ASchroder.com

Seriously, just don’t do it – I think I’m going to have to find a new start page…

It’d actually be a really interesting experiment if the Herald just ran Google adwords instead. I wonder if more people would click on ads that related to what they were reading rather than shitty bandwidth consuming banner ads. There might be something in it, seeing as Google only gets paid when people click on targeted ads and by all accounts they’re doing pretty well out of it….

As a Magento developer I’m always a little bewildered by the number of web stores that use flash banners instead of simple javascript powered rotating div ’s – at least the div ’s can have text and alt tags associated, which the search engines can crawl.

</rant>

Tonight I released my new wordpress theme – what do you think? It’s the bastard offspring of two free themes; SevenFive and Agregado hacked together to make a new theme. In the spirit of the original themes being free, here it is – I make no apologies for the crude hacking together and all original copyrights hold – I’m not trying to pass this off as my own or anything.

I’d really like any feedback you have, particularly the 10% of you who use Internet explorer, as I want to make sure the site is simple, clean and usable. So leave a comment, or email me with the things you’d like me to change.

Also, now that I have got the pseudo-creative bug out of my system, I’ll try to post a few more Magento articles to keep you going – so keep an eye out for them.

Just a quick little how-to on Mailchimp and Magento using the existing extension by Ebizmarts. We want to be able to send customers who sign up for the newsletter through the Magento store a little thank you gift (discount code) X days after signing up using Mailchimp’s excellent autoresponders. This is supported by Mailchimp, but requires double opt-in or the following little 2 step work-around with the Mailchimp API.
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In a bid to help solve a weird 404 error that Kevin has been experiencing with the self test I offered him a pre-release copy of my upcoming ‘unified’ Magento email extension. It will support both SMTP and Google Apps/Gmail along with a few new features.

Anyway, if anyone is keen to try the extension please contact me or flick me an email or post a comment and let me know, I’ll send through the files, I’d rather not post it for public availability here yet, because it’s not as stable as I’d like. But expect it very soon!
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Th old Ashley would never say this, maybe I’ve been working with PHP too long, but seriously, I’m going to have to side with the dynamic language crowd on this one – I think I have been spending too much time developing with Magento!

After an Eclipse upgrade a whole raft of my unit tests started failing to compile with the error: The method assertEquals(Object, Object) is ambiguous for the type. What this means is I’m passing an int and and Integer into a method that has two different signatures: assertEquals(Object, Object) and assertEquals(int, int) both of which could be called, thanks to autoboxing.
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