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!

Today, I spent a little time making a couple of changes to Salvia Trip. The number one thing I needed to do was create some kind of spam filter. Initially, I planned on moderating all the experience reports myself, but all the american ones had to wait ages before I got out of bed. This kind of delay isn’t very helpful when there’s community buildin’ to be done. A few days later, I just published them automatically, until someone’s salvia experience could apparently be summed up soley by a list of links. “What a spiritual journey”, I thought. After the second beautiful interpretation via the medium of linkage was brought to my attention, I realised something needed to be done… eventually. Naturally, procrastination took hold, and I resorted to deleting them from the database manually as a quick fix. So today, I put my coding hat on and made a little filter to halt any report containing a link. I’ll then delete all the spam, accept all the legit reports and everybody’s happy.

Since my coding hat was barely on for five seconds, I decided further action was necessary. Other changes include:

• Changing the number of trips/comments on a user’s profile page from six to five, like the front page
• Swapping the order of the most popular trips when browsing – least popular were at the top for some reason…
• Adding a default avatar to profiles without one
• Displaying avatars with all trip reports and comments
• Changing the advert blocks to be a bit more complementary instead of blended in with the text

Here’s the new default avatar, inspired by those next to comments on this blog. You might recognise the salvia leaves from SageWisdom – I painted in the leaves, spread them further apart and used them as a pattern for the background.

My head is now sufficiently toasty, so off comes the coding hat and on goes the relaxin’-in-front-of-the-telly poncho. We have some powerful new smoking mixtures to try out…

This has been my avatar for as old as I can remember, when the only thing worth doing with the Internet was downloading single mp3s and learning how to blow things up. As such, the only copy I have is the 80*80px shitty quality jpeg you see here.

It’s now 2008, and as the web becomes a bigger, better place full of rich media and interactivity, most forums have evolved to allow avatars bigger than 3kB. So, to be ready for the next several years haranguing people over the Internet, I figured I’d need to “upgrade”.

An hour or so with Photoshop later, enter Mark II. Bigger, better, certainly more badass AND wearing some kind of hippie T-shirt!

There is a reason to all this though. As every niche marketer should know, posting on forums and being part of a community is a great way to get your name out there. A lot of people don’t do this for one reason or another; maybe they don’t have the time, or maybe they just can’t stand talking to their “key demographic”. Whatever the reason, they should be getting involved. Forums can be both entertaining and worthwhile for your business. They help build your brand, and a signature link under each of your posts will go a long way toward getting you more traffic and getting you noticed by the search engines.

Another reason I wanted to make this new avatar is because my forum profiles needed updating anyway. What with the recent changes I made to Coffeesh0p, a great number of my signature links were pointing to the wrong place! If I was going to have to change my profiles anyway, I may as well update my avatar!

Of course, some may argue that I was merely procrastinating…