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 8 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 2 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 »

I took on a “small” project which I shouldn’t have - it’s becoming more trouble than I anticipated, and the majority of it stems from integrating with paypal.  Their documentation for integrating with their services is (intentionally?) vague.  While there certainly is a huge amount of it, there are things which are just ignored, like [...]

Posted in Development, Ecommerce, PHP, Software, Web 5 Comments »