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Monitor your Magento Store with MageSpeedTest.com

July 6, 2011 in Magento, Magento Speed Test, Web Development with 7 Comments

I snuck/sneaked out a new feature for MageSpeedTest.com last week: Performance Monitoring.

Basically it’s the same simple Magento performance test you know and love, run every 6, 12 or 24 hours. If the results of the regular tests differ by more than your preset tolerance, you get an email warning you – simple.

I wanted to soft launch it to a) try it myself in production for a while and b) get some tester feedback.

So with positive results from both I am now officially announcing the new Magento Monitoring feature and inviting you all to try it for free!

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SMTP Pro with Magento: A sort-of user guide.

June 30, 2011 in Google Apps Email Magento Extension, Magento, SMTP Pro Magento Extension with 61 Comments

This blog post is about the SMTP Pro extension. It is my attempt at full explanations to some very good questions/feedback from Chris Last in his comment on an earlier post. I decided that I should give thorough explanations to the questions and they probably belong in a blog post rather than a reply comment. Hopefully it’ll form a mini user-guide, I’ll try to update it as such over time.

There are too many sections in Config->Advanced->System for me to make complete sense of:

Mail Sending Settings – do these have any effect?
Disable Email Communications No
Host localhost
Port (25) 25
Set Return-Path no

1) The Mail Sending Settings are the built in Magento ones, they don’t work very well for custom SMTP servers and you can safely ignore them. One thing to note though. I do adhere to their disable configuration in my extension. So if you disable all emails using the core config here, all emails do stop even if sending via SMTP Pro.
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Clustering WordPress on Amazon EC2 micro instances

June 28, 2011 in PHP, Web Development with 15 Comments

If you are reading this, you are an unwitting participant in my latest experiment: clustering my blog on Amazon EC2 – thanks! You will be connecting to my blog on one of several Amazon EC2 micro instances, cobbled together in a quick and dirty solution that was more knee-jerk reaction to some downtime, than well thought out project.

This post serves as a chance for me to test if the cluster works, and a summary of the architecture I have set up using several EC2 micro instances and WordPress. It’s a quick and dirty little WordPress cluster using spot-request micro instances at $0.007/hour – how fun!
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Export New Zealand Finalist: World Wide Access, and I’m on the FM!

June 8, 2011 in Other Stuff with 2 Comments

Quick non-Magento related post. World Wide Access got to the finals of the Export New Zealand awards, we’re going to a flashy black tie dinner and everything, very exciting! Anyway, I just wanted to share this little sound byte because it’s my first ever (and probably only) 30 seconds of fame on the FM band.

If you don’t like the internet and want to hear it in the wild, it’ll play on NewstalkZB Drive show 4pm-7pm from Tuesday 7th June – Thursday 16th June 2011. You can tune in for some insightful discussion with Susan Wood while you’re on the way home!

Excuse the dry monotone voice – that’s just how I sound apparently.

PS: I haven’t been doing _much_ Magento development lately as you can probably tell by the lack of new posts, but I’ll post some articles soon, given all of the interesting news of the last weeks, what with Magento selling to Ebay, and details of the Magento 2 project being unveiled at the Magento Developer’s Paradise.

Magento and Amazon’s CloudFront CDN – The Easy Way

May 2, 2011 in Magento, Web Development with 26 Comments

In this post I will cover a simple way to configure Magento to use the Amazon CloudFront CDN service and to create a CloudFront distrubution that mirrors the static files in your site. This method relies on the custom origin functionality announced late last year when CloudFront came out of beta. But first, a little background.

A CDN (content distribution network) is a network of servers that puts your files and content closer to the user requesting them, and thus they can get the quicker. Using a CDN has a nice side effect of offloading some work from your own server too – which if you use Apache means less processes on your server for each customer.

When Amazon first announced CloudFront I got very excited about the prospect of writing an extension to automatically sync a Magento store’s media with an S3 bucket, to enable this simple, affordable CDN solution. Alas, it turned out to be quite hairy dealing with the subtle race conditions that can occur when first accessing a specific media file that may not be available on the CDN yet.

With the introduction of custom origin functionality there is no situation where the CDN won’t have the file. If the CDN doesn’t have the file, it gets it from the underlying source server, if it already has it, it serves it. This means the first request for a file will be a bit slower, but after that it’ll be quick.

So to make a CloudFront distribution work in Magento it only takes two steps.
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