I have never bought something from one of those generic merch sites, but I guess some people do, otherwise they wouldn't exist.
Good for them if they can offset some of their costs with that.
Really interisting that this is article is from 2004. To me this gives strong IndieWeb vibes. It's a shame that all the things that require an own domain are never going into the mainstream, not to mention the user experience of having to manually sign a comment before posting it.
I don't really get why we even bother with cover letters anymore. Fortunately I see more and more companies places that explicitly discourage a cover letter when applying.
There is! It's called microformats[1] and is a very minimal format to embed machine readable data inside of html via standardized class names. The format for a person would be an h-card[2]. There are a bunch of parsing libraries for multiple programming laguages, such as https://go.microformats.io/.