Since me ‘n’ the misses have finished our degrees (just waiting on the results now…) & almost finished moving house, hopefully we’ll be doing some cool blog & Coffeesh0p stuff soon.

For the blog, firstly I intend to do a couple of interviews with some interesting people. While I like to talk a lot about drugs, medicines, pharmacology, etc, I’m also a bit of a nerd, so I’m looking forward to talking to a few like-minded people who run drugs-related sites. I’ve also got a bong I’d like to give away, but I want to do it in a much more awesome way than the last competition. I’m thinking …joint rolling contest? Would that be something you guys would be interested in? The details (and legality) would need to be worked out, but that sounds like it might be a laugh. I figure before you should be granted bong access, you must first appreciate and master the art of rolling.

Any other suggestions? If you can suggest anything better, I’m all ears. Well… mostly.

Now uni has finished and we’ve moved into a bigger house, we can finally give Coffeesh0p a go full-time, something we’ve been looking forward to for ages. Firstly, now we have more space, we can start buying entheogens (such as Salvia & Kratom) by the kilo directly from their source. That should mean we’ll be able to sell them to you for much cheaper. Also, we’ve got the room to expand our range again, so keep an eye out for loads of new products. If there’s anything we don’t sell that you’d like, leave a comment and I’ll try and hunt it down.

Since I’ll now be making Coffeesh0p (and this blog, of course) my number one priority, I’ll be able to make some interesting changes. I’ve already done a bit of housekeeping stuff, like made the basket page look a little friendlier and put some cooler buttons on all the forms. I also had a go at adding a delivery address option on the checkout, but that’s not working right. (If anyone wants stuff sent to an alternate delivery address, btw, just email me. ) I’ve got a few ideas on what to do next, but I’d also reallllly like your input. In fact, here’s your chance to be a harsh as possible – what looks shit? What’s completely defunct? How could I make it look 110% more awesome? What essential, must-have features are we missing? If you can think of anything at all, please enter a comment below!

In case the idea hasn’t sunk in yet, I’m looking for your opinion on all these things. Leaving a comment couldn’t be simpler – just enter a name & email (don’t worry, no one but me will see your email address, and it doesn’t have to be a real name), and then pour your opinion all over the comment box. Hit submit and you’re done. Even if you’ve never left a comment anywhere in your life and this is the first bit of communicating you’ve done online, please write something!

© Synchronium – stealing other people’s ideas since 2006.

Out of my three final exams, I’ve taken the two hardest ones already, leaving one small one for next week. Since this is an ethics exam which I can’t revise for, I’ve finally found a bit of time to do some interesting Coffeesh0p work.

Navigation

If you’ve been on the site before now, you might have noticed the simple breadcrumb navigation at the top of each page under the search box. What we used to have was a simple list of pages all the way back up to the home page.  It helps not only with navigation, but also with search engine optimisation, linking the site together to give a much more structured feel. One problem though – it looked totally shit.

Today, I gave it a bit of a facelift:

As you can see, it now looks like it’s supposed to be there, instead of like it was tacked on as an afterthought. It also shows a drop down list containing all the subcategories for a particular category, hopefully making navigation a bit easier too as well as linking the site up more solidly.  I’ve also moved the search box to the left and brought the category jump menu up beside it to make more room. Unfortunately, it only works on the shop pages for now. I think a good potion of tomorrow will be spent applying it to the rest of the site.

Advert

I also got a bit of time this week to have a proper go on Photoshop in order to design an advert for the next edition of Wasted comic. We advertised in the first issue, but a) that advert looked worse and b) our old Photoshop guy no longer works for us, giving me the perfect opportunity to flex my skillz:

What do you think? Your criticism is more than welcome – it’s the only way I’ll learn.

Competition Winner

Oh, and before I forget, the final competition winner is Virusboy. Your pills will be shipped on Monday!

Everyone else: Don’t be too disheartened. I’ve got some more stuff to give away in the near future, I just need to decide on the most awesome way to give it away, so stick around!

