I’ve been working with Magento Ecommerce lately, an ecommerce platform that is becoming more popular, and I thought I’d share a few random impressions in case someone else out there is considering using it. Here they are: 1. Magento is much better than most of the alternatives. The popular PHP open-source competitors are OSCommerce, ZenCart, [...]
Just a quick congratulations to my friend Ben Lew, who just launched his first iPad app: Interactive Alphabet. It’s designed more for kids, but if you have trouble with some of your letters, you might like it as well I don’t have kids, but after playing with the app, I think it would be something [...]
In the previous post, I covered the steps for preparing to really dig into a new project. Now that you’re ready to go, here are six steps that you might find useful. Get it running Do very high-level overview Dig into specifics Switch to clean backup or rollback with version control Cleanup unused code Fix [...]
As a contract web developer, I frequently work with clients who have gone through one or more developers or development agencies and still haven’t achieved the goals they want, so they bring me in to mop up and finish the project. The sooner they call me, the better, but I often don’t come in until [...]
Clients often ask me to recommend a PHP-based MVC framework, so I’ve spent some time evaluating some of the more popular ones. There are dozens now, but two of the early ones are still very popular: CakePHP and CodeIgniter. This isn’t meant to be a super in-depth review, just a quick comparison of some of [...]
My wife and I had a good discussion this evening about habits, after she read my post from yesterday. I realized that my habits are both effective and important because most of the things on my list of daily habits fall into the category of being important (in the long run), but not terribly urgent. [...]
I’m fairly ambitious and goal-oriented, and I tend to set my sights pretty high, but that can backfire. Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck in a rut, that my goals will never happen, that I’m just not moving forward in my life. It’s taken me a long time to diagnose the problem, but I think [...]