I'm Director of Engineering & Product at Close. I'm interested in startups, programming, UX, SaaS, and building great web products. More about me.
I was given a copy of a book called “Magento: Beginner’s Guide” to review, so here goes. Overall, the book does a good job of giving a high-level walkthrough of all the different aspects of running a store with Magento.
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…
I listened to a very interesting TED Talk today by Dan Pink. You can watch it below or read my brief notes from it.
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.
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
Google I/O 2009 Keynote, Day 2
4/28/2009
Google Wave – Product, Platform, and Protocol
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.
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…
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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Some mental notes for myself in case I encounter this again, and maybe this will help someone as I was doing Google searches trying to figure this out myself…
A couple months ago I bought my first Mac computer with the release of the new MacBook Pros. The new machine is beautiful and the switch to OS X from Windows has been primarily positive overall.
There were a few things from Windows that I greatly missed, but I found solutions which worked:
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This summer I had the privilege to intern at Google and spent another summer in Silicon Valley – the hub of all things tech-related. My internship lasted 10 weeks and, much like my Yahoo! internship last summer (I gave my reasons for not going back to Yahoo! this summer), I had an incredible experience.
I have two more happy clients now. I’ve launched two new websites recently: SwimmingSafari.com and Hibernicor.com …
I’m was recently offered and accepted an internship at Google for the summer. I’m extremely excited about this opportunity as I’ll be working at the company which has been having such an incredible amount of impact on the web. I’m looking forward to being around and learning from the very talented people that work there.
This post comes a bit late, but I wanted to recap my experience at SXSW Interactive 2007. I decided to diverge from the typical college spring break plan and headed out to Austin, TX for the 4-day conference covering topics such as web design, usability, blogging, and other technology.
With SXSW coming up, I decided to make up some quick business cards and have them printed through OvernightPrints.com. I can’t believe SXSW (and Spring Break) is only a week away, but I am excited and looking forward to learning a lot and meeting some great people.
This post actually is a comment I left for this blog post, but decided I would also post it here. The author’s post discusses contrasting opinions on using several separate social media websites vs. using Facebook for everything. My comment is below:
After spending time today with frustrating IE6 CSS issues with borders on ul and li tags, I finished my CSS navigation tabs. The CSS is based on the XHTML produced by the WordPress K2 theme, but can be easily matched for any site.
I just got back from another trip to the Bay Area in California, where Yahoo! generously flew me out to be a part of their Time Capsule Camp event…
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As a follow-up to my post noting some issues I’ve found with Google Calendar – namely what seemed to be a security hole, I was extremely pleased to see an email from Google on the matter:
I just completed a web design project for 24/7 Tutor – a new Gainesville-based tutoring service for UF students. They let students call them literally 24 hours a day for tutoring in a growing list of difficult classes…
Update: Google responds.
Google has been doing a great job innovating lately through the integration of their products (Docs and Spreadsheets, Calendar and Gmail, etc). This integration, however, has not come without security issues arising. TechCrunch has covered several of them – but I believe I have found another… Read the rest of this entry »
This semester has lended for some school projects a little different than usual. Some seem to be even… useful?