Wellllll, my dissertation is finally handed in, so I thought I’d write a bit of a long post about Kratom today. Kratom is probably my favourite entheogen, so I’m surprised I haven’t written about it before. Actually, it did get a brief mention in JWH-018, Spice & Me (to the disappointment of a couple of kratom vendors more interested in profit than helping to spread factual information), but I think it’s worthy of a post of its own. I also recently added a tonne of kratom products to Coffeesh0p that I want to talk about too, so a post about kratom is about due.

It’s a shame that I don’t have any more presentations to give (well, kind of, because I hate giving presentations) because Kratom would definitely be the subject of the next one. So…

What is Kratom?

Kratom refers to the leaves of the Mitragyna speciosa tree that’s native to Southeast Asia. A member of the Rubiaceae family, Kratom is also related to the Coffee plant (Coffea spp.) and Psychotria viridis, a hallucinogenic shrub used throughout the Amazon. It’s effects include analgesia (ie, it’s a pain killer), stimulation at low doses and sedation at higher doses accompanied by euphoria. Sounds awesome, right?

Kratom Use

So, how is kratom used? Traditionally, workers of Southeast Asia would chew on the fresh leaves for a mild stimulatory effect and also as a pain killer. Sounds like a perfect natural remedy to get you through a long day, but unfortunately, fresh leaves are pretty scarce outside their country of origin. Luckily for us though, dried leaf retains its potency, so can be shipped worldwide – just don’t try and chew it. Dried leaf can be be brewed into a tea, refined into an extract (which can also be brewed up or eaten) or smoked, although the effects of smoking it are limited.

Kratom tea is generally prepared by boiling your leaf (see below for dosage info) in water and lemon juice for about 15 minutes. This is then strained and more water/lemon juice added to the leaves and the process repeated. The lemon juice is important, as the citric acid present in it acidifies your tea, meaning more of the alkaloids present in kratom will be extracted into solution. Once the leaves are strained for a second time, they can be chucked away, leaving you with a murky brown liquid that doesn’t taste amazing. This large quantity of liquid can be boiled down further to reduce the volume, but it’s not essential. You might want to add some sugar or honey for taste though. My lab rat and his gerbil friend tend to make their tea up to the nearest 100 ml, so it can be taken as 50 ml shots throughout the evening. Turning your particular dosage of kratom leaves into approximately 200 ml of tea is enough for 4 shots. If you’re new to kratom, try spacing these shots out every half an hour to an hour. This way, you won’t take too much and you can experience all of the subtleties kratom has to offer instead of diving straight in at the deep end. Alternatively, some people just throw all of their crushed leaf into a glass of juice, stir it up and just knock it back. This can be just as effective if you’ve got the stomach for it.

As far as smoking goes, it’s really not that great. If you’re going to smoke kratom, it’s far more rewarding to smoke some alongside a cup of kratom tea than just smoking it exclusively.

Kratom Dosage & Effects

An effective dosage for one person may be completely different for another person, as a tolerance can develop, especially with daily use. Other factors can also affect how much you might need (more on that later), so the best thing to do is start off with a low dose and increase it by small increments each time until you arrive at a dosage you’re comfortable with. This advice should be followed whenever you try something new, not just for kratom.

Here’s a rough dosage guide:

Dosages greater than 15g can be too much for some people, while dosages above 25g will be too much for most people. It’s statistically likely that you are included in the “most people” group, so please be careful!

Kratom Pharmacology

Kratom contains a number of active alkaloids, including mitragynine, 7-hydroxymitragynine & mitraphylline, which are structurally similar to the hallucinogenic tryptamines (eg LSD, psilocybin), as if this plant wasn’t interesting enough! At low doses, these alkaloids are thought to act on the adrenergic system (the same sets of receptors that respond to adrenaline & noradrenaline), responsible for the plant’s stimulatory effects.

