Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

I started developing a mobile site for our local contractor customers yesterday. We'll see how it does, but so far I've managed to find a neat tool to view what it'll look like. Actually, you can view any site in it as it would be viewed in Opera Mini . For someone developing a site and not wanting to use a mobile device constantly to test it, this is great. Now, I just need to figure out what I want to show them for sure.

I've discovered something this week that I'm working on fixing. What I discovered is this: real-time lookups aren't a good thing. For years now, we've done real-time lookups whenever someone adds a product to their cart and enters a zip code. This allows us to not worry about rate changes and focus on the products. But what it's also meant is we're leaving money on the table. A quick test over the past few days has shown that nearly 10% of the time, UPS's servers aren't returning data. That doesn't seem good to me. There are days where our customer service reps complain about shipping rates taking a long time to load. Those are the times I knew about. But the 10% figure is even without taking the "Nothing returned" into account - this is just "Something useless returned". So, as a fix, I've queried enough to get all the rates now, and I'm rewriting our shipping calculations to run entirely without querying their servers. W...

I reported not that long ago that we finally got a development server . Well, we've already shut that one off and moved to a new one. Apparently, that was much more of an antique than I thought it would be. We're now running a Hyperthreaded P4 with 2GB of RAM and hardware mirrored SCSI drives. I thought that the old machine would just act like our web servers under heavy load, but when it was taking 2 minutes or longer just to load a couple fields via Ajax calls, I decided that wasn't worth waiting for any more. Now, I'm going to be able to develop a little quicker... and I've got some sweet projects planned out. When I get them a little further along, I'll be sure to let anyone reading here know about them.

I've been working on configuring a development web server for toolbarn.com over the past couple of days. Was it a quad processor, quad core system with terabytes of RAM and storage? Perhaps a Sun T-2000 with more threads than you can shake a stick at? Not a chance. I'm using old hardware to simulate our web servers under a heavier load. That, and it was sitting here not being used. I commissioned a Dell PowerEdge 2300 with 768MB of RAM, dual PIII 600's, and 3 8GB SCSI drives in Software Raid 5. Not exactly high-end stuff that we'd want to run anything serious on, but for developing a website, it'll be just fine. We also set up a PhpWiki for keeping track of development notes internally among the team in IT, and we'll be doing lots of documentation over the next little while. Oh, what fun. I remembered, after getting 403 permission denied errors on all folders, that Apache requires some special tuning of the selinux parameters. Note to self: find this post ne...

We've been having some trouble with the checkout process on our sites over the past month. First, we have been preparing a third party integration on ToolBarn (not even Offermatica, as that's been installed and running for a while now without problems) that caused SSL warnings in checkout. This lasted most of a business week, causing sales during that week to seem slightly "soft" (our term for below average.) Secondly, Shoemoney had a $50 coupon for AdCenter (Microsoft's advertising platform for those not familiar with PPC). Well, I got it all up and running, and we immediately started having people calling in saying they were having problems with checkout. The oddball part here - they all have MSN as an ISP, most using MSN Explorer for a browser. So I'm left trying to figure out why. I mean, IE and FireFox are both used in our call center, and we've got the occasional Opera user testing it. I have a Mac to test things on as well. I also use Linux, so yet ...

So I've taken part in a debate over if CSS navigation systems cause an SEO penalty and all the internal pages to fall out of grace with Google. I personally don't think this is the case, so I've started working on one for ToolBarn.com. I can see how the usability for some will be great, for others it'll be used the same as always, and some people will keep on using search. However, it's neat looking and our competitors don't currently use it, so it'll differentiate us from them. So what's the reason people are saying it's a penalty? Simple. There are div's that are hidden. Well, the version I'm building doesn't use many divs. Most of it is just unordered lists with different classes applied depending on the depth. I'm interested to see how it ends up looking and working. My biggest obstacle right now is our webstats and our live help buttons. They both run JavaScripts that have to complete before the JavaScript for the nav system will...