Hi all. As you may be aware we are currently experiencing some problems with our checkout and it's not working. This is because our merchant suddenly decided after 6 years of a great and prosperous working relationship that they weren't willing to process transactions from a site with 'adult' content such as our own.
We are currently working on an alternative checkout system but it's taking a little bit longer then we'd like. If you'd still like to place an order you can do so via bank transfer or cheque. Please email jo@coffeesh0p.com with what you'd like and which method you'd prefer and I'll get back to you with the relevant details.
Apologies for any inconvenience and huge thanks to those of you persevering with placing orders with us. We will definitely be back up and running properly soon but you guys are keeping us going in the meantime! - John & Jo
Hello!
It appears that you're from outside the UK, which means we don't ship to your country, sorry!Fortunately, the website below ships worldwide and accepts all major credit and debit cards:
If I've got this wrong and you ARE from the UK, please click here to automatically update the system and dock my wages accordingly. To disable this message, please click here.
Coffeesh0p.org Development Blog
Hello, and welcome to the blog! Here's where we'll post all the latest updates on our latest project, Coffeesh0p.org. Coffeesh0p.org aims to be the number 1 resource for drugs information on the internet, both in terms of information quality and usability.
We're looking for contributors all the time, so feel free to get involved in any way you like. Comment on the blog itself, sign up to our Forums or get in volved with the project directly by Getting In Touch.
There are two types of drugs information repository on the Internet. Firstly, we have the static "Web Page" look, with a static design that almost hints at a template, but not quite - this not only looks boring, but gives no feeling of user interaction, required by today's Web 2.0 generation. The other type is the exact opposite - A Wikipedia style site, whether it's Wikipedia itself or a spin-off focusing on just drugs, for example, WikiShaman. The fact remains that these kind of sites are just no good when you want quality information compared with the static web page style information resource, but what they do offer is community interaction. Each article has, or can have, it's own "Talk Page", where users can discuss the article. Take a look at the Talk Page for Cannabis Foods on Wikipedia. This kind of thing is a great idea, but with one problem - users have so much control over the site that the information presented by Wikipedia is renowned for being factually inaccurate, which is not very helpful when it comes to drugs and their potentially fatal effects.
So, where will Coffeesh0p.org fit in? Hopefully, somewhere in between. We aim to display quality information, unedited by the public, like the static web page style site, but allow some degree of community interaction and discussion. Each subsection (IE, not the main page for each drug, but specific articles, such as a History or Advice section) will allow readers to comment on it, and those comments will be displayed underneath. We will also allow readers to rate that section, so we can get a feel for what you all think both qualitatively and quantitatively. One final thing we'll let the users do is flag an article for review. This means that reviewing the article in question will be added to the "To-do list", looked at and hopefully improved. This middle-ground of user interaction will also allow us to pick out people from the community who really know what they're talking about to join our team.
Up to now, this blog has covered a few of our major ideas for the project. In future posts, I intend to direct the conversation towards actual development, with a few ideas thrown in, as well as guest posting from members of the team. With any luck, the Christmas period will bring with it major developments to the project, so keep an eye out!
We almost have our first article written on MDMA (ecstasy), thanks to Allez! There are still bits to be added, and references to include, but this article is pretty much there. There are a number of other articles in the pipeline too, but they all need a bit more work. It might be that we launch Coffeesh0p.org with the one article up, and grow from there, instead of waiting for a huge backlog of articles to be written. It might also encourage people who've seen what we're up to to get involved themselves. Onto another one of our ideas then...
Idea #4: Mozilla Firefox search extension - Quite a simple and useful idea to implement, I hope. For those who don't know what Firefox is, it's a browser, like Internet Explorer, but better. Why is it better? Security, websites displaying properly, etc - there're a number of reasons to use the Firefox browser, but that's beyond the scope of this post. Let's take a five minute break then while you download, install and start using Firefox.
*Five mins later* So, now you've all switched to Firefox, I can talk a bit about what Search Extensions are. Basically, a search extension is a little box in the top corner of Firefox that searches for whatever you type into the box, directly on that search engine. So, suppose I have one for YouTube, I can search for whatever I want in there, and it will bring up the typical YouTube search results page. There're engines for Google, Amazon, eBay and a few others installed by default, and millions more available Here.
Back to the point, then! In order to make our site that bit more accessible in a variety of ways to the end user, we shall be creating a search extension of our very own! If you're not following me, this means you can search Coffeesh0p.org directly from your homepage (or any other page for that matter) without having to navigate to http://www.coffeesh0p.org first.
Yes, I know, not that great an idea, but with ALL the ideas in place that I've already discussed and plan to discuss, overall usability for the site should be phenominal!
This week I'm going to discuss a pretty cool idea that should benefit everyone: guest writers. That is, webmasters who run sites based around drugs get a bit of space where they can write an article or two for the .org project. We'll be on the lookout for anyone who runs or helps to run a drugs related website, and possibly other active members of their respective communities, "internet reputation" permitting, to sit down and write a bit about what they know best. We'll then check out what they've written, see'f it's any good and whack it online in the appropriate section.