At higher doses, however, these compounds start to activate your opioid receptors. These are the same receptors that opiates such as codeine, morphine and heroin bind to which cause the same sedation, analgesia and euphoria associated with opiate use. 7-hydroxymitragynine actually appears to be 17x more potent than morphine at these receptors. Powerful stuff! It’s no surprise then that:

1. Kratom can be used to help opiate addicts overcome their addiction
2. An effective kratom dosage depends on any pre-existing opiate tolerance
3. Kratom itself can be habit forming, just like opiates (so don’t use it every day!)

Growing Kratom

Unfortunately, growing kratom will be more hassle that it’s worth. Mitragyna Speciosa prefers the warm, swampy conditions of Southeast Asia, which makes growing it outside impossible in most areas of the world. Even a green house won’t be enough. If you’re going to grow it, you need to be serious about it. You’ll need an area of your house set aside for climate control, lamps, etc. Here’s the final blow: the kratom you grow yourself will likely be of inferior quality compared to that grown natively. Sorry to disappoint.

If you still want to go ahead, you’ll need to find a rooted clone, as you won’t find any seeds commercially available, or if you do, they might be fake, and cuttings tend to be vulnerable to infection.

Kratom Products

There are a number of kratom products available for purchase. I’m always on the lookout for more because I think this plant is truly amazing, so if you find something you think I should be stocking, let me know! Anyway, here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve got so far:

Kratom Leaf This is just bog-standard, dried, crushed kratom leaf. This is also available in a prerolled joint to enjoy in conjunction with other kratom products.

Thai Dragonfly Liquid Kratom Extract Each bottle of liquid kratom extract contains 20 ml. I’m not sure what strength this extract is, but it suggests a dose of 5 to 10 ml will be sufficient.

Kratom 15x Extract This extract is 15x stronger the plain leaf. Each pack contains 2g of powered extract. Unfortunately, this is a little expensive compared to the rest of the kratom products available, because it comes in fancy packaging and I have to import it.

Freeze Dried Kratom 20x Extract This brittle, resinous extract is 20x stronger than plain leaf.

Kratom Gold 35x Extract Capsules Each pack contains 3 capsules of 500mg 35x extract. A convenient way to consume your kratom!

Krypton Kratom 50x Extract This is without a doubt my lab rat’s favourite kratom product. Being 50x stronger than plain leaf, 0.5g is plenty for an entire evening. Comes in a 3g and 1g pack.

It’s a sad day. Once our current stock of Spice has run out, then there’ll be no more Spice. I’m not sure if it’s actually going to be banned, or if our suppliers just can’t get hold of it any more, but what I can tell you is that similar smoking mixtures are still available. We’ve still got Sence & Aroma on the site, and I added Smoke this morning, but here’s what we hope to get hold of in the next few weeks:

Yucatan Fire Genie Mojo Red Ball Ignite Cahoots Chill Zo Hai Eclipse

Hold tight, Spice fans!

Competition Winner

The first of three packs of Hypnotic Pills goes to Paracaine! Although that’s not your real name, you should know who you are. Actually, I emailed you yesterday, but no response. Perhaps the phases “randomly selected“, “winner” and “legal pills” tripped some sort of spam filter? Who knows! Anyway, Paracaine, can you drop me an email or comment on this post when you see this? You’ve got until next Saturday to get in touch…

Here’s some good news. Thanks to the endless badgering of a few Americans, I’ve decided to open the competition up worldwide! Yes, that’s right, the remaining two packs of pills can be won by anyone! All you need to do is subscribe to this blog by email to be in with a chance to win.

New Products

Over the past week, we’ve added a couple of new products to the site:

• Snoberry – the younger, hotter, strawberry-flavoured sister of Snow Blow herbal snuff
• Hummer 4 Pills – Turns out we had the old 3 pill pack on the site and the manufacturers changed them to 2 and 4 pill packs. I thought I was going crazy when I couldn’t find a 3 pill pack that someone had ordered, but now both the 4 and 2 pill packs are on the site.
• Hypnotic Pills – Yes, that’s right, you can now by the 4 pill pack and 2 pill pack if you can’t wait to win them!

