Archive for January, 2010

Customize Magento Skin | Magento Tutorial | Magento How To

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Today, I’m getting ready to launch yet another Magento e-Commerce website for a client and have decided to do a step by step howTo on fully customizing a Magento skin.

1) You’ve already installed Magento on the webserver you are using for your test enviornment.

2) You’ve got one of the default themes already running

3) You need to next make copies of the default skin and template directories. cp ./app/skin/frontend/default/default to ./app/design/frontend/default/project_name and cp ./skin/frontend/default/default to ./skin/frontend/default/project_name .

4) You need to next tell the backend that you are using a custom skin and template. Login to the Magento admin section, and navigate to System -> Configuration this will take you to the main setup area, choose Design on the left and enter your project_name in both the template box, and the skins box and save.

5) You should now be using your new template, we will customize the skin in my next post!

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Open Casting Call “Surviving the Island”

Monday, January 25th, 2010

So, I’m thinking of starting a new t.v. or webisode show. I’m calling the show “Surviving the Island” and the basic concept is simple, place ten people on an island and the last person that’s alive gets the prize.

Obviously it will have to be a pretty big prize, lets say a million dollars. With as bad as the economy is at the moment I could probably get players for less but 1M seems right.

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We’ve done a re-launch, check out the new DiggyPOD.com

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Digital publishing on demand, that’s what you get with DiggyPOD.com

They are a great company out of Ann Arbor that turns out book store quality books. Take a look and get writing today.
Visit www.diggypod.com and see just how easy it is to become an author!

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Faster Internet | Speedup Comcast | Google DNS

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

Sick of your browser saying “resolving host” well if you are like me you realize that this is actually a comcast problem. Yes they can provide you with a 16mb downstream connection but they can’t resolve their hosts fast enough to do anything useful with it.

Today I decided I’d try google’s public dns http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html and I’m so impressed. Go figure that the world leader in internet technology would also have the fastest dns available.

Step two was to move my router away from my cable modem. I recently read a post describing the electrical interference that a cable modem can have. When placed next to eachother the wireless router spends all it’s time negotiating errors. Once I moved it four feet away from my modem my speed doubled.

My comcast 6m connection is now testing out at 6.6mb down 5.5mb up. Match this and I’ll be impressed.

After noticing the increase I went ahead and changed the dns information on my router so all machines on my network are now accessing pages twice as fast.

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