So, what's in it for them (or you, if you happen to be one of the aforementioned people)? Qualitatively, they get some writing published on what will hopefully be "The Number One Drugs Resource" on the internet - bragging rights? Hell yes. Quantatively, and probably most importantly, the guest author will either receive a little page about him and his site or a link to his site straight from the article itself. Not only do links bring traffic, but a high quality link from an authoritative site (yes, I know we're jumping the gun a bit, but we'd get nowhere without ambition) will also increase the position of the site being linked to in the search engines. Without going into a lot of detail about how this works, Google sees links to other sites kind of like a "vote" for that site. The more votes a site has, the higher up in the search results it will appear. Kind of. If you want some more information on what I'm actually talking about, google "Search engine optimisation". If you don't care that much, all you need to know is that a link to your site from a site with a high reputation, that's also relevant to your site in some way, is very valuable indeed.
What's in it for us then? Well, this is also twofold. Firstly, we get a little bit of the work done for us by someone who's a bit more experienced in their field. Works for us, and helps improve the quality of the material for the end user. Following that logic, a better article will result in more trust from the search engines, meaning the link back to the author's site carries more weight. The topic of links neatly brings us round to point number two - webmasters that decide to write an article for us will no doubt want their community and friends to read their article too, and rightly so! So what will they do? Link to it! And as we know, linking = a higher position in the search engines. Everybody wins!
Are YOU a webmaster or knowledgable member of an online drugs-related community that's interesting in writing something? Let me know either by leaving a comment here, sending me an Email or posting on our Forums.
Today I'm going to talk about who's involved, what we've got done so far in terms of content and discuss with you another one of many great ideas.
Who's Involved Firstly, there's me, John (AKA Synchronium). I run the .org project and anything related, like trying to actually code it all. Then, we have Random, our quality control guy from Australia. His job is to take content written by everyone else, see what's missing, standardise it, proof read it (along with my girlfriend, Mrs_Synch) and then we publish it. Next are the casual team of writers we've come across from various corners of the Internet. There are quite a lot to list, so what I'll ask is that all you writers leave a comment under here and tell everyone a little bit about what part of the project you're up to. Our team is in no way complete!That means we need YOU to help us - We always need more writers, and even if you can't write but want to help us, we have a number of things you could do, all of it very interesting. If you feel you could add something to the project, comment here, send me an Email, or post on the Forums. Now for idea #2...
Idea #2: Wordclouds & Tagging - What's a massively important feature in a community? To see what everyone else was up to! You wouldn't join MySpace or Facebook or StumbleUpon if there were no evidence of anyone else using it, so here's what we plan to do: allow people (public, or signed up members, we're not sure yet) to add their own tags to drugs. This could be based on effect, slang names, or whatever - The idea is that the most popular tags for the drug appear bolder and bigger in a word cloud, kind of like the homepage of Torrentz.com. (We don't advocate torrenting, it was merely an example of a wordcloud). We were also thinking of a wordcloud on the front page for the most commonly searched drugs too. It should not only look nice, but also give everyone an idea of what everyone else thinks. Combined with a number of other community related features which I'll be discussing at a later date, Coffeesh0p.org should end up being one massive, drugs related community!
That's all for this week, but stay tuned, because we have a lot to talk about! :)
I've spent all my time recently developing this blog and ironing out any flaws, that I've completely forgotten what it was I was supposed to be developing in the first place. I know I originally coded this blog so I could talk to people about our ideas and progress so far, but progress towards what, exactly, has escaped me.
In a desperate bid to remember what the hell I'm up to, I did what any webmaster would do - Check the forums! (And no, these aren't the Drugs Discussion Forums, these are the Coffeesh0p.org Secret Forums!) I happened across a few interesting bits of information which I thought I'd share with everyone today.
Idea #1: Autocomplete Searching - When we were looking at all the other drugs information sites out there, we (and everyone else we asked) found that actually finding the information about a particular substance was a bit of a pain in the arse. TalkToFrank is a visual nightmare, not to mention takes a while to load on a slow connection, since it's flash. Erowid's front page looks quite nice and dynamic, but again, navigating from that page and sourcing out the drug you're after requires too much effort. And it's exactly the same for Lycaeum. So what's going to be different about Coffeesh0p.org? An Autocomplete search feature, that automatically suggests the drug you might be searching for. You can see an example at the top of this page, if you're using Internet Explorer 7 or FireFox - Type in "salvia" or "seeds", for example and see what happens. For Coffeesh0p.org, this will be incorporated into the massive database of drugs information we'll hopefully have accumulated. The rationale behind this is that you arrive at the front page, type in about four letters of what you want and BAM, the exact thing you're looking for is staring you in the face.
So, by next week, I hope I'll have a bit more of an idea of what's going on, and write about another one of our ideas.
