Willow Glen: 2050 Lincoln Ave. San Jose, CA. 95125
(408) 266-1103 hours: 11-7 | wednesday 12-8 | sunday 11-5 | map
Hijinx Comics Retail Software
Overview When I first toyed around with the notion of owning a comic book store,
I reflected on my younger days as an employee. I thought about those
things that made the job difficult, and about the tools I always
wanted to have to make my job easier.
One cool thing that Diamond does is to put a lot of raw data at the
retailer's disposal, but sometimes it's tough to know what to do
with it. I've written a lot of tools in Perl to help manage and
munge that raw data into formats that are useful to me and my
customers. Everything from simple new comics web page generators to
a complete customer/inventory management software, and I want every
comics retailer who wants them to have them for free.
My first release is the software used to generate this very site. I call it the Hijinx web generator, or webgen.pl.
The second release is the Hijinx retail system, a web based
application I use in my store to
manage subscriptions and do cycle sheets, among other things.
It requires an external database such as Mysql, but can use others
vi the modular Perl DBI.
The Diamond Hijinx search plugin for Firefox allows convenient searching of Diamond Comic Distributors directly from a browser's search bar. Neato.
All of my software is written in Perl, installed and tested on a
Unix-like platform (usually RedHat Linux), and distributed under
the GPL license. Anyone interested
in porting this software to Windows is welcome to do so.
