Category: Web Development

Any general web development topics are covered here, ranging from ecommerce web stores, search engine optimisation or store optimization to framework discussion.

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A New Theme, A WP 3.0 Upgrade, Flickr, Tumblr – But No Actual Content

If you’ve visited my site in the last 9 months you’ll notice it looks a bit different now. I just upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress, and have installed a WooTheme called Unite. I haven’t tried a Woo Theme before, but they’re pretty slick, well coded, I’d probably buy another one.

I also moved my photos over to Flickr from Picasa (mainly because I was too lazy to rework the Picasa integration and the theme supported Flickr out-of-the-box).

I liked Unite because it looks a bit like Tumblr, which all the cool kids seem to be getting into. I like the _idea_ of Tumblr, but have been put off by a few things they don’t support as a platform (comments being one). Plus the task of trying to migrate my blog with all it’s comments and posts to Tumblr is a non-startr.

As a side effect of buying this theme, I have two others available to me, so if you fancy a particular WooTheme, let me know, I’d share one for a good cause.

One last thing – this update will mean the IE6/7 people who visit (albeit not many of you) should now see a reasonable site. Speaking of which does anyone use IE6/7 because they want to or is it symptomatic of a lack-lustre corporate IT department?

I’d appreciate any feedback you have on the theme, particularly if you are visiting on a weird platform/browser.

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10 Steps to Magento Ecommerce on a (small) Budget

This post basically regurgitates greatly expands on an email I sent to a good friend of mine this week when he asked me about building an ecommerce webstore, and whether the quote he had of $25,000 was reasonable for an owner-operator hand-painted pottery website. Hint: it’s not.

Naturally enough I didn’t think that was reasonable, and I listed a few simple steps that can be taken to get a free Magento webstore up and running for a small budget – at least an order of magnitude less than the agency quote. The catch is, it takes a bit of elbow grease and tech savvy – it doesn’t require you to actually program computers though.

I’ll state upfront, I’m the kind of person who would rather have a store that only does half of the things you want it to, running; than one that is still in development with load of great features ‘coming soon’. I subscribe to the actually shipping is the best feature philosophy of software development (that’s also my excuse for releasing buggy beta software).

So, with the 10 steps below, you can join the dot.com boom and get selling your products online through Magento. I’ll run through the steps below, and try to keep a running tally of costs as we go. If you spot anything you disagree with, please comment, I’d like this to be as accurate as possible. Preamble over, let’s get down to it.

Continue reading 10 Steps to Magento Ecommerce on a (small) Budget

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Magento vs Wp-E-Commerce: a comparison case study

Being a computer programmer typically means all of your friends and family immediately assume you a) can fix their wireless router and b) want to. For the same reason we often get asked to help make a website, blog, webstore, killer web 2.0 app or all of the above – which in the most part I can’t help with through lack of spare time. But I did manage to fit a WordPress + WP-E-Commerce project in, and this is a case study of that development project in particular, comparing WP-E-Commerce to Magento.

My girlfriend Cindy asked me to help with her latest venture, Cheap Titles – so naturally I helped whip up a site. Despite spending most of my time developing Magento, I actually thought I’d give the WordPress + WP-E-Commerce combo a try. I’ll summarize my rationale for that in the next section – suffice to say it made some things a lot easier.

So this is a little blog post that summarizes my experiences making the site with WP-E-Commerce, what I noticed different about the platform, as compared to Magento – and in particular how I found the underlying code quality of WP-E-Commerce measured against Magento.

Continue reading Magento vs Wp-E-Commerce: a comparison case study

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TweetBeeper.com – A Free Email to Direct Message Service (and Email to SMS too)

I just uploaded Tweet Beeper to Google App Engine. It’s a simple application that receives an email, and then converts the subject line into a twitter direct message (which in turn can be an SMS sent to the recipients phone). A little whimsical, I know, but the weather was fairly average here this weekend!

TweetBeeper in 1 Minute

How do I use it? Easy!

  1. Follow @TweetBeeper on Twitter.
  2. Send a subject-line email to:
    your-twitter-id [at] tweetbeeper.appspotmail.com

What can it do?

  1. Cron Job Output to Direct Messages
  2. Webstore monitor failures to SMS
  3. Magento Sale notification emails (or any store)
  4. … and any other situations where email to SMS would be handy

TweetBeeper.com - Email to twitter Direct Message service

Continue reading TweetBeeper.com – A Free Email to Direct Message Service (and Email to SMS too)

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Magento Backups: How To Ensure Your Data Is Safe with Magento Cloud Backup

This is a blog post about Magento backups, how you can do them by default in Magento and how a new extension I have made called Cloud Backup will help to make them automatically and send them offsite to Amazon’s S3 storage service – increasing the chance you’ll have a recent backup if (when) bad things happen to your store or server. I’d like your help beta testing this new extension, and this post will hopefully convince you why that’s mutually beneficial for us. The extension is still pending on Magento Connect so give it a whirl, I’ll update this post with the link shortly, or for those that are particularly keen to test it, you can download the release directly and install it manually.
Continue reading Magento Backups: How To Ensure Your Data Is Safe with Magento Cloud Backup