Ah Spring. The ice is melting, the winds are howling, the streams are streaming. Jack and I have been hard at work making some fundamental changes to the site. Hopefully most of these changes will be transparent to you (because they’re supposed to be). One thing we did was switch hosting companies. Goodbye Earthlink after seven years, hello Lunar Pages. Earthlink was an OK host–but just OK (lately their servers had gotten really slow). We also upgraded a lot of software that runs things on the site, from the mailing list to the pointless poll. Should you care about any of this? Well….probably, nah.
But there is one big change that won’t be transparent: Starting in April Jack will begin accepting credit cards. Folks have been asking for this for a long time (the old “just send me a check” doesn’t really cut it in the Internet age). It’s something Jack has wanted to do for awhile. The big obstacle was finding a web host and shopping cart that wouldn’t require us to redo the site using one of their boring, cookie-cutter page templates (if you’ve ever shopped at a Yahoo store you know what I mean). After months of researching, viewing demos, and making comparisons, we finally found a solution we like–foxycart. It’s the bomb–easy to use, 100% secure, and it lets us keep the look and feel of the Web site exactly as it is. Right now we’re just doing some final customization and testing and expect to go live in a couple of weeks. So we’re pretty psyched. I’m even wondering if (haven’t told Jack this) we should offer a prize or something to the first person who places a credit card order on the site.
My personal 2008 spring cleaning of fishing gear I just started today. So far it mostly amounts to returning a lot of stuff I bought last year that turned out to be junk. 😉