My 2025 wallpaper project focuses on two things. The first is making new graphics and posting them every day. The second is stretching my online social skills a little more. This month, I’ve tried a few new things and wanted to talk about them here.
Shops
I’m using this project as an opportunity to experiment with a few online shops. I’ve never set up a shop online before.
First up, Gumroad. I’ve uploaded the first four months of wallpapers as individual items, and you visit the shop here. I’ve placed the price at $4.99, but there’s also a “pay what you can” choice at checkout.
Gumroad’s setup was pretty quick, and they allow me to upload large files with no obvious limit. January – March just had large files, but going forward, the “pack” will be a set of four zip files.
Etsy is the other shop I’m trying out. Etsy charges the user per item for sale, but it’s not enough to bother me during this experiment ($0.40 per posting, for those curious). Etsy also has a 20mb limit per file, and a five file limit. Because of this, I’m making weekly zip files that fall just under the limit. So far as I can tell, Etsy doesn’t offer a “pay what you want” choice, and you can’t charge $0.
Portrait Video
I post the wallpapers on social media every day, but only as still images. I’ve dabbled in trying Tiktoks and YouTube shorts before. I mostly worked with some of my podcasts. However, I’ve never used an editing app to stitch things together. The recent launch of Instagram Edits pushed me to give the app a try. I hoped that its relative simplicity would be encouraging.
From installing the app to publishing a video took about 15 minutes. If I can make the time for these videos to be ten minutes or less, I will be happy. We’ll see if they make any difference!
One thing I’m not sure about: I’m using an audio embed of a song during the editing process in Instagram Edits. However, the song exports along with the video file. I’ve uploaded the video to Tiktok and Youtube Shorts, and I wonder if the audio embed will cause any issues. We’ll see!
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