Shopping Carts, Meta Tags and Message Boards

Nobody really wants to talk about this stuff. Not my over-burdened wife. Not my game-playing kids. Not my tv-watching daughter. Not my unaffected friends, if I had any. Not my accountant, gardener or any one else with half a life. This is why I have this board. To think aloud in text.

I've been trying to work my t-shirt interface into an ideal shopping cart, but it doesn't exist. There are several functional carts out there, like Yahoo, or OS Commerce, but nothing really can solve all the problems that need to be solved with the myriad of choices, shipping methods and compatible payment methods that are required to stay in business on the internet. The worst problem is that the more compatible that a cart is the more it attracts fraudulent customers. This creates a vicious cycle of ridiculous orders that need to constantly be reviewed and it just stalls the entire system. I am considering the worst possible scenario, which would be to provide a link for three different shopping cart options on each product. There problem here is that the code for each product in each cart will conflict. W/E.

Meta Tags and the perfect html are killing me. I've worked hard to create some pages that are compatible with html 4.0 and that will provide a clean read to spiders for indexing purposes. However all the scripts that run shopping carts or provide any creative web functions send these compatibility issues into chaos. Clean html seems impossible. Every site that I try and confirm the html in this type of system fails, so I should just give up trying to make the html work for the this type of script.

Lastly, I've had successful t-shirt message boards/forums in the past but my current ones are always being over-run by spammers. I don't have time to keep deleting post to keep the boards clean. I just like to start a contest and come back in a couple of days, like fishing, and see if there are any good designs. I don't mind answering questions, but I hate spending all of my time deleting spam so the board can stay operational. The more I block the spammers then the harder it becomes for the average user to make a post to the boards because they need to sign up and such. It's a shame that this resource has been hijacked by wasteful postings that must be automated postings.

Sure if I just did one thing, ran a message board, then I could pull it off, but I've got too many other silly projects going on right now. Like perfecting the perfect ink made of bee honey. I was discussing this with a friend of mine who is a proponent of Soy based inks. Neither of us has found a t-shirt ink in production that is truly non-toxic and just because an ink is water-based that doesn't make it non-toxic. It may be PVC free, but the pigments and such often end up in the drain when printers use water-based inks for t-shirt printing.