Wordpress is the most beginner-friendly solution I know of in terms of fitting together nicely and smoothly. If you’re doing it on your own server, you will have to do the Wordpress install yes, but that’s true of any solution you pursue, and once the base is in it’s very easy to add e-commerce functionality. There are a ton of Youtube tutorials that show the process in varying levels of detail, but this one shows a streamlined way to actually install and set up the Woocommerce plugin. You will have to enter products and etc, but actually installing the plugin is literally about a 30-second process.
I generally like to talk it up just because Wordpress is generally my go-to for easy setup of a new web site, whether or not it involves e-commerce; it’s easy and well-supported and dedicated Wordpress hosting is probably some of the cheapest types of hosting you’ll be able to find on the internet. That tutorial I linked about likes Bluehost; personally I prefer Tigertech but the point is there are easy and cheap options.
I’m happy to answer questions or help; I’ve set up a few different little amateur-mode e-commerce sites on Wordpress and I don’t know of any easier solution.
At a bare minimum you need a complex database structure to support products, stocks, orders plus the pages for browsing, searching, shopping, ordering, tracking, then you need user accounts, integrations with payments and shipping, a transactional email service etc.
Well, sure. You’ll also need a filesystem to run it all on, cache memory with LRU replacement, a router, power and air conditioning, and lots of other stuff. The question was, what’s an easy way to do all that that’s ready to run. I’ve set up a couple different e-commerce sites on Wordpress and it’s easy and flexible; everything you listed does need to happen, but it’s behind the scenes of the plugin installation. I genuinely don’t know of a turnkey solution that’s easier, although I’m happy to hear about them.
I mean, Wordpress started as a blog. Linux started as a terminal emulator. The question is how well does its current state fit the current task at hand.
There are WordPress plugins that attempt it
Why do you say “attempt”?
it’s usually more for people who use it mainly as a blog/CMS and want to sell a couple of things on the side
So, I run a dedicated site that sells a few thousand items based on Wordpress+Woocommerce; it’s basically a hobby, but if I wanted to be serious about driving sales one of the most important things would be the ability to customize landing pages, test out different layouts, make changes, etc… basically, the ability for the software to function as a CMS would be key to what I would want. Being “primarily” a CMS product with selling products as secondary, for me, works better than the other way around (primarily a product-listing-and-selling software with editing pages and layouts as secondary).
I wouldn’t use them for a large shop.
Depends what you mean by “large.” Performance is probably the biggest issue that would make me hesitate to go for Wordpress+Woocommerce beyond a certain scale, but as I say I’m running a moderate-scale e-commerce site on Wordpress right now and I’ve generally been very happy with its tradeoff of “ease of setup” vs “customizability and extensibility for fancy stuff” vs cost.
Yeah. The “Fire on the Velvet Horizon” stuff is really too powerful to be used as-is in my experience; generally I’ll insert them in much reduced form. “Hostage Frog” becomes a big frog monster that tries to swallow and digest the adventurers. “Ice Age Eye” becomes a particular frozen part of the map that’s unusual and strange in a certain way. That is why I love it though; any one of those entries easily contains enough powerful content that it could take over and consume the entire campaign structure, so there’s plenty of creative strength to use for adding flavor to the adventure even if it’s not safe to use undiluted.
I for-real forgot that new reddit existed. I’ve stopped posting there but still read “all” periodically, and “old.reddit.com” is so ingrained that I was a little confused when they started talking about a new look, since I haven’t noticed anything…
I have some small amount of experience with this, but based on the little I know, here’s what I can say. First question is what is your goal? To get customers, or to create a community? Below is general advice but it’s hard to say just talking about it in the abstract.
If you want a community, I would probably advise to just treat it as one more channel, have separate pages in Meta / X / Fediverse / Pinterest or whatever as separate communities, since in a lot of cases there won’t be overlap between them. I wouldn’t recommend abandoning your existing Meta or X pages to set up a Fediverse page instead, although making a contingency plan for the slow motion demise of Meta as a platform for the long term seems like a good idea.
