Tag Archives: tshirts

Presents for programmers

It is coming up to that time of year again. You had better start dropping some hints on what you want for Christmas if you don’t want socks again. How about a software themed T-shirt? You can never have too many T-shirts and it means you can go an extra day before you have to do the laundry.

It just so happens that www.programmer-tshirts.com (set up by myself and Patrick McKenzie last year) carries a range of wittily(?) captioned T-shirts for software types of all stripes including: microISVS, C++ programmers, LISP programmers, Mac developers, software engineers, managers and bloggers. Following on from a conversation at ESWC 2009 (with someone who might prefer to remain anonymous) I have just added another design for server programmers:

I know the T-shirts aren’t cheap (print-on-demand is expensive), but I have ordered a couple myself from the European shop and the quality is very good. Also you can customise the t-shirts (e.g. choose a different colour). Best of all the commission on each T-shirt (12.5% for the US shop and £1.50 for the European shop) goes to two very worthy charities:

Sightsavers International works to alleviate sight problems around the world. Every year Sightsavers and their partners treat millions of people for potentially blinding conditions. It costs as little as $0.10 to protect someone from river blindness for a year.
Jaipur Foot have developed an effective and easy-to-fit prosthetic lower limb that can be produced for a little as $30. The charity has distributed over 300,000 limbs free of charge in 22 countries.

It won’t be a surprise to regular readers that I am going to finish this post with a less than subtle call-to-action.

(STOP PRESS: 15% off everything in the European shop until 29-Nov-2009, use voucher code: NOVEMBERSALE)

T-shirt update

I’ve have just made the first payout of royalties from T-shirt sales. $106.20 of Zazzle royalties were split evenly between Sightsavers and JaipurFoot. Patrick McKenzie has also made a very generous additional donation as he promised on his blog.

Sales dropped off rapidly after Xmas, so I am probably going to leave programmer-tshirts.com ticking over until Xmas 2009. Thanks again to everyone that bought T-shirts or helped with the publicity. Special thanks to Patrick for setting up the programmer-tshirts.com site on his server.

NB/ You can still buy T-shirts!

Charity T-shirts for programmers – update

41 T-shirts sold so far. I intend to make the first payout to SightSavers and Jaipur Foot once most of that commission has cleared. Thanks to everyone that purchased a T-shirt and to all the bloggers that helped to publicise it. Special thanks to Patrick McKenzie for setting up a dedicated site on his server. We intend to leave the site up for the foreseeable future in the hope of getting more sales through organic search.

If you have any good ideas for a T-shirt design I could use, feel free to email them to me. Or, if you have the artistic skills I lack, I would love some help with designs.

If you haven’t already bought a T-shirt – now is the time! Zazzle currently has an inauguration weekend sale – a $4.40 discount for all T-shirts for the next 2 days. Just use code 440SHIRTSALE when you purchase from the Zazzle shop.

programmer-tshirts.com

Many thanks to all the bloggers who linked to my programmer T-shirts for charity project. Patrick McKenzie has very generously donated his time[1] and some space on his server to set-up a dedicated website at programmer-tshirts.com. If any of you feel like promoting the new website you could put a small ad on the side of your blog (see right) or display the flash panel shown on the new website (wordpress.com apparently doesn’t allow embedded flash).

The HTML for the ad is:

<table style="text-align:left;width:200px;"
       border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>
      <table style="text-align:left;width:200px;"
             border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2">
        <tbody>
          <tr align="center">
            <td>
              <big><a href="http://www.programmer-tshirts.com/">
              T-shirts for programmers</a></big>
            </td>
          </tr>
          <tr align="center">
            <td>
                 <a href="http://www.programmer-tshirts.com/">
                 <img style="border:0 solid;width:172px;height:175px;"
                 alt="programmer t-shirts"
                 src="https://successfulsoftware.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/programmer-tshirt.png"></a>
            </td>
          </tr>
          <tr align="center">
            <td>All proceeds to charity</td>
          </tr>
        </tbody>
      </table>
      </td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

In WordPress you can just add it as a text widget (Dashboard>Appearance>Widgets).

The source for the flash panel is:

<embed wmode="transparent"
   src="http://www.zazzle.com/utl/getpanel?zp=117873325148652352"
   FlashVars="feedId=117873325148652352&path=http://www.zazzle.com/assets/swf/zp/skins"
   width="450" height="300" TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash">
</embed>

Even if you just run it for a week or two before Xmas that would be great.

[1]A resource in short supply for a salaryman in Japan. Especially one that commutes in from a rice field and runs his own microISV.