Hey! I'm looking for a web designer to make me a really pretty static website that serves as a marketing landing page for our coffee shop and coffee roaster.

It needs to look really nice, and basically just route people to our physical store and our online store (the online store will be on a separate web page, as well the rest of the info about the physical store.)

It's basically a glorified parked webpage, so that no one else uses this domain name that is close to the name of our business to direct traffic to another business, but I'd love for it to look nice and be useful while also preventing malicious squatting.

Are you the person I need?

@ekaitz_zarraga Like I said, it was mostly used.

The paper trimmer looks more or less like this: https://www.mybinding.com/guillo-max-guillotine-stack-paper-cutter-360-sheets.html

We're using a Tamerica T-30 glue binder and compatible glue strips.

My first attempt at perfect binding by hand in like 4 years.

I used to make my own books. I stopped for a while because it's a pain in the ass.

I think I might start again.

This is a piece of doctor who fanfiction written to finish Shada, the unfinished Douglas Adams episode.

Adams used Shada as the base for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency in the belief that the script would never see the light of day.

Then the BBC released all the finished footage, and also the script leaked, and also the fan fic was published.

Then the BBC released it as a flash animation with the 8th doctor.

Then they animated all the missing bits for the fourth doctor and released it.

Then they had someone else novelize it.

It is, at this point, probably the most accessible episode of classic who.

So a couple of observations:

1) It's pretty obviously a fucking book.

2) Our color printer is fighting with me again.

3) I did the binding with hotglue, but forgot to smooth it before I applied the cover.

4) I didn't score the cover before I applied the cover even though I know I'm supposed to. I just forgot.

5) I have a fucking glue binder and glue binder sheets in this building right now. Why did I use hotglue?

New printer should be here by Friday, just in time for me to make Books.

Anyway, once I'm done repairing this fucking printer it'll be time to go home, but I'll do up a couple more books tomorrow.

Have I mentioned how much I hate Epson printers?

Best prints I've ever gotten 1 time in 10, and a bunch of god awful bullshit 9 times in 10.

I currently have layout done for the fanfic Shada novel, the Firefly fanfic novel "My Own Kind of Freedom" by Steven Brust, The House on the Borderlands, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Radio Beasts, and The City That Paid To Die (a Spider pulp, and the first book in the lauded Spider vs Empire State trilogy.)

Alright, I'm revisiting book binding.

I'm not very experienced in bookbinding.

This is the first time I've done it in 3 or 4 years, and that time 3 or 4 years ago was the first time I used this method.

I've tried *lots* of other methods over the years, and this is absolutely the first batch I've done that universally feels like it could have come off a shelf.

Even the ones I made using these techniques several years back mostly came out with lots of inconsistencies and problems, but this batch is pretty much exactly where I want it to be.

Some more pictures

Here are some of the books we've bound.

I'm not 100% certain that the images for two of these covers are in the public domain.

I am 100% certain that one of them isn't, and I shouldn't be using it.

Now! I could improve this by printing two books at one time, each on half the paper, so that we weren't splitting the grain of the paper in the middle.

I could improve it by using different paper for the covers.

I could do better internal typography.

But uhhhhh all of those things are significantly more work (or expense) than what I'm doing now, and the gains are marginal.

Also, this method leaves you with a TON of scraps of tiny paper.

These make great packing material. They're also useful for paper mache.

I've heard that you can also reconstitute them in to new paper, but I've never tried that and it sounds fake. (This is mostly a joke. Making paper is very hard.)

Now, we'll never be at maximum efficiency. I'm not an efficient person.

Anyway, in terms of equipment, I got our ream kerchunker for $200 used. It'll cut 500 sheets of paper.

I got our glue binder for $50 used.

Our laser printer is also a cheap used laser. $50 or so, and we refill the toner ourselves (go with a Brother, so the toner and drum are separate.)

I forgot to include the glue strips in my original cost estimate. I bought a pack of them the first time I did this, I have no idea how much it cost. I haven't needed another pack yet.

I can't imagine they're expensive. I wouldn't have gone with this method if they were.

Part of the problem is one of approachability.

BASIC still works, you know? I wrote programs in FreeBASIC as a kid.

Python is out there, and is fairly easy to get started with, and there are plenty of good guides and tutorials.

But they are not *approachable* you know?

It is absurd that there are not simpler ways for non-programmers to make computers do what they want.

In the 80s, my aunt (a child) and my grandmother (someone who, today, can't even effectively operate her Television) wrote a series of computer programs from which they ran my grandfather's business.

They generated invoices and printed them, scheduled jobs, kept a list of customers, etc.

They did it all with an Atari 8-bit computer, and the included BASIC.