So today I was stumbling around the internet looking for the best CMS solution available and came across (what seems to be) an pretty amazing open-source e-commerce solution. I must say, at first look and a quick install, Magento is pretty impressive. It takes a lot of the difficult stuff out of developing an e-commerce solution.
The first huge benefit and time saver I came across is it’s built-in Authorize.net, Google Checkout and Paypal support. Worried about security? Don’t be…Magento utilizes SSL in everything it does and is PCI compliant. This is a pretty big time saver in itself. Just type in your account name and it’s ready to rock.
Next, the back end. It’s a bit tricky to get around, but once you figure it out it’s extremely informative. You’re able to totally manage this thing from the admin panel and it seems to be really effective. I’m actually quite astonished at what it does. They really took everything into account during development. inventory levels, sales, coupons…EVERYTHING. There’s even an RSS Feed to tell you which items you’re running low on (assuming you carry inventory).
Best of all, it’s totally open-source. You can edit anything you want and build it to suit your needs. The store front is fully customizable as well.
I just had to get the word out on such an interesting and great open-source project. To me, there’s nothing better than free.
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So I just found yet another IE bug. This time the length of characters when definining a DIV’s ID is involved.
For the nFront Security website I developed a "theater" page so people can watch all the videos in one place. I’m using an open source flash media player (I forgot the name, but I’ll update this in a minute) and it works by writing out the player to a div. You must, obviously, define the div it is going to write to. No problem right….
WRONG! Being the descriptive coder I like to try to be, I named the DIV "nFrontPasswordFilterConfiguration" . Since I always use Firefox (until debugging time comes around) I didn’t notice this error. What would happen is that all the movies would appear, except this one. The only thing that was different was that the id name was longer. Since I’ve got a knack it seems for doing things that cause these bugs appear I decided to shorten the name to "nFrontPasswordFilterConfig"
VOILA! Works like a charm now. Therefore, the maximum length a DIV ID can be in IE is somewhere in the range of 26 - 33. I would guess it’s 30, but don’t quote me. I’ll find out an exact number for ya.
Hope this helps someone.
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Just stumbled across this today and thought it was mention worthy. I don’t want to give a full review yet because I really haven’t gotten the chance to start using it. I’m talking about Jott. It’s a free, and simple, voice to email tool.
I stumbled across this thing at 5:00 and it’s now 5:18 and I’ve already got everything setup and had time to power up my blog to make this post. Everything is an absolute breeze. Even the confirmation process is flawless. You call a number and the second your call goes through, the page your on updates and shows the confirmation. Sort of hard to explain, but you should register just to see it! What a great idea of using caller ID to verify.
Here’s how it works. Sign up first. Once your registered and have confirmed your email and phone number, import your contacts from Outlook or whatever. You can do it manually or import from a .csv. In outlook, just goto File -> Import export. Follow the directions and only export your contacts. Simple!
Now for sending an email. you call up the toll-free number where you are then prompted for the contact name. Jott then repeates the name for confirmation and then you can speak your email. I’ve tried a few and have yet to find a single spelling mistake. Not to mention its very quick to. I got the emails seconds after I spoke them.
For some of the down sides….of course they add their own signature at the bottom of the emails, so this thing isn’t business ready just yet. It’s still in Beta afterall. It would also be nice to have the option to SMS someone a message, instead of only emailing. Not necessary, but would be a nice touch. That’s about it for the negatives.
The site, from a design and usability standpoint, is incredible. The layout is simple and clean and also very effective. As for navigation, I would give it a 7 / 10 though. It’s a bit rough to get to where you want at first. Once you get past the learning curve though, it’s pretty easy. I’m lazy though and want things to be instantly simple.
Think I’ve said about all I wanted to. Check it out for yourself and let me know what you think!
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