If you want to drive sales, then for me Google Ads always worked better than buying advertising on Meta or X or etc anyway. Have you measured conversion numbers from Meta? They make it easy to spend money definitely, but I always found the ROI in terms of pure paid sales to be pretty bad from them.
Hm, yeah, I would just start up a Mastodon page in parallel with the Meta page. Pick the right “home” server to join; that’s critically important for Mastodon in a way that it’s not for Meta. Put in charge of the page someone who’s genuinely excited about participating in Mastodon, and would be engaged with the gaming community there whether or not they were in charge of the page. I don’t think I would recommend spending anything on ad promotion of the Mastodon page, but like I say I’m not convinced of the utility of spending money on Meta promotion either. YMMV
Anyway like I say my level of knowledge about it is pretty minimal but I’m happy to talk more in depth on details of my experience also if you like.
The smaller edition which weighed 188 tons and which they did actually build a couple prototypes of, had a for-real problem that it was difficult to find a motor powerful enough to drive the thing but small enough to fit inside it. It wound up going 8 mph.
Speer was the one who actually vetoed the Ratte supertank. Also, check out this entertaining bit from the discussion of the Maus supertank, of which a couple prototypes actually did get built:
“It had the same design flaw that made the Elefant unsuitable for close combat. In the end, the tank will inevitably have to wage a close combat since it operates in cooperation with the infantry. An intense debate started, and except for me, all of the present found the ‘Maus’ magnificent.” -Heinz Guderian
I liked Guderian and Speer both. They seemed sensible.
Bro I’m from the US. If I stopped supporting people just because they were war criminals, I’d never be able to vote or talk politics ever again.
(Also, Speer actually talks about this in his book – he said at his trial in Nuremberg, his lawyer wanted to bring up that he tried to kill Hitler as a factor in his defense. He said, no, by that point in Germany you could just walk up to any random person on the street and say “I’m working on a plan to kill Hitler” and if they had courage, they’d say “Thank God how can I help.” Basically, he was happy laying out some good things he did late in the war, but said yeah maybe I am a war criminal, I don’t want to weasel out of any of my earlier conduct. But, also, according to his Wikipedia page which I just read, he took pains to present himself as more blameless than he actually was, made specific revisions to how things were presented in his English-language autobiography as compared with the German one, and was in general definitely a POS of the highest order.)
Next you’re gonna tell me Speer’s book where he explained that he had no idea about all that holocaust stuff, and just liked building fancy buildings and getting hang out with this bunch of snappy dressers, was a little bit self serving.
I saw some supposed-expert-for-what-that’s-worth on reddit according to whom this isn’t quite accurate. He said the doctrine he’d been taught was, if you get hit in a tank then it’s highly likely that more is coming, so aggressively moving in the direction from which the fire came and shooting the shit out of anything you see is your best chance for survival.
This was a comment on a video of Russian tanks getting blown up, and he said the Russian response he was observing, of stopping the tank moving, wandering around briefly, and then trying to get away with obstacles blocking you was basically the fastest way to get yourself and everyone in your tank killed. So at least the US box of this graphic should read: “FUCK EM UP FUCK EM UP MEAT’S BACK ON THE MENU”
What they’re trying to accomplish is to make people afraid to get involved in administering elections unless they’re “on the right side.”
This particular effort might or might not have any effect at all. But the point is, it’s in concert with a thousand other things. And, more importantly, they’re getting practice, and learning about what works and what doesn’t and what they can get away with, and who they can trust as their allies when things get real.
Individual privacy and security is national security.
The “nation” in anything resembling a democracy is made up of individual private people with their own motivations, and their own sometimes considerable power, whose security is protected even when it doesn’t line up with the interests of whoever happens to be in charge of the government. Those nations can become extremely powerful, much more so than “secure” states, because they have within them powerful people who give good faith to the systems of government that can organize and wield state power. It has to be that way. Any government that betrays that relationship will collapse into something akin to modern-day Russia. Certain policies might be bad for “individual privacy” in the short run, and good for “national security” in the short run, but there’s a reason why the nations of Nazi Germany or the USSR who prioritized state security so high above that of individuals, weren’t at all secure in practice. On an individual or a national level.