The Best Thing On The Internet

I think Sam Harris may have been wrong about religion keeping drugs illegal. These evangelical Christians appear to be totally battered:

(Drum & bass added for emphasis)

Mellon Udrigle Beach

Last week me and my now ex-girlfriend (read on…) went on holiday to the west coast of Scotland. With the last few weeks of university looming over us like some kind of big, looming, stressful metaphor, what better way to unwind than abandoning all work and revision for a bit and going on holiday?

Slattadale

We started the week wandering round the grounds of Blair Castle and then headed up to Landmark Forest Adventure Park, where we learned that ducks will jump for chips, among other things. There’s no way I can list everything we did there and not sound completely lame, so have a look at their website instead. Day two we spent chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool on Mellon Udrigle beach, one of the best beaches ever, where me and my girlfriend got engaged!

As if that wasn’t enough excitement for one week, day three was spent checking out a river that appears from nowhere, another awesome beach in Durness, Smoo cave, the best fish et chips in the country according to Rick Stein and Corrieshalloch gorge, a gaping hole in the ground, spanned by the flimsiest of bridges.

Durness Beach

Day four was a slow day – everyone was knackered. A quick run round the shops in the morning followed by another trip to Mellon Udrigle was about all we could handle.  The last day was a little more action packed. We went to Gairloch, Red Point, yet another beach, Slattadale, a nice little woodland walk,  and finally Inverewe Gardens, home to some pretty amazing plants, considering it’s in Scotland (apparently, it has something to do with the weird currents around there…) For those of you still thinking “Who the hell would want to go to Scotland? All it does is piss down“, let me just mention one more thing… On our last day, where we were was as hot as Bermuda, hotter than all of the UK and the majority of Europe. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!

A big thanks to everyone who obviously thought we did deserve a holiday and placed an order anyway! If it makes you feel any better about the delay, me and the soon-to-be misses were up all Sunday night packaging stuff – at one point we could barely move for envelopes. Suffice to say, the Post Office shat their pants!

So, it’s back to the grindstone for another few weeks then hopefully we can get some interesting stuff happening with Coffeesh0p and this blog.

The view from Inverewe Gardens

Thanks again!

Woop!

It’s been a busy week here at Coffeesh0p Studios (my bedroom). First off, we’ve been battling with hosting issues since the weekend. Turns out we’d exceeded our bandwidth limit for February, taking both Coffeesh0p and this blog down until I forked over more money. It’s kind of like the internet equivalent of being kidnapped and held to ransom. I’ve also been taking pictures for some of the new products I mentioned a while ago, so I thought I’d share some here. At the moment, the product images on Coffeesh0p are pretty small, most of them being around 200 px wide, so I’ve picked a few of my favourite full size pics and displayed them below. Click on each for the full resolution version.

	We’ll finally be stocking plain ol’ Fly Agaric caps in the next few days. Up until now, the only Amanita muscaria we’ve sold has been prepackaged, so it’s hard to display them in their full glory. This single cap will be turned into a thumbnail image only 50 x 50 px. Seems such a shame.
This picture of Salvia divinorum leaf has been desperately needed for quite some time. Although we’ve always sold salvia leaf, the picture was terrible.
	Since most extracts look pretty unappealing, this chunky Damiana 4x extract really stood out.
This is one of our new smoking mixtures, Blaze. Looks as delicious as it smells!

So, I’ve been playing around with Excel (read: procrastinating) a lot lately and produced these lovely looking graphs. Since they do look ever so lovely, and without revealing too much, I thought I’d post them here, along with a healthy dose of good advice. Also, the second two show the first month’s results from my little article experiment.

The X axis represents the months from Jan 2007 until Dec 2008. The extrapolated curves of best fit do not take into account December’s data.

