After posting so many amazing Cedar Key Sunset photos, we were flattered to get some requests to offer prints, calendars, etc. for sale.
After some poking around, we found Zazzle – an online store that allows us to make custom products available for one-off printing. They provide the storefront, handle the payments & printing & shipping, and we get a small cut of the sale.
We designed a few items, and paid to have samples shipped in before making them available..
… and we’re happy with them!
So, this is our official grand opening!
The Technomadia Zazzle Store is now open!
Cedar Key Sunsets
We picked our 13 favorite sunset photos from our month in Cedar Key and made them into our new Cedar Key Sunsets Calendar.
It’s available in three different sizes (the small one is perfect for RVs!). We’ve set the calendar to print for March 2013 – February 2014, so you get a full 12 months of WOWs. You can also make customizations, such as changing out photos, changing the color of the spiral binding, or the format of the calendar printing. Zazzle gives you lots of options!
In addition to the calendar, we also set the store up so you can order prints in many sizes of our favorite individual sunset photos.
SerenDIPity
While we were at it, we went ahead and made a few products with our ‘SerendDIPity’ sign.
This is based upon the artistically ‘vandelized’ street sign that we discovered at the base of our road when we moved to St. John in the US Virgin Islands – we have made it our constant reminder that we’re always on the right path when we follow Serendipity’s signs. Now you can too!
You can now order SerenDIPity magnets, tiles and stickers.
If there are other items that Zazzle offers that you’d like to order with our ‘stuff’ on it – let us know. We can see about setting it up.
Why are we offering these products for sale? Well, for one.. it’s just cool to be able to offer them, and we’ve gotten requests. Zazzle makes it pretty easy for us without having to invest in stocking inventory.
But – there’s another reason.
Technomadia.com’s traffic is outgrowing its current ‘cheap’ hosting solution, and the next level is a pretty steep increase in costs that we just can’t justify to continue self funding. We want to experiment with providing ways for our readers to support this site by offering you useful and/or beautiful things of value. Our ‘pay as you wish’ eBook has proven that folks will voluntarily contribute to gain access to our content… but it alone has not been enough to fund the changes needed to keep us online.
If pictures of sunsets and signs aren’t your thing, then please consider some alternative ways to support our efforts here. We have some other ideas listed and will be mentioning them from time to time as well.
Why don’t we try advertising instead? Because we know from experience how much work it would be to generate enough ad revenue to fund the changes needed.. and we don’t have enough time to become professional bloggers to put forth that amount of effort on top of producing the content we already do (not to mention, we don’t like the clutter of advertising or having to censor ourselves to be attractive to sponsors).
Thank you – we appreciate your support in helping us continue to bring you content!
Try ramnode.com. I use it, $6 something a month and 1TB of bandwidth and quite a lot of CPU. Other VPS’s and hosting are similarly cheap.
CPU and bandwidth are not the issue. WordPress is hoggish with RAM. We have tried VPS with DreamHost, and it was incompatible. We are very reluctant to transfer everything elsewhere (a major hassle and a lot of work) just to find out we exceed RAM caps there too.
If we move, we will go somewhere the specialized in hosting WP.