In the absolute middle of World War 2, when Britain was fighting literally for its life against the literal Nazis, and losing, the government had to deal with paying rent to the sometimes disagreeable landlords for their military intelligence offices, and they had to face angry questions from civilians in government about firebombing in German cities and how it was inhumane. They weren’t allowed to just get on with whatever they decided they wanted to do. There was no question about “well this is a government matter so I don’t care what you think, as a private person, and I don’t have to.” That’s not how a democracy works. Some people might disagree, but in my opinion that’s why the side that Britain was part of ultimately won the war: Because the British people knew their rights as individuals would be respected, and so they in turn felt comfortable giving wholehearted support back to the government when the government needed it.
Anyone who describes “national security” as a thing that has to be balanced against the rights of the people who in actual reality make up the nation, is probably talking about something more akin to “state security” in the USSR or Nazi sense. Not the security of the actual nation, but the safety and convenience of policymakers and their friends, sometimes specifically their safety from the nation (i.e. the people).
I spent years of my life programming C++ for a living. Now I’ve been away from it for a while, every few years I look back at it and every time it’s gotten a little worse....
What are some websites where i can find monster/mutant/hellspawn digital art? im looking for inspiration for my half homebrew post apocalyptic sessions
I wouldn’t even go that far, although I’m not deep into the tactics and action of getting progress done like Huey was. To me, fighting for trans rights right now is obviously a good thing. As is fighting for worker’s rights. Refusing to fight for worker’s rights alongside someone, unless they’re willing to also join your fight for (for example) trans rights, is what I think is silly.
The point I’m trying to make is, you don’t even have to do that.
There are already laws against revenge porn and realistic child porn. You don’t have to “prevent” this stuff from happening. That is, as he accurately points out, more or less impossible. But, if it happens you can absolutely do an investigation, and if you can find out who did it, you can put them in jail. That to me sounds like a pretty good solution and I’m still waiting to hear what his issue is with it.
I daily drive Firefox, but more and more websites are starting to break without Chromium, so I still have to occasionally switch to get something working. I was using Ungoogled Chromium until I realized that there was no easy way to update it when that pixel-stealing exploit came out a while back....
I’ve been using that for a while since I ditched Chrome, and anecdotally it seems like it hits a pretty good sweet spot of “privacy-protecting to such an extent that I notice little annoyances as I browse the web, but they’re all trivial and easily bearable, which probably means it’s doing quite a lot to try to protect me.”
A startup called PimEyes allows anyone to identify a stranger within seconds with just a photo of the person's face. The technology has alarmed privacy advocates worldwide.
Consider the consequences, says journalist Kashmir Hill, of everyone deciding to use this technology at all times in public places.
“Something happens on the train, you bump into someone, or you’re wearing something embarrassing, somebody could just take your photo, and find out who you are and maybe tweet about you, or call you out by name, or write nasty things about you online,” said Hill
In an interview with NPR, he said the abuse of the tool has been overstated, noting that the site’s detection tools intercepted just a few hundreds instances of people misusing the service for things like stalking
Y’all are angling for a gold medal at the understatement olympics.
There are potential uses of the technology that could be beneficial. For instance, for people who are blind, or for quickly identifying someone whose name you forgot and, as the company highlights, keeping tabs on one’s own images on the web.
He continued: “PimEyes can be used for many legitimate purposes, like to protect yourself from scams,” he said. “Or to figure out if you or a family member has been targeted by identity thieves.”
OH, COME ON
I love how they really have to dig to even come up with some legitimate ways to use the technology.
Close. It’s about Pimeyes which is used to figure out the name and location of the Onlyfans girl you have a weird parasocial crush on. What’s the worst that could happen?
(Technically, it only finds other photos on the internet of whatever random person you have a single photo of, which you can then often leverage into knowing their name and location.)
I’ve been using Proton Mail and VPN for a while now, and I’m just wondering how everyone else feels about them. I have this kind of inherent alight distrust of them just because they seem like they offer a lot for free and kind of have a Big Tech vibe about them, but there’s nothing for me to really substantiate that...
