Jockstrapguy

Haven't given an update in a while...

I'm still working on the new website, ended up having to take a break from it to catch up with neglected Jockstrap Central work and also dealing with my health (again).

The good news is that I dove back into working on the new site last week and tackled a huge and very important job: making the "forgot my password" work. I'm sure it sounds like a simple thing but it's actually VERY complicated as if done wrong can open you up to hackers. Anyway, it's working and I'm really happy with it.

This morning I tackled another nagging job. To redo the Model Gallery . I originally bought a bit of code to handle the lightbox (gallery viewer with swipe, zoom and slideshow) and it was technically working and aesthetically awesome. But because of poor bit of code, when you clicked on the first small photo to load the large version and launch the viewer, it would load all photos in the gallery before opening the viewer. Not acceptable when there's a 100 photos to a page in the gallery.

Well, this morning I found an opensource (i.e. free) bit of code to replace the other one and it's as good (and free!) and it loads the viewer right away. Did I mention it was free?? Less than an hour and I had it all up an running.

This afternoon, I had another ERUEKA moment. We're always looking for cheaper shipping options for our Canadian customers (don't get me started with Canada Post) and found one. Although they have an API (sometime to connect to to get shipping quotes and more) but as usual, they're documentation on how to connect to and interact with it was awful. I tackled it last week and walked away pulling out all my non-existent hair (blame my father). Well, I just went back to it with a clear head and a good dose of radiation from my CT Scan earlier and boom! I figured it all out.

Hoping I can keep up this progress and hopefully get this new site launched before the year 2029!

As for my health, it is what it is. There's complications but we're dealing with it (I say we as Adrian is with me all the way). I have a complication which I won't get into as it's kind of gross but I'm heading in for surgery on November 29th to get it taken care of. Should only be in there overnight and hopefully the healing from it won't be too bad or long.

Oh yeah, I also have a photo shoot tomorrow afternoon with William Miguel to shoot a new collection from Raw Studio and four new metal cock rings for our Xtreme brand.

Is anyone still reading this rambling mess? Lol!

John.

Thank god our Trick and Treat promotion is almost over for another year!

Just to let you know, I just got onto BlueSky - it's (hopefully) going to be an alternative to Twitter(X) as Twitter(X) it's become a cesspool. How many ways can Elon Musk fuck it up?

Anyway, BlueSky is still in Beta but it's looking great. There's no bots, no fake accounts, they have a smart system for posting adult content and so far it's been a super positive (and sexy) experience.

Right now it's invite only for new signups, but once you're on and you've been there a week or two, you get one invite a day. Thanks to our buddy Tim at UnderwearNewsBriefs I was able to get an invite.

If anyone wants an invite let me know, I should be getting my invites to give out starting sometime next week. I

Here's the link for the desktop version but there's also an app for it for other devices.:

Creepy!

I've been editing photos of Tobias in our new Bruto jocks and he has an odd birth mark on his inner thigh. So I've been messing around with Photoshops Generative Fill AI and have decent results.... until now.

I simply gave it the prompt:
"remove birthmark from skin but retain skin texture and body hair"

And this is one of the results I got!

Had to share, lol!

Once again! We just found another online store using our images (with our branding tags cut off). It's one thing for them to find a few of our photos out there on the Internet and innocently use them on a blog or something but to use full photo sets and deliberately cropping them and not giving us any credit. Pretty sad.

Not to mention, we have model releases and they don't extend for use by another company (without our permission, and we would never grant it without consulting with our models first). For many, modeling is their livelyhood!

