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>

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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I’ve made a new Magento extension for submitting your store sitemap to Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing. My new extension can submit automatically whenever the sitemap is regenerated, or on-demand from the admin UI. More about how I made it and how it works below, but first a little background.
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This post is about the Magento Event system – a full explanation of how it works and a couple of issues I had with it resolved. Hope it is a help for people wrestling with the Magento event dispatch mechanism.

My particular situation was this: when automatically fetching tracking details from our carriers via a Magento cron job, the resulting Google Checkout Magento event did not fire, so the end customer was not receiving the notification properly – even though the ’shipment’ object within Magento was correctly displaying the tracking details.
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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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