Wait… okay, I think we’re talking about two different things.
Emails you send or receive are not private. End of story. That’s nothing to do with the provider; they’re just not. SMTP is from the stone age of internet when nothing was private, and the attempts to graft a layer of encryption on top of it are from the bronze age, when encryption wasn’t very standardized or well-tested against real threats, and all of that shows. Even if you put a significant amount of work into grafting full end-to-end PGP encryption on top of the best your provider can do to keep your emails private, it doesn’t work. Emails are not private.
What I assumed you were interested in was in separating your non-private collection of emails from your real world identity. Proton + Tor will do that, bang on. If you’re trying to send and receive messages which are genuinely private, use one of the fairly good options which can do that (Signal or Matrix maybe). If you’re trying to send and receive your non-private emails without it being linked to your real world identity, use Proton + Tor. If you’re trying to send and receive SMTP emails without people being able to read them, you need to rethink what you want, because you’re not going to be able to get that.
But yeah, don’t use email if you don’t trust your email provider.
Not sure how much more I can simplify this: The “if you don’t trust your email provider” has no place in this sentence. Don’t use email if you need the content of your messages to be private. If someone’s looking at Proton because they think it’ll keep their emails private, then yes, that’s a bad idea. But that’s not because of the “Proton” part of that sentence; it’s because of the “emails” part, and setting up your own SMTP service will do nothing to remedy that (in fact it’ll make things worse because it’ll put your own IP address into the “Received-By” headers of every email you send out).
I’m not trying to argue or anything, but I think you should read this for a quite good overview of the issues involved with trying to secure SMTP email. You can also read any number of expert opinions saying the same thing, if you don’t believe me or that article.
If you’re communicating with someone you know who’s also running their own email server, there is no problem with using email.
So, basically, never. I’ve run several SMTP servers in my time. I’m having trouble thinking of an example of when I might have been communicating from one of them to someone else who also ran their own secure SMTP server. If you’re trying to set up a secure end-to-end communication channel with one specific person which involves work on both your ends, it’d be way easier and more secure to use some other transport protocol at that point.
Email is a good protocol
It is. 100%. Sorry if I gave the impression I didn’t think it was. For all its age and some amount of minor stone-age baggage it brought with it, SMTP is genuinely quite well-designed and still serves its purpose 43+ years later, which is incredibly impressive. That purpose is, insecure but reliable and interoperable communication.
it runs over TLS.
Yeah, so does your HTTP connection with Proton. That doesn’t mean the end-result system keeps your messages secure, any more than using HTTPS means Proton is secure.
You can read the article I linked to above, but basically the short version is that email is by the design of the protocol subject to being stored or transmitted unencrypted at various intermediate places as it’s being sent around, in ways that are by the design of the protocol impossible to prevent.
You’re not required to agree with me; you can think what you want, but that’s how I see it.
If someone is looking for end to end encrypted communication, I agree, they are probably better suited by another protocol. SMTP is really good at what it’s designed to do.
I agree with this. I’ll pretty much leave it at that.
Yeah, email is unsafe, agreed. I addressed that below, saying I thought they just wanted to separate their real-world identity from their un-private emails. If you’re trying to use Proton to keep your un-private emails private, you’re gonna have a bad time and you should use some good end-to-end solution that isn’t email instead.
On August 21, information about the sunken Chinese nuclear submarine 093 Shang surfaced on the Internet. The accident occurred on board during a mission in the Yellow Sea. According to British intelligence, the Chinese submarine fell into its own trap intended for British and American ships. As a result of the incident, 55...
Hm… I do kind of get what you’re saying now. I just don’t agree with this limited way of applying the term. I do know what a backdoor is, yes.
So: If you have a remote shell program like sshd, it can do what it does. There might be malicious code inside, there might not. But if we said specifically that it had a “backdoor,” that would mean that it can also accept arbitrary login requests (bypassing the normal authentication) for someone to log in and run arbitrary commands. That’s a backdoor. The code’s still running within the context of the terminal program, but what makes it a backdoor is that it’s doing it on demand from some remote user. Yes?
