We all love free stuff. When geeks get together at conferences and the like, you’ll always see people rushing to get their paws on the latest cool startup’s tshirt or frisbee or flashing bouncy ball.
TechCrunch has a story on StartUpSchwag which will be doing a similar thing which ValleySchwag started doing last year, which was to bag up all the ‘schwag’ (that’s free stuff, folks) they could from the plethora of startups in Silicon Valley and deliver to all the schwagheads every month for $15.
StartUpSchwag differs from ValleySchwag in that it will actually do the production of the merch for the companies too, making it easy to fulfill – which ValleySchwag sometimes found hard to do every month.
Nice idea! I heart schwag! And I happen to have the kewlest domain for said service : http://schw.ag !! Niiiice
I’ve had a website system planned for tshirt, mug, mousemat, etc designing for a while, over at http://blograffiti.com, for user generated merchandise for a few years. I still need to find a decent (global) printer/fulfiller to help me in this venture. I already have a redesigned doodler thing ready to go.
There’s also quite a few of these things cropping up all the time, some with some great tools for designing stuff. CafePress being the obvious one and PixelTees being an early starter in the self-made tee game.
UPDATED: To support Curl, if it is installed. It appears that some servers have the ‘fopen’ wrapper disabled, preferring Curl – which is faster too ! )
OK, so I have just knocked up a PHP5 script which, WITH SOME MORE WORK (on your part) will grab all your photos from flickr, should you want to move away from them.
This script takes your screen name and then lists all your photos, with the original photo file url, the title, description and any tags, comments and geocoding data too.
That’s as far as I go – the script is not doing any downloading at all – I leave the rest up to you You could add the details to a database, store images anywhere you like, ftp them somewhere – it’s up to you to get the PHP to do what you want.
If I get the time, I will create a desktop version which does the same thing. The tricky bit might be deciding on a static xml format for all the rest of the data – maybe a big RSS file would do. Or OPML. Or both?
NB: You MUST have PHP5 with simplexml and fopen wrappers or Curl activated (Some webhosts prefer you to use Curl, so they deactivate file_get_contents)
Enjoy! Feel free to use this code and hack and mash it up at will. Please add to the comments of this post, if you do extend it. Cheers!
We all love free stuff. When geeks get together at conferences and the like, you’ll always see people rushing to get their paws on the latest cool startup’s tshirt or frisbee or flashing bouncy ball.