My heart goes out to you, and Adrian. Your amazing spirit should be sold/rented/given to all others who despair of life's knocks and blows! I knew nothing of your Great Challenge until this message that I just read. If/when I ever have a huge challenge ahead of me, I hope I think of you... You appear to be quite an amazing guy. I know that all of your family, Adrian, business associates, friends and customers are proud to be in your life. Please know that you are now in my private prayers and secret wishes for everything good for you.... You deserve it all for your amazing spirit!!!! XO William Gary

Health update:

Firstly, I apologize for not being around YJ as much as I would like to be. I've had a hell of a month with my cancer treatments and side effects. As most of you know, I'm going through my second round of chemo and this time it's a combination of chemo and immunotherapy every three weeks. At the beginning, the side effect weren't so bad, mostly tiredness which forced me to nap most afternoons. The other main side effect was skin issues which were also manageable with products. After 8 treatments in, the skin issues have subsided.

But, four weeks ago, I ended up with a new side effect: pure exhaustion. I couldn't go up a flight of stairs without having to sit down and take a breather. That was in combination of a strange dark black color output in my ileostomy which I chalked up to having lots of soy sauce and hoisin the night before. Well, when I went for my next treatment and round of blood work, turns out my hemoglobin was down to 60. My oncologist figures I had some internal bleeding (hence the weird output) which would account for the exhaustion and low hemoglobin. So, on top of my chemo/immunotherapy treatment, I had two blood transfusions. Which gave me tons of energy. Now I know what vampires must feel like after a feeding!

On top of all that, Adrian (husband) had noticed that I've been depressed over the last little while. He was right: I'm tired of the side effects, I'm tired of all the hospital visits and I'm tired of not being able to devote myself 100% to Jockstrap Central and this site (two things I love!) Trying to balance photo shoots around my energy level has been a nightmare.

Because of it all, together (oncologist, Adrian and myself) we decided it was time to take a break. My oncologist told me from the start to let him know if I wanted to take a break just to let him know and also told me he just read about a study from Norway that taking a break is beneficial.

So... I'm taking a break from it all.

I did a CT scan and everything is stable and we'll do CT scans every 2 months and as long as things are stable I'll be staying off treatments.

I'm already feeling better. I managed to launch the new contest, I'm back to programming and working on the new Jockstrap Central website, I've arranged a quick one week trip to head home to Newfoundland to visit my parents and can't wait to shoot all the new gear we've just ordered for Jockstrap Central.

Yay me!

Happy 11 year Anniversary to my husband and business partner Adrian ( @Versexx )!

We've been together for 19 years but got married 11 years ago today.

Rant:

So we ordered a new brand/line back in April, was told it was going to ship in May. It turns up on a competitors website a month and a half ago and we just got an email stating they were ready to ship our order. We cancelled it.

Then we ordered a new line of jockstraps from another new brand and they were about to ship our order but let us know they didn't have any size small in one color. That would be terrible to launch a new line without a full range of sizes and colors.

Unreal.

Rooting for you. Hope you are feeling somewhat better!

Quick update...

1. Still doing chemo and it's still playing havoc on my productivity but I'm getting through it.
2. Managing to continue work on the new Jockstrap Central website. The front end is done, e-commerce (check out) is done, customer portal is done and now I'm working on our admin section (where we display and process orders and a whole bunch of other things). There's a lot to that and I'm adding more functionality to ultimately make our jobs easier when it comes to making changes on orders (changing addresses, changing sizes on orders, adding to orders, etc..)

3. The best news is... I got a new camera! Been playing around and my god it's a thing of beauty. Still have to test it in the studio but I'm pretty sure the quality of our photos is going to be improving - with even more clarity.

hey fellow Canadian ,I'd like to see some pics of you in your jock.

Just a quick update:

Not sure how, but I managed to get the new Show Us Your Jockstrap Contest up and running. Looking forward to all the hot photos being posted.

Didn't get much accomplished this week with the new Jockstrap Central website as my husband (and business partner) Adrian had his second hip replacement surgery this past Tuesday. So I'm playing nurse and doing some of his Jockstrap Central chores as he recovers. I'm starting my fourth chemo session on Tuesday so next week should be interesting </sarcasm>.

On a good note, I'm shooting a hot new model tomorrow in some new McKillop jocks and a new collection of Raw Studio jocks and gear.

Cheers,

John.

