I recently found UserFly.com, a service which will record videos of the visitors to your site, allowing you to play them back and watch where users go (and how they move their mouse around on the screen).
I was flabbergasted at how easy this was to use – I tried the free version and had recordings [...]

Posted in CSS, Design, Development, Ecommerce, Software, Testing, Web 2 Comments »

My brother wrote a Magento module recently – the Facebook Connect Module.  It’s pretty straightforward, and allows you to make it easier for shoppers to enter in their information in to your Magento store.  When checking out, they can connect their Facebook info, using the Facebook Connect process, and their information will be imported in [...]

Posted in Ecommerce, PHP, Software, Web 3 Comments »

I’m really not sure how to get the attention of someone at QVC in their tech dept.  I’ve tried many things, and nothing has yet worked.  My problem – described earlier – is still not better.  My thinking has shifted slightly – I think this is more likely an Akamai problem, but it’s still affecting [...]

Posted in Business, Ecommerce, Web 5 Comments »

I just saw someone tweet that they’d received something in the post, and linked to a URL shortener service.  It redirected to Amazon.  Now I realize that Twitter is a pretty new service, but with mobile rising, I think we’ll see a need for short URLs more and more.  Couple that with the slightly extra [...]

Posted in Ecommerce, Web 9 Comments »

I found a review of my brother’s Magento book earlier today.  Starting off with “However, I’m not really the type of person to give accolades unless something is absolutely stellar. As such, this post will primarily be about the shortcomings of the book” I wasn’t particularly surprised that there was more of a focus on [...]

Posted in Book, Ecommerce, Software, Web 23 Comments »

So, tomorrow (technically *today* in Australia!) is the date for PDF delivery of my brother’s new book – the PHP Architect’s Guide to Programming with Magento (I think that’s the full title).  More details here.  I’m really excited for him, as I know he put a lot of work over the past several months learning [...]

Posted in Book, Development, Ecommerce, PHP, Software 3 Comments »

TechCrunch has a story on a recently funded Facebook app which, frankly, seems stupid.  Buying and selling ‘friends’ as ‘pets’.  People have already sold me somehow on Facebook, and I just ignore it.  I don’t get it.  I thought MySpace was the place for stupid/flitty ideas, but it seems Facebook is moving in that direction, [...]

Posted in Blogging, Business, Design, Development, Ecommerce, Ideas, Society, Software, Web 2 Comments »

A new module for Magento was put out in to early release today.  The module provides “made to order” functionality for ecommerce shops which need to provide custom ordering capabilities for ‘just in time’ manufacturing. From the module author:

The MTO module allows users to enter in specific dimensions in for any product and that [...]

Posted in Ecommerce, PHP 5 Comments »

Magento has a new release today, and there’s a lot of features/fixes in there.  The neatest one to me was
Added zend cache backends for apc and memcached by Mark_Kimsal
cause that same Mark Kimsal is my brother. 
The link above points to the full announcement, but here’s a sample of some features in this release:

Add [...]

Posted in Ecommerce, PHP 3 Comments »

So Magento has the hot buzz in the PHP community right now as the next big ecommerce system.  I’ve not done much with it beyond poke around in the code.  My brother Mark has been doing a long term project based on Magento doing a lot of custom work on top of it, and has [...]

Posted in Development, Ecommerce, PHP, Personal, Software, Web 6 Comments »