June 7th, 2020

I would like to create an online "cafe", in the form of a pixel art gallery, utilizing Vue and my own custom pixel art of cute bunny foods. This pixel art gallery will be designed and fashioned as a cafe display case. Clicking pixel art items would add them to your cafe food order. Once you've selected all your items, you may check out by clicking the "Total" button. This will add up the digital price of your items and generate some HTML code that can be copy/pasted to display the pixel art on your own website or download for whatever purposes you'd like. It's all free, you don't actually have to pay for anything. The price displayed will be a suggested donation to listed rabbit rescues. The goal is to inspire people to donate or maybe even adopt.

Here is what I'm looking to achieve:

1. Create custom animated pixel art of bunny themed food items, approximately 6 to start.
2. I'd ideally like to build this as a stand-alone Vue application.
3. The resulting total will be a suggested as a donation to rabbit rescue organizations.

I can't say it serves any higher purpose than that. It's a fun practice project for myself in terms of being a creative task and getting some more experience with Vue applications. And maybe if someone comes across it and thinks it's really cute, it might inspire them to donate to a rabbit rescue.

---

July 25th, 2021

Hey, it's been a year and I've accomplished... pretty much nothing on this project! A lot has changed though. Summer of last year I concentrated on making personal projects more of a priority. Unfortunately things became next-level crazy at work. My ability to enjoy personal time or focus on personal projects became completely non-existent, I became completely burnt out. Not an issue anymore, so I'm back in the swing of things and checking the backlog of items off my list. 

I've finally taken some first steps on the road to my digital bunny cafe. I have a very basic starting point up on github but no preview just yet. I'm utilizing Vue with the help of Vue CLI for this application. It's a simple one-page sort of thing, so a full blown framework like NuxtJS is complete overkill. This is my first experience with Vue CLI. I'm so use to manually managing and configuring build processes, this makes life pretty easy. The GUI aspect is nice too, though I still prefer command line. 

On the sidelines, I started on one bunny food item for my cafe. The art aspect of this is slow going, but still progressing. It's becoming a little easier to focus on non-technical stuff. The theme I'm going for is "space". All my bunny pieces will be food items related to space. If I can be a little successful with this, I kind of like the idea of creating new ones every season to offer. We'll see.

---

November 16th, 2021

I've finally made a significant amount of progress on this project. I'm at 3 of 6 art pieces right now. I've switched to just digital art as since it's what I'm most motivated in producing atm and since I've decided on a different direction. Since I have time to figure out all the logistics, I'm going to set up an actual storefront. The product sold will be prints (maybe stickers) of each art piece. I will be donating 100% of any profits to rabbit rescue. I think this would have a greater impact if people are getting something physical instead of digital. I may offer a small downloadable product for smaller donation, like a phone wallpaper or something, in case even the cost of a print or sticker seems too high. 

---

December 31st, 2021

Big jump in progress here. I completed all 6 art pieces in early December. Each one is scaled for a print. I've also isolated the bunnies from each piece to create a sticker version. So I can launch a storefront with 6 prints and 6 stickers to start. I took most of December to build my own eCommerce storefront. I created a completely headless site using Vue and Nuxt. Basic content is pulling from directus but all product content is pulling from Shopify using their storefront API in combination with "Buy Buttons" for cart and checkout functionality. I needed to learn GraphQL pretty damn quick, but all is well and the storefront portion is complete. The site will be launching on January 1st, 2022 at https://buncafe.ika.ink. I addtion, I've put my products up on Etsy since I realize it will be hard to funnel traffic into an unknown storefront and a marketplace setting could be helpful here. 

I've spent the last 2 weeks finalizing all sorts of details and process, including producing my products, setting up storefronts, configuring shipping, taxes, etc... It is so much work! But, in the end it's all sorted and I'm looking forward to launch. 

In terms of donations, I'll be donating 100% of profits from the month of January and then at least 15% in the following months. After going over the numbers, it won't be possible for me to continue donating all profit with how much work it takes to produce products and upkeep the storefront going. Still, something is better than nothing. I can either run the storefront for a couple of months and then shut it down because I cannot sustain it without profit, or keep it running indefinitely and continue to donate a percentage. Since it'll take a while for any sort of sales to catch on anyway, it seems best this way.