Buy geeky feminist prints from the terminal
TLDR: If the terminal &|| feminism are your jamz, check out http://codercat.club/terminalprints.html.
& https://www.producthunt.com/posts/terminal-prints
One day my roommate came home wearing a tshirt that said:
while ( in_crib ) {
for ( int i = 0; i < 3; i++) { drop ( like_hot ); }
}
I was obviously very entertained by this… and then got an idea. What if I could reword some common feminist slogans in various programming languages? It felt like an interesting way to compliment the women in tech movements, by creating awareness and maybe even bringing a community closer together. I brainstormed for a bit, thinking of how to play with my favorite bash commands, and came up with a list of slogans that were unreasonably amusing to me.
- rm -rf patriarchy
- from feminism import *
- assert ( woman == man );
- apt-get install feminism
- nastywoman.smash( patriarchy );
- def wakeup ( self ): return “flawless”
If I was so amused by these prints, there must be other like-minded people that would enjoy them as well, sooo it was time to put them on the web.
There are quite a few sites that facilitate printing custom designs onto products such as tshirts, mugs, posters, stickers, etc. Kirill and I browsed around and made accounts on various sites to test out the interfaces, and eventually settled on Redbubble as it seemed like the path of least resistance. Using Redbubble, we could easily upload a design onto a nice selection of items in one click, while also getting the benefit of the Redbubble marketplace bringing traffic to the page.
There was still one problem, I could not stand the Redbubble shop interface. I found it quite difficult to navigate, and not an effective interface to deliver the style, emotion, and message that I was imagining for the feminist — tech slogans.
I decided to make my own interface for the Redbubble shop on Strikingly, because I was already familiar using this service to display my other tshirt extravaganza in 2015. However, I slowly found that these designs were not graphic enough to hold their own on a web page, they were just text slogans.
Then, I remembered my homie Kirill suggesting how cool it would be if I made a package that allows you to buy these t-shirts from the terminal. Since they are all command line phrases anyways, all you really need to decide which design you want is to decide on a slogan that can be presented to you in its native location. We pushed this idea aside at the time because it seemed difficult to integrate a method of payment. However, if the terminal was replicated on a browser, we could easily redirect the user to the item on Redbubble where they can complete their payment!
The terminal seems like a minimalistic interface, but attempting to recreate it with html and css made me realize how magical it truly is (newlines, search history, text fitting, oh my!). Everything you want to do with web has probably been done before… so I checked GitHub and wallaaa there it was, an open source terminal in your browser called xterm.js!
This is an awesome repo. Out of the box, you can basically access your own file system from a terminal in the browser. Super awesome, but I did not really want people to be accessing my files on the web… So I hacked into the xterm.js repo and found a section that allows you to run a fake terminal, basically an empty terminal with no file system but all the beautiful terminal functionality organized in div elements.
At this point, it was trivial to add my own commands, list the available slogans, redirect the user to the chosen Redbubble page, and some other terminal essentials (such as hitting the up arrow to see previous commands!). Surprisingly the xterm.js terminal was so functional that it supported bash colors without me having to add any code! So I had to decorate.
I am very serious when I say that the toughest part about this project was probably closing a color scheme, and which ASCII font to use for the logo from this ASCII Font Generator.
Anyways, I thought it turned out pretty cool, and is an interesting concept for a feminist geeky tee store.
Hope y’all enjoy, there are secrets in the terminal if you know how to find them …
Check out the source code @ https://github.com/sneha-belkhale/codercat-prints
Product Hunt page @ https://www.producthunt.com/posts/terminal-prints
And other projects @ http://codercat.club
