify the way payments are taken and I’m planning on integrating a number of other tools to make life easier for developers.

Again, it’s incomplete and not ready to release – but it is in a place that I’m able to use it as an admin. I’m planning on getting F&B using it and then releasing it on it’s own. If you’d like to see some features then please comment below and let me know.

The one thing I have realised about working on my own projects is the freedom I have to talk about it. No NDAs, no worry of treading on people’s toes, just (hopefully) helpful info. Several blog post ideas have been found over the course of the work I’ve been doing so far this month, one of which has already been published. I’m hoping I’ll finally have something to show you all before the end of this week.