Looking to extend the “Cloud-as-Desktop-Storage” model to its limit, bitcasa offers Infinite storage and file sharing through its services. Pretty neat idea for those looking to sync files across... Read More »

There are often a few things on the web that I think are really cool to share and do so on the usual social networks; however, given the Read More »

In working to make my blog an example of best practice, I wanted to implement version control, not only to track changes but make upgrading and... Read More »

Though there are many benefits to using cache-control headers on outgoing files, browsers will not revalidate a user’s file until either the cache-control’s expiry is reached or the application... Read More »

WordPress has a nifty feature that allows a user to add a Featured Image for a given post or page. In this use case, I needed to pull... Read More »

As a default, Git is a difficult to scan quickly and understand what changes are and were made. Adding color can alleviate this. To add color run... Read More »

Magento 1.3.2.2 — On the catalog view pages, the sort-by select input offers a range of options. These can be added or removed by visiting “Catalog” > “Attributes” >... Read More »

One of the neat things about Magento is the ability to extend functionality through a pre-defined architecture. This architecture does not really limit the use of any other... Read More »

Received an email from a client stating that their website was no longer working in Internet Explorer 9. Upon looking closer, I realized that the site was working/loading... Read More »

A Magento store is running a CMS page at the /product-selector URL. The request, from marketing, is to redirect a Top-Level Category to this new, product-selector URL using... Read More »

For a recent Magento build, we needed to create some quick functionality for user testing. The end result was to show the children of the active category in... Read More »

There have been a few headaches in overseeing WordPress Network development, most of which stem from theme developers expecting their work to be used on a one site, one... Read More »

To retrieve data when in the Category View, /catalog/category/view.phtml, one only needs to use the getCurrentCategory() method and a specifier to the attribute wanted.

getCurrentCategory() returns the registry key for... Read More »

In building a dynamic video sitemap generator, I need a way to loop through a store’s product collection. As I saw it, if a product was in a... Read More »

As I mentioned in a prior Magento blog post, I’m focusing my learning of Magento through solving real-world issues.... Read More »

Continuing on the ‘answer-a-forum-question’ theme, I wanted to demonstrate how to present a list of Store Categories in the left sidebar.

Magento’s modularity is extremely daunting at first, given the... Read More »

Our content creator requested assistance on a YouTube video embed that was having the code stripped every page save. After a quick search, it turns out the WordPress... Read More »

The method that WordPress gives, to get all categories a post is a apart of, utilizes the WordPress taxonomy system. A taxonomy is a descriptive way to group... Read More »

There many ways to get existing functionality into a different block within Magento. One can call in the needed Model, Helper or Session. One can build a module... Read More »

As I’m trying to learn Magento, I decided that answering forum questions would be the best way to get feedback on how I would do something and, hopefully, help... Read More »

One of the coolest parts of using Magento is that it can be accessed from different parts of the server even if you’re not within the Magento install directory.... Read More »

Magento is built using the Zend PHP Framework, which utilizes the MVC design pattern. An explanation of MVC can be found by a Google search and is beyond... Read More »

Using WordPress Network an admin can set the limit of all file uploads by size or type for all child sites within a network.  Unfortunately, WordPress reads the upload... Read More »

Using an Apple computer has many benefits for non-development tasks but one of the more frustrating aspects is that the system will create a .DS_Store file within any directory... Read More »

One of the biggest pitfalls in using WordPress plugins is that most are built as standalone applications that do not take environment into account.  Despite being a truly awesome... Read More »

For the blog posts, some folks have been asking how I got the ‘next’ and ‘prev’ posts working with excerpts, titles, etc. If you check the old WordPress codex,... Read More »

I needed to setup a Google Website Optimizer test on one of our store’s product pages, which meant that rather than injecting GWO javascript onto unnecessary pages, it would... Read More »

With our new media division underway, we have quite a few analytics accounts set up to track each of the client sites being created. Given that there are... Read More »

I needed to swap out the default ‘top.links’ that are populated by ‘template/page/top.links.phtml’ and assorted ‘layout/*.xml’ files, respectively.  In most installs, I create a ‘layout/local.xml’ that is overrides existing... Read More »

On our .com sites I built a script to track video viewing behavior.  Of course my heart sinks when I get a message from the marketing manager expressing that... Read More »

A WordPress theme that I worked on today had some unusual behavior in that WordPress could not identify if a user was logged in or not.  I’ve found that... Read More »

It’s simple.  It’s ridiculously simple.  But I keep forgetting how to create a user and grant privileges.  Of course, the point of a personal blog is to explore knowledge... Read More »