Only Network

It’s been great to watch The Ballet Shop start to blossom using Magento as it’s new software. I’m more and more impressed by this e-commerce package every day I use it. Not only is the feature set outstanding, but there’s a vibrant community pushing it forward, developing add ons for it and participating in the forums. It’s not tied to a particular range, you can use it to sell services as well as products like loose diamonds and other physical goods. It’s more geared towards the physical goods side though, and includes modules for shipping, invoicing and all the other bits that you would expect from the back-end of an online store.

Well, one thing is for sure. If I ever have to build an e-commerce site again in the future, Magento will be my product of choice!

I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.8 with all it’s juicy goodness. It’s been relatively painless rolling it out across my different blogs, but there have been a handful of plugins that made the upgrade less than painless. I managed to fix any issues I had quite quickly, but I have heard of people having the occasional show stopper that needed plugins adjusted or even disabled to get their blogs up and running again.

All in all, I have found WordPress a pretty good platform to be running things on, and I particularly like the versatility it offers. I’ve used it for various websites and see it used on many more, whether blogs related to dancing or dedicated to diet supplements or even saving the world! The versatility, availability of different themes and different plugins lends itself pretty well to allowing you to create whatever type of site you like. But if you want to use WordPress as a CMS, check out this post first: Using WordPress as a CMS

I took some time tonight to put some effort into the next iteration of WP Auctions, a plugin for WordPress that lets people auction anything they like right off their blog. Anyway, we’ve been working on some updates to it and today I finished a new version of the upload routines that lets you upload images into your blog’s file system. The previous version used ImageShack to host the images, but like this you have full control. I think I might make it an option whether to use ImageShack or not.

It’s been interesting working on this plugin, because we’ve had lots of feedback from people using it. We’ve seen people use it to auction paintings, jewellery and pretty much everything. From personal blogs to people down in Westgate, we seem to have quite a bit of traction, which is great news. Hopefully we’ll have the new version out soon .. watch this space!

I’ve been looking at the theme on this blog and wondering what I can do to improve it. One throught I had was that the content area is a bit too narrow, but I really wanted to keep the category section on the left hand side. I like the fact I can use this blog to play with all the features in SuperPress so I’m not keen on turning things off. I like the fact that the site looks more like a blog than a website dedicated to diet pill reviews, so I’m not keen on turning off things like the widgets at the side and other similar features.

I might have a play and see if I can just widen the whole theme and see what that looks like. That’s one thing I like about WordPress, that you can play around with the theme without affecting the content. What do you think? What would you change if you could?

And The Ballet Shop is live again, available for people to shop and purchase anything they want from. The new website is built on Magento and we’re using a number of features that come out of the box to help enhance people’s experience. It now supports customer reviews for example, so people can share their views about different products. The checkout experience has been enhanced no end and there are a host of new features that people can use. It still needs some work, and the team is busy adding on different products and categories, but feel free to browse and shop for your dance shoes, ballet outfits and other dance paraphernalia.

The site was due for a revamp for some time. Just like a teenager looking out for the best acne treatment on the market, we’ve been racking our brains on the best way to improve the site and give our customers the experience they deserve. It was quite lucky that we came across Magento as part of our evaluation of what was available on the market. We gave it a try and fell in love with it right away. It also took us surprisingly little time to set up the new shop, theme it and start getting products in. I’m looking forward to learning more about it and potentially using it for other projects too.

I’ve had the opportunity to play a bit with Magento over the last few days. It’s an Open Source shopping platform that is just awesome in the amount of features it offers. Everything you can think a shopping site would need has been included; features like cross-sells and upsells, customer reviews, custom promotions, stock management, configurable products, invoicing, everything.

The website I’m working on is The Ballet Shop, a website that came to life a few years ago based on some ASP/Access code I had developed. It ticked over nicely for a few years, but now needed a major overhaul. So rather than rebuilding it from scratch, I decided to investigate the open source option, and I’ve been blown away by this package. It works for any online shop you’d like to try, whether it’s a dance shop or a website focusing on Green shopping. If you decided to try and put your business online it comes very much recommended.

In the meantime, watch this space; I’ll let you know when the site launches.

photo credit: how_long_it_takes

Every day we come across loads of different acronyms for a whole bunch of different things, some of which are technology related, some of which are totally unrelated. Earlier today I was talking with some colleagues of mine and we were pulling forward acronyms from different aspects of technology and sharing what they meant with one another. I even learnt a few myself.

I was thinking that we could turn this into a simple game. Here are a list of acronyms; can you identify which ones are technology related and which aren’t?

1. UCSPI
2. MMLM
3. VPS
4. BCBSNC
5. HSDPA
6. HIPAA
7. OVTD
8. OAY
9. ECMA
10. FVF

Ready for the answer? Well, only half of those are technology related, the ones with an odd number; the rest are taken from a variety of other practices and disciplines. A good place to look them up with be at the Acronym Finder

How many did you guess?

And in our “you’ll find anything online” corner, here’s a great snippet from Gizmodo; a bra that changes shape based on your body temperature. Here’s how they describe it:

The upcoming Smart Memory Bra by Lisca lingerie senses a woman’s arousal through her body’s heat, then squeezes her boobs together accordingly. We ask, does a pushup bra really need an off switch?

The integrated memory foam bra reshapes under the influence of heat to enhance cleavage, making a woman more desirable when she’d like to be desirable. Or, you know, when she’s just a little sweaty.

They then describe an interesting scenario where the plan can backfire ending up with everyone at the party fighting over each other and hanging from the chandeliers. It will be interesting to see if this makes it to market.

Did you know that you can get custom water bottles that you can use to advertise your company, promote your products and heck, even your personal brand. I can see how these could be an interesting opportunity for someone trying to spread their name around, as people tend to use bottles all the time. It’s also more environmentally sound to use something like that rather than a disposable bottle that gets thrown away.

The catch, well, you need to order a whole bunch of them, because of the way the printing works. On a couple of products I picked, 240 pieces was the minimum order quantity. So if you’re after getting a bottle with your son’s name written on it for him to take to school, you’re out of luck (unless you want to buy 240 of them)

It was interesting to read about a new type of search engine which will be hitting the Net towards the end of this month. It’s called Wolfram Alpha and promises to change the way we gather information online. Currently, if you search the Web for “what are the best fat burners?” for example; you’ll get a list of websites that may or may not give you an answer, may contain reviews, products and an assortment of different results. Wolfram Alpha does something different. Instead of pointing you at websites with an answer, it will try to answer the question for you.

So, for example, if I ask the question What is the population of London? Wolfram Alpha will give me a direct answer. Google, on the other hand, gives me links to websites that contain the answer. Will it change the way we use the Web? Time will tell. One thing is for sure; the SEO world is going to have a fun time trying to break their model in the same way they try to influence traditional search engines.