Phil Freo Web Development

Magento is an incredible open-source PHP eCommerce platform built around the idea of flexibility, and has been gaining a huge amount of traction over the last 18 months.  Unlike “old” open-source solutions such as osCommerce, Magento was architected very carefully using OOP principles and MVC so that the entire system can be customized (both visually and functionally) without having to modify core application files.  This ensures that future updates aren’t a pain, and that multiple extensions can live peacefully together.
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I’m working on slicing and CSS for a new theming project for Magento Commerce and was plagued with a CSS bug that affects WebKit (Safari and Google Chrome).  After some searching I found that several other people have had the problem, but I didn’t see a comprehensive writeup of the solution.  Here’s what I found…

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I listened to a very interesting TED Talk today by Dan Pink. You can watch it below or read my brief notes from it.

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I had a few goals for this summer away from school.  I wanted to go to some tech conferences, check out more startups and web companies in both Silicon Valley and closer to home in Florida, and continue with my freelance development work.  I also decided I wanted to take the Zend PHP 5 Certification test to learn more, see what I know, and to separate myself from every other kid who thinks they know PHP.

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Hate scrolling down to see birthdays on Facebook? I just wrote a quick user script to reorder the parts in the sidebar on Facebook’s homepage.

Before: Requests, Suggestions, Sponsored, Highlights, Events/Birthdays, Connect
After: Requests, Events/Birthdays, Suggestions, Highlights, Sponsored, Connect

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Google I/O 2009 Keynote, Day 2
4/28/2009

Google Wave - Product, Platform, and Protocol

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Google I/O Keynote

Wednesday 5/27/2009

San Francisco, CA #io2009

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Today I tried Mozilla Prism (cross platform) and Fluid (mac only), both of which are used to create single-site browsers (SSBs).  I especially wanted to use them for GMail and Google Calendar since those are the two web apps I consistently have open in a tab at all times.

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For a new project, I’m working on launching a large number of very similar WordPress installations with minimal effort. I needed a way to have WordPress automatically parse some kind of template tag or shortcode (like “[client_name]“) across all the different pages on the site. Not only that, I needed the field’s values to be easily updated in one place, and there would be an arbitrary number of shortcodes.

So I wrote my first WordPress plugin…

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I got this message when trying to use Subversion on OS X through Terminal.

I checked out my svn version using “svn –version” and it said I was using 1.4.4 – so I decided to update. Here’s how…
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