I guess this first graph shows we’re here to stay – this is the number of orders placed with us each month. While the number of orders placed last month is a little lower than November’s data, this is consistent with most other e-commerce sites, who all see a slump in traffic (and sales) over the holidays. Who’d have thought people would prefer to spend time with their families rather than shop online? The same thing also occurs during December of last year. Still, not bad for a recession.

This graph shows overall traffic to the site. Internet marketeers may be interested to learn that the distinct peaks represent my limited foray into social bookmarking. Notice how the same months in the previous graph do not show any similar increases in the amounts of orders placed. This just goes to show that social bookmarking is shite for e-commerce.

One final point: traffic dropped significantly in December – far more than you’d expect over the holidays. Fortunately, this was exactly as I’d planned. December was when I moved all the old articles over to this blog, and articles are big traffic-generating machines. Take note, budding marketeers – article marketing can really drive traffic to your site! Compare the month of December on both graphs so far though – while traffic dropped significantly, the number of orders decreased only slightly. There are also plenty of other things you can do with old static content, so make sure you don’t let things stagnate.

This final graph shows each month’s conversion rate – that is, the percentage of visitors who go on to place an order. December’s data shows a significant increase as soon as I moved those articles, which just goes to show – traffic isn’t everything! It surprised me that before then, the conversion rate was still continually on the rise. I must have been doing something right. Unfortunately though, many, many things can affect your conversion rates, none of which have a particularly large effect. Here’s a great post on 108 ways you can increase your conversion rates.

Why I should Be Worried

There’s no doubt about it – our little hobby is kicking some ass, but it’s not all good news. More orders means more work, and right now me and my girlfriend are in the last term of our final year at university, so time is not something we have in abundance.

We might have to hire someone…

As Coffeesh0p gets bigger and bigger, I’m getting more and more worried about promoting the psychoactivity of the plants we sell. Recently, the hyped up sales talk all over EveryoneDoesIt has resulted in them removing Salvia divinorum from their shop, so in response, we’ve slapped “not for consumption” labels in a few of our product descriptions. One problem still remains however – our articles section, which contains cannabis recipes, extraction teks and info on proper usage. While I’ve always been a supporter of providing proper information, these articles are making me more and more uncomfortable as the days flit by. As any Internet marketer should know, article writing is one great way to boost traffic and get links back to your site, but any Internet marketer worth his salt also knows, you shouldn’t take unnecessary risks.

The substantial traffic gained from these articles is also pretty poor when it comes to e-commerce – people looking for information probably aren’t ready to buy anything, so “convert” poorly. But those information seekers make great blog readers, so moving those articles to this blog makes perfect sense. It’s tempting to look at overall traffic and feel good as you see it increase, but traffic that converts poorly is actually more of a cost than a benefit. More people = more hosting bills!

Over the next week or so, I’ll gradually be transferring those articles onto this blog (with a 301 redirect, naturally), so keep an eye out!

In fact, we’ll steal your money, sell drugs to your kids and piss on your cat.

No we won’t, but that’s what I’m tempted to say every time Coffeesh0p gets an email asking this same ridiculous question – we get asked if we’re legitimate quite frequently, as it happens. It makes you wonder what’s going on in the minds of these people. If we’re legitimate, of course we’ll reply with a “Yes”. If we plan on stealing your money, we’re even more likely to say “Yes”!

Perhaps they’re the technophobe set of society, afraid to enter any details in case of fraud or identity theft. If that’s the case, maybe they also assume that I’m under oath when answering emails, because no one would ever reply with “Ok, you caught us out! We’re a scam”. They genuinely expect a full spectrum of honest replies.

If these people don’t trust me with their money, but are willing to take what I say as fact, maybe slapping a big button on the homepage saying “WE WON’T STEAL YOUR MONEY” will make people think twice before emailing us.

Actually, in future, I think I’ll just link them to the post…