Building the new Jockstrap Central website has been slow going thanks to my chemo treatments but I'm still making progress.

The checkout is now done but still have to do tons of testing. I've now moved on to the customer portal section. Viewing present and past orders is mostly complete and I'm now working on the section where customers can manage saved addresses. Once done, I'm on to the customer Wish List management section. Hoping to have the portal done by next week.

After that, it's on to our admin section and then filling in all our info pages.

I see the end!

Hey Man, I hope you are feeling well after all your reatments. My thoughts are with you, Dude!

Have to wonder if those models that come in for a shoot after a night of partying appreciate or even notice that I remove/reduce those bags under their eyes?

Unreal!

So, I was playing with ChatGPT (again) today and decided to see if it could program. So I asked it:

"write some code in HTML CSS and Javascript to have a button on a page that when clicked will open up a modal popup with the message I'm Open with an animated gradient background that runs through the colors of the rainbow.

Took me three tries asking the AI to rewrite the code and it got it. Here's the results. I didn't write a line of code:

Well that's 3 hours of my life I won't get back trying to debug the new website on an iPhone.

This may sound odd but..

Yay! I got my chemo this week!

So... we had our friend and ex-model Jack over for dinner last night. He's been a position where he hasn't been able to model for us over the past five or so years.

Well, things have changed and I think we're close to getting him in for a new shoot! He just wants to work on his body a bit more and get his abs back (I think he's perfectly fine, but that's his decision!) Seriously, the man is looking incredible right now.

In case you don't know who he is...

This is the daily bullshit we have to put up with dealing with social media and advertising companies.

As you know, we've created a very conservative website for our JC Ahtletic products ( jcathletic.com )and we're trying to do some advertising on the AdRoll platform (those annoying ads you see on websites, the ones where you look at a toaster oven and all of a sudden see ads for toaster ovens everywhere).

Jockstrap Central is far too adult for them and we're ok with that but considering how conservative JC Athletic is, we decided to give it a go - only to have them reject us because a few of our images feature partial nudity (bare bottoms from the side). So, I quickly did a search to find the AdRoll blog where they use this women's underwear/lingerie store as a case study and sure enough, there's tons of shots of women in g-strings and thongs. So, we called them out on it (and accused them of being sexiest) and they refuse to budge. Tell me why one of these images features partial nudity and the other doesn't?




Also this week, Instagram has just removed another of our images for being to sexually explicit without a method to contest it and given us a warning that they're going to delete our account. Here's the image:

No chemo this week, platelets too low (46 eek!)

So I'm back working on the new Jockstrap Central website.

Just did my first full pass from browsing products, putting stuff in the shipping cart, adding discount code then on to checking out. Saving a new shipping address, loading a saved shipping address, getting shipping options, paying via Paypal and finally onto the final receipt. page And it all worked! Still some i's to dot and t's to cross but huge progress. Next week I'm going to hook up our own credit card processor (a big job).

The other HUGE job is I'm having to redo all our product photography. With the new responsive design, all the photos are now larger. So every photo in our current catalog has to be resized and tagged. Usually 9 photos per product and a thumbnail and larger version of each. It's very time consuming but I'm doing a few products every day.

With that said, when launching new products, with the new site I'm going to save a lot of time as there's less photos to size and tag.

Well I spoke too soon (see post below).

I had a very rough week with the chemo. Took me over a week to feel some sort of normal again. I had aches and cramps everywhere, my brain wasn't working, I had moments of delirium and was feeling exhausted, I couldn't sleep despite feeling exhausted.. Needless to say, I haven't been able to do much work (which was worse than everything else).

Finally called the oncology pharmacist and she sorted me out with the meds I had on hand and almost immediately started feeling good.

I go for my next treatment on Tuesday and I'm pretty certain I know what to do next time to combat the side effects and expect to only have a day or two out of commission after the treatment. That's the plan!

I've got two new models lined up to shoot - so I gotta get this sorted so I can get them jocked up (and naked) in front of my camera!