Fun with Text
11 June, 2007
I'm still roasting. Lots of new coffees since the last update, but these have been going into the newsletter and not here as nothing surrounding these coffees is anything that I haven't written about before. The most recent news is that I will be attending the Roasters Guild retreat this year (I was, unfortunately, unable to attend last year).
Today I would like to write about some of the things going on with the marketing side of things. You may have already noticed the recent Web site redesign. Due to the way this site is made, this was really a trivial change to make and I was able to use it as an opportunity to update the scripts that build the site and wrap everything up in a revision control system.
The other exciting new thing we're working on is making it easier for people to get some of the material on our Web site in our shop. Renae is doing most of the work on this, but I am helping as she has only recently started to learn how to use TEX. I have been using this program for some time to produce our newsletter, but it will see use for a greater diversity of signs and documents as a side effect of our decision to move away from Microsoft products. That move is not out of any particular dissatisfaction with the software we have (aside from Publisher, which is why I have been using TEX), but that software will eventually lead us to buy Windows Vista, which just isn't ready for business use. Within the next few years, we plan to replace Windows with Linux and Mac OS X and replace other Microsoft software with free alternatives such as TEX.
While these documents are not yet out in the shop, we decided that PDF versions of these documents would be nice to have on the Web site as a printer friendly document. The first of these, the Tea Lover's Guide, is available now (Warning: 2.3MB PDF).