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Comment by seekely | Hacker News Reader

I had this idea rolling around in my head for the last couple of years, and I finally decided to build the damned thing just to get idea relief.

The backend is a typical LAMP stack with the Symfony2 framework backing the P. Varnish sits in front of all the Chef managed Linode boxes. The site will work without Javascript (up until the checkout), and the style degrades really nicely depending on your viewport (try it out by resizing your browser).

I'm open to all comments and critiques, so let me hear them. And if you are into graphic t-shirts, here is a code for a Hacker News 20% discount: 4803-7940-0816-5604!

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That's a heck of a cool idea, nice job! I visit a lot of t-shirt sites and my first thought was "Very clever!" which doesn't happen that often. :)

My only problem is that I already have enough of a t-shirt buying habit that spending $25 per shirt isn't going to happen very often, especially when I don't know the quality of the shirts. You might add more detail on the actual shirt quality and fit.

The email collection line on the homepage doesn't make it clear what kinds of emails you'll be sending. If it's a weekly (bi-weekly, whatever) showing of the new shirts I'd say something like 'Sign up for our weekly new shirt email' so it's more specific.

Thanks!

I have some shirt info at http://getnifty.com/shirt/info, but agreed it should be more prominent and detailed.

And pushing out copy change to 'Sign up for weekly sale notifications' as we speak.

I checked out the new page with the extra information, and a new question formed: why so many brands for the shirts? Typically I'm used to seeing a shirt shop just say "we print on American Apparel".

Good question and obviously not an optimal situation.

Since I'm a small shop going through a third party printer, I am last in line for raw t-shirt supply. Mix in color and size availability, and it gets pretty tricky to rely on one brand. So for now, I am using a few high quality brands to make sure t-shirts get out in a timely manner.

FYI I found a typo on your FAQ page:

What if I purchased the least popular t-shirt multiple times?

Nice going! You will receive a coupon giving you free t-shirts in the same quanity as your purchase of the least popular t-shirt.

Oops! Thanks!

Hey, best of luck with this - I really like the idea and it seems like something you're passionate about. Congrats for shipping it, I'm excited to see what reputation it builds.

That being said, I'm excited for my minimalist bicycle t-shirt!

Nice site, just wanted to say I really like the phrase "style degrades" instead of "responsive design." It's much more accurate and I will be using it from now on, thanks.

But the idea is that the site presents itself in a way that is optimal based on the medium being used by the user, right?

Why would "degrade" be the better way to refer to that idea?

I believe the initial logic was due to legacy browsers such as IE6. These are browsers that aren't what you designed for, so the webpage degrades. Since you take some steps to mitigate this and optimize it when it degrades, it makes it "graceful degradation"

The full idiom is "graceful degradation". It's been common on the web since the 90s, but I think it actually came from networking jargon.

It's not the same as responsive design. Graceful degradation implies a sort of hierarchy, where you subtract features on platforms that don't support them. So if you're using an supercool advanced browser feature, like colored text, you don't break the site for older browsers.

The responsive design idea is really more about different use cases than adapting to a more primitive environment.

I know what graceful degradation is.

I'm actually disagreeing with what you are saying: responsive design is such a poor solution to the problem of providing a mobile or tablet site, that it is actually more accurate to refer to it as graceful degradation, rather than as addressing a new use case.

Neat idea. I like the design of some of the shirts. One nitpick, the preview images could be bigger...a lot bigger.

Thanks, I will fix this for next sale.

If it ends up being too much of a hassle to make the photos bigger just making the design image bigger would suffice.

(I'm not sure if the photos/design image distinction is clear or the correct terminology. Let me know if it was not clear)

The purple t-shirt has the logo photoshopped on 100% identical for male and female. Destroys the illusion of actual product photography even for very gullible people.

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