Gear up for sound, with the ER Robot SoundFX!

One thing I’ve always missed in Second Life, is the element of sound. One of the things that really makes you “FEEL” like a robot or toy or doll, is the little clicks and whirs of motors and internal workings.

The ER Robot SoundFX Attachment is a sound-effects enhancement for your favorite robot, droid, or doll outfits. it makes sweet little servo motor sounds when you walk or run. Motors whirr and gears grind when you jump, or land, or sit, or stand.. almost every move you make, there’s a subtle robotic sound to match. With 5 independently controllable volume settings, and 18 unique sounds, we think you’ll find that the ER Robot SoundFX attachment will become a part of every robot, droid, or doll outfit you wear!

It’s been a fairly busy past few days. I’ve had RL things to deal with, been in and out of the house, on and off Second Life, and I’ve got two new products hitting the store today. You’ll see posts on those items in just a few minutes from now. Affiliates will see an update pack in their inboxes sometime tomorrow, probably.

Along with these new product releases, I’ve retired the most recent holiday bears. 186 Fourth of July Bears were given out, and 286 Bane Bears (that’s not counting the 300-or-so that were given out during the ER Bear Bash at SL8B).

Retiring bears always makes me a little sad, because there’s always someone who won’t get one, or won’t see the ones that came before. Bringing all the bears back for the Bear Bash was so much fun, and the event was a grand success. I really do hope we can do that again in the future, maybe at SL9B, or perhaps at some other event.

August/September is a bit of a dry period when it comes to holidays that make good bears. I’m thinking of putting out a “Summer Bear” out in mid August, but if you have any suggestions for August/September bears, I’d LOVE to hear them! Leave your ideas and suggestions in the comments section below, or use the Contact Page if you’d like.

Quite a few distractions over the last couple of days, but I’ve finally got the Affiliate Program page in proper working order. There’s some good, basic information there about how the program works, and hopefully it’s not too sales-pitchy. The inworld notecard that comes with the Affiliate Pack still has more detailed information, but as a basic overview, the information presented here covers all the major bases.

I’m not a super huge fan of writing “prepared content” like this. I really prefer a more personal, stream-of-consciousness style of writing. But it needs to be done from time to time, and to be honest, I’ve needed to fully write out how the Affiliate Program works, for a long, long time.

While I was at it, I decided to clean-up the page-names a bit more. It seems that wordpress lets me assign three names to each post… its “slug” or url name, its page name (which is also its title) and its menu name. This means I can have a page titled “ER Locations” which shows up as “…/locations/” in the url scheme.. and displays as “Store Locations” in the menu. This sounds a little sloppy, but it actually helps neaten things up. I can have the Page Title I want, and keep the urls simple and clean, while at the same time keeping the number of menu items with “ER” in them to more reasonable levels.

Of course, all this monkeying about with the url scheme, may result in a few 404′s when following links in older blog posts on the site here. I’ll try and see about fixing any obvious ones, but a few might slip through, so be advised.

Next up on the plan, is the Products page. It will probably be a short while before I have anything concrete to show off there. I’ll have to test out a few plug-ins and see what I can come up with. I’m still not too sure how best to approach listing my items.. not to mention that there are well over 70 items to find pictures and descriptions for. It’s going to be a big project, and one that won’t be finished in just a day or two.

In the meantime, there’s a link to my SL Marketplace listings, which represents about 80% of our current product line. Of course you can always see ALL of our items by visiting one of ER’s inworld locations.

There’s a number of [placeholder] links in the menu bar, but don’t let those fool you. A LOT got accomplished today. The Locations page is fully laid out, the “slurl” shortcuts are now using the prettier “maps.secondlife.com” interface, the ER Story page is finished as well. The Contact Us page is working nicely, and the captcha system for that is now using similar fonts to the captchas used on the rest of the site. Likewise, the front page has been transitioned from a static page, to live blog content. The twitter widget is working, the “Link Up” links are working, and there’s even the beginnings of a blogroll links section as well!

Smileys are working, the Facebook “like”, Google “+1″ and Twitter “tweet” buttons are installed, and seem to be working as intended. Post avatars are working just the way I like them, though I will need to go through and weed out my duplicate user pics. I managed to work out how to semi-easily host images on Picasa, and how to hotlink them back into the site.

Over and over again, piece after piece of this project has snapped together like a lego set. It’s been a lot easier since I decided to stop fighting templates. So often when I’ve worked on wordpress sites, I’ve tried to force the site, program, and template to conform to my design ideas. Instead this time, I’m choosing to accept the template for what it was intended to be, and am trying to use the software the way it was intended. Still, I’ve got nearly a dozen plug-ins installed, but they’re augments, rather than replacements for existing functionalities.

Part of the credit goes to the folks at Theme4Press, for their relatively simple Evolve theme. While its hard-coded css leaves a lot to be desired, the theme has required hardly any modifying to make the site appear the way it does now. The theme has lots of built-in options, and plenty of settings to customize the look.

There’s still plenty left that needs doing, of course. The Affiliate Program section alone will probably require SEVERAL pages to cover all the ins and outs of setting up the affiliate vendors, handling problems, etc. The Products section is a whole huge project all by itself. Not just deciding how I want to present the products on the site, but deciding what parts of that information I should leave hosted remotely, whether I should make individual product pages on the site here, or simply link to the identical information on the SL Marketplace listing for each product. And then of course, I need to update all 75+ listings ON the Marketplace… since most still have garbage BBCode leftover from before the Xstreet site closed down.

Spinning off the “Winter” content is making more and more sense as time wears on, allowing me to link to “personal blogs” on that site, being able to dabble in the occasional “Internet Drama”, post lol-cats, review products.. as well as publicizing various tutorials, videos, and other “not ER” content, without having to compete for precious site real estate with the ER site.Of course the downside to that idea, is that it will probably be a short while before I can devote time to setting THAT blog up.

But assuming I do decide to go that way, that will mean that the “About Winter” page will probably NOT get written.. at least not on the ER site proper, and the placeholder link will probably evolve into a big shiny button that says “Click here for my personal site”.

The biggest upside to that idea, is that the ER site can be “all business”.. making it that much easier for customers, affiliates, and whoever to find the specific, relevant information they’re looking for.. without sifting through my crackpot conspiracy theories, junk food recipes, and out-dated video tutorials for using Sculpty Paint.

All in all though, I feel like I accomplished a HUGE amount today, and up-to-now.  The site is already a great deal more usable than it EVER has been in the past, and it’s only going to improve from this point. But for tonight, it’s time to step away from the computer, and go relax and watch a movie.

Great start to the morning, and great strides on the website. Managed to get control over the default comment setting for pages.. and started experimenting with using some of the smileys on my Locations page, as a sort of “what can you expect to find here?” system.

Found a great old picture of the very first ER location, which I posted up on the About Us page. I think that page needs a better name. “Our Story?” Who knows.

I also remembered one of the pages I wanted to add last night, but couldn’t remember. A page specifically for the affiliate program. Might play with child pages for that one, or I might just put in links to “floating pages” that aren’t directly linked to the menu.

So far, it’s all really coming together very nicely, and the idea of spinning off the blog content is still “on the table”. Got any feelings about that? Why not leave a comment below?