The ER Hanukkah Dreidel is a one-prim, rezzable dreidel that spins when you click it. The Dreidel will display the randomly chosen side that it falls on after each spin, and displays an explaination of what each symbol means. Full instructions are included for playing this fun, holiday betting game. (Sorry, you’ll have to provide your own chocolates or coins).

The ER Hanukkah Dreidel has now been added to the pile of freebies, available at all three of ER’s flagship locations. As with every holiday season at ER, more holiday freebies may appear as my schedule permits, and as the season wears on… so check back from time to time!

These holiday freebies will only be available for a limited time, so be sure to come down to the shop to grab yours today!

Visit one of our inworld locations today!

Ever since the introduction of sculpted prims, I have wanted to make a new attempt at furniture making. My original furniture set was low prim, in 2007.. but by today’s standards it uses too many prims, for too little detail. Enter the ER Classic Furniture set. 17 pieces in all, with 14 unique pieces, and each just 1-3 prims! The set features contemporary/traditional styling, and the kinds of details, primcount, and features that make this furniture a “Must Own” addition to anyone’s home.

Each piece of the set includes a texture changer, with 6 built-in woodgrain textures, including a white, and a black wood. All pieces are modifyable, so you can add your own textures, or use the SL object editing tools to select any color of tint you desire. Pieces with fabric sections also include 6 colors of fabric, and the china hutch includes 6 china patterns for the dishes.

Deck the halls, without decking your wallet.. ER’s Holiday Freebies have returned!

Once again, it’s time to raid the boxes in the back of the ER warehouse, and set up everyone’s favourite holiday freebies at the store. This year, all the old favourites have returned: The Hanukkah Menorah, the Nativity Scene, the Candlestick, Holiday Fireplace, the Jingle Bells, and of course last year’s favourites, the Gift Box Sculpts kit, and the Antique Radio with updated holiday music stations for this holiday season!

And as with every holiday season at ER, more holiday freebies may appear as my schedule permits, and as the season wears on… so check back from time to time!

These holiday freebies will only be available for a limited time, so be sure to come down to the shop to grab yours today!

Visit one of our inworld locations today!

Hallowe’en, that spookiest of nights, a time for trick or treating, and watching scary movies. Now you can join in on the festivities.. with the 2011 Hallowe’en Bear from Eclectic Randomness. A cute little shoulder pet that squeaks when you click him, this little bear is dressed as Frankenstein’s Monst-bear! He even makes electrical sparks from his neck-bolts when you click him! You know you want one, so hurry on down to ER, and bring your friends, because like all of ER’s holiday bears, this one will only be available for a limited time!

Now available in both “Shoulder Pet” and “Home Decor” sizes!

Visit one of our inworld locations today!

A modern take on an old SL standard, the ER Cigarette Holder lets you hold the holder in your hand, take a puff, and exhale the smoke much like you might expect. But the scripts and animations have been specially formulated to work with most high-priority Animation Overrides.

The ER Cigarette Holder pack includes three colours of cigarette (White, Red, and Black), and two versions of the holder: One version that you can hold in your hand and smoke periodically, and one version that you can hold in your mouth (perfect when dealing with neck corsets and other rigid-body attachments).

The package even comes with a tintable, one-prim ashtray.

I wasn’t at all happy with the selection of windchimes available on the marketplace. EIther they were no-modify, or no-copy, or they used too many prims, or just cost too darned much. So I decided to make my own.

Unlike most windchimes in SL, the ER WInd Chime doesn’t play a repeating loop of windchime recordings. Instead, this scripted windchime randomly plays one of 4 windchime notes, at random intervals that you can control.

The windcatcher flap spins lazily in the breeze, and the sweet notes of the chimes flow out gently. The plastic parts are tintable and a settings notecard is included, to control the volume, the distance the sound travels, and the minimum and maximum gaps between notes. And at just two prims, you’ll have plenty of prims left over for a hammock and a glass of iced tea!

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.

I’ve decided to forgo creating a “page per item”.. even though CataBlog does have features that support doing so. There’s really only a few possible types of information for each product.

1. An image (usually the vendor image)
2. Price, permissions, etc (printed on the vendor art)
3. A text description
4. The product’s instruction manual
5. Potentially a video tutorial (never done one of these)
6. Link to the SL marketplace listing
7. location inworld where it can be bought

Generally speaking most of these can be found ON the SL Marketplace listing for the given item. Since the information already exists there, why waste a lot of effort reproducing it here? Especially since there’s no way to SELL the product from the webpage, so all I can really do is provide a clearinghouse of information about the product, organize it a little nicer, and link the customer to places where they can get the information they’re after.

I’ve narrowed this down to 4 information points

1. Marketplace listing (picture, price, description, permissions, purchasable)
2. Instruction manual in PDF form (also findable from the marketplace listing)
3. Link to any video content (again, none of this content actually EXISTS yet)
4. An easy way to find inworld locations selling the item.

I’ve already got a page with all the ER store locations listed, so #4 is pretty much handled. Then it’s simply a matter of linking the marketplace link, and a link to the instructions.. and pretty it up with a thumbnail and a short text blurb.

You’ll be able to see what I’ve got so far on the Products page. It’s still in flux, and I’m not sure how helpful the “See it in SL” buttons are. The thought of 75+ buttons on one page all leading to one other page on the website, seems a bit ridiculous. But I’m not going to create specific slurls to each inworld vendor (especially when I have 3 different main store locations!)

By “keeping it simple”, it will theoretically be easier to add new products, thus making it easier for me to keep the site up-to-date.

The downside, is that to make this work, I will have to go in and update, and clean up, every single one of my Marketplace listings. Most of which are still cluttered with dead bbcode left-over from before XStreetSL closed. Plus there are a number of ER products that haven’t made the leap to the Marketplace yet.. mostly because it’s a lot of work to list them. But this cleanup has been sorely needed for quite some time.. so it’s a good thing, it’s just more work.

But that’s going to take more than a couple of days to get done… and I’ll be honest, my patience is waning. I think I may take a few days off, to start putting together the secondary wordpress install for my personal stuff.. if for no other reason than I’d really like to post to my personal blog, and it currently doesn’t exist.

In the meantime, I’ve got a link to my Marketplace listings on the products page. The rest of the site is totally useable right now, and while there’s no front landing-page (yet?), the site is in good shape. Done for today.

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.

First up, after I got back, I decided to look into ADDING some very specific icons to the already ample selection of smileys installed on the site. These were very specifically needed, for the Locations page:

I think they’re considerably more readable “without the Legend” than the icons I was using:

(particularly since the new ones actually have proper mouseover tooltips that show what they actually MEAN.

I’m still using for “Limited Selection” mostly because I can’t really think of a good way to illustrate that on a tiny-icon scale.

Time to start hammering on the Affiliate Program page(s). ugh. I need to find a movie to play in the background.