If you had a social media program like Tiktok, it can do what it does. There might be malicious code inside, there might not. But if we said it had a “backdoor,” that would mean that it can also execute arbitrary code (bypassing the normal authentication of downloaded apps) for someone to run arbitrary code. That’s a backdoor. The code’s still running within the security context of the app, but what makes it a backdoor is that it’s doing it on demand from some remote user.
There’s another related definition where “backdoor” means a secret way of escalating privileges, but that up above is the context where I’m using it, which is also consistent with Wikipedia’s definition. You’re free to not agree with my definitions, I don’t wanna argue any more than you do and I’m happy if you want to use the word however you want. But that’s how I see it.
E-commerce platform
I’m looking for an e-commerce platform to build an online shop for myself. Is there something ready to deploy on my own server similar to WordPress?
Resources for adventures or prompts that are easily adaptable or not system specific
Hi everyone! I’m a pretty new GM. I’ve only ever played ttrpg as a GM with my kids, using the Hero Kids system....
Reddit updates look after rough 6 months and ahead of reported IPO (arstechnica.com)
Shane MacGowan: Pogues singer dies aged 65 (www.bbc.com)
The Irish singer-songwriter, whose hits include Fairytale of New York, was unwell for some time.
What are your must have programms on (debian/ubuntu based) linux?
Hello!...
Social media marketing on privacy focused platforms ?
I have a question regarding social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and other popular platforms....
TIL that Hitler approved the construction of a supertank weighing 1,000 tons, over 100 feet long, with a main gun repurposed from the deck gun of a battleship. (en.wikipedia.org)
Laura Veirs - Rocks of Time (www.youtube.com)
Tank commanders when their tank gets hit (sh.itjust.works)
3D Gaussian Splatting - New photorealistic real time rendering tech I'd never heard of (www.youtube.com)
‘Acts of terrorism’ across Washington as 4 election offices get white powder in mail (www.kiro7.com)
The powder sent to both King and Spokane counties tested positive for traces of fentanyl.
deleted_by_author
Cursed C++ Casts [ A few more reasons not to like C++ ] (www.youtube.com)
I spent years of my life programming C++ for a living. Now I’ve been away from it for a while, every few years I look back at it and every time it’s gotten a little worse....
im looking for art websites
What are some websites where i can find monster/mutant/hellspawn digital art? im looking for inspiration for my half homebrew post apocalyptic sessions
RHCP - Warm Tape (www.youtube.com)
Mr. Airplane Man - Winter (www.youtube.com)
Billy Bragg - A New England (www.youtube.com)
They didn't go to the shop floor and say "Who here is a gun nut?" (www.tiktok.com)
AI Generated CSAM Is Out of Control (www.youtube.com)
John Lennon - Working Class Hero (www.youtube.com)
Mark Knopfler - One Song At A Time (www.youtube.com)
mixtape for if I was a cool vampire and it was the 1980s (sh.itjust.works)
in this scenario i am a cool vampire and i play this in my cool vampire car at night. don’t talk to me....
Since Brave is apparently absolutely terrible, is Vivaldi any better?
I daily drive Firefox, but more and more websites are starting to break without Chromium, so I still have to occasionally switch to get something working. I was using Ungoogled Chromium until I realized that there was no easy way to update it when that pixel-stealing exploit came out a while back....
'Too dangerous:' Why even Google was afraid to release this technology (www.npr.org)
A startup called PimEyes allows anyone to identify a stranger within seconds with just a photo of the person's face. The technology has alarmed privacy advocates worldwide.
Do you trust Proton?
I’ve been using Proton Mail and VPN for a while now, and I’m just wondering how everyone else feels about them. I have this kind of inherent alight distrust of them just because they seem like they offer a lot for free and kind of have a Big Tech vibe about them, but there’s nothing for me to really substantiate that...
Just another story about "innocence" of Apple devices
On August 21, information about the sunken Chinese nuclear submarine 093 Shang surfaced on the Internet. The accident occurred on board during a mission in the Yellow Sea. According to British intelligence, the Chinese submarine fell into its own trap intended for British and American ships. As a result of the incident, 55...