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I have just finished a project for a client specialising in Computers and Peripherals to take their osCommerce based site (though heavily customised) and apply a fresh new design to the existing site. For the design work I have hooked up with local web designers Creode who are actually based in the same office complex [...]

Just came across this and its so cool and easy I had to blog about it straight away.. http://www.fivesecondtest.com/ Basically people see a screenshot of your design and then get 5 seconds to ‘take it in’ and give you feedback on which bits they managed to assimilate. Very useful More Reading:

Xdebug is an excellent addition to a PHP developers arsenal. However when debugging large arrays etc, the truncating can get in the way. To stop Xdebug truncating arrays etc when you dump them using var_dump, just make these two additions to your php.ini file: PLAIN TEXT CODE: xdebug.var_display_max_data=9999999999 xdebug.var_display_max_children=9999999999 For a fuller explanation of Xdebug [...]

Just came across userfly, looks like an interesting tool. Would appreciate any feedback in the comments from people who've used it. http://userfly.com/ More... Down the Foxhole - Effective Flash UsabilityOn the usability of taps and the lessons for web design » malcolm ...MEX 2009 - Usability tops buying criteria for mobile phones | Tech ...usability [...]

I really like NetBeans IDE for coding PHP. However there are lots of hidden features which are only accessible via keyboard shortcut. This page lists a bunch of them. Its titled Ruby Shortcuts, but they seem to work just as well for PHP. More... the life of john : XDebug, NetBeans, WAMP Apache Crash SolutionStefan's [...]

I just hit an intriguing situation where a page that was perfectly viewable in my browser was not visible via curl. I scratched my head and messed around testing the page in variety of online proxy services and local web browsers. I even stared messing about with telnet and manually typing headers. My conclusion was [...]

I've been using spotify a lot recently. For coding work you can't beat a nice classical playlist, however I have found the classical collection of music on Spotify to be really quite hit and miss, with an unfortunate bias towards those tragic classical music meets 90's electronica abominations... :S So I have started filtering out [...]

This week has seen the full launch of 247Electrical.co.uk. The site is based on Magento and the specific requirements where that it needs to be able to handle a large scale catalogue with frequent updates whilst still enjoying all the fancy features such as layered navigation and custom attributes. As Magento's own bulk catalogue handling [...]

If you are doing any kind of bulk updating etc then you also need to make sure that you rebuild all of the caches and indexes after your bulk updates otherwise things can go wrong. I have just managed to get the following script to work including when flat catalog is enabled (thanks to Nick [...]

I've been spending a hell of a lot of time coding Magento recently, and for any full time serious ecommerce business I would recommend a Magento solution. However I have spent much more of my time coding osCommerce and usually CRE Loaded osCommerce based ecommerce sites. CRELoaded is still a great package (once you get [...]