Always having a hard time to find the perfect loader for your AJAX scripts? Then you need to bookmark this site: Ajaxload.
Not only it provides a few dozens of animated GIF image for your loader, you can even customize it background and foreground colors. Nice!
Funny, I never really took any use SSH until recently. So I have a whole lot of commands to learn and remember, and I am lousy at remembering! Good thing I found this Common SSH Commands page. All the basic commands and short description for each of them. Definitely helpful!
AppCleaner by freemacsoft
Price: free
If you always look for small Mac apps that you hope they can make your everyday tasks easier and cannot resist to try them one by one, then you will need AppCleaner. It is a small app which allows you to thoroughly and easily uninstall your apps.
I used to leave so many small preference files scattered on my Mac because I would download, install and uninstall apps that did not really work for me. With AppCleaner, it makes everything more simply and safe.
Website: www.shopify.com
[rating: 4.5/5]
A shop in minutes, a business for life. JadedPixel, developer of Shopify, is certainly not exaggerating its tagline, you really can set up your online store in minutes.
It all started a year ago. I had zero experience on working with e-commerce system. I always thought it had to be customized by someone who had absolute knowledge of programming that supports the system, whether it was PHP, ASP, anything. Surprisingly, it only took a few days to fully understand how the themes work and I could create a customized theme in a few days. Note, you can start building your online shop using the provided default themes.
Customization
Just like stated above, it is super easy to learn and create a new theme. It uses its own Liquid templatling system for dynamic content, but believe me it is easy to understand. Of course you still definitely need to have at least an understanding of (x)HTML, CSS and basic programming algorithm.
You only need to modify 6 or 7 theme files and one CSS file, compared to dozens on most of other similar systems. Worth to note, it is also convenient to add a customized JavaScript modules without interfering with the rest of system most of the time
Backend Admin
This is also one of the biggest point why we love it so much. The look and feel is very clean. AJAX support makes it possible to drag and drop to sort your products.
Shopify's Admin interface screenshot
Support
The first place you need to go when you are experiencing any problem or bug is their forums which can be a good or a bad thing. The good thing is there are so many nice and skilled people on the community that will gladly share their knowledge and help you out. The bad thing, you just sometimes need a direct respond and explanations from the developers and it may take a while to get their attention.
Improvement
Shopify is growing along with your business. There are countless updates and new features that have been added since the first time we use it, and they plan to keep on doing it. Although there are some features that we wish they should have added, but not yet. They listen to their customers, so I am sure one day they will be added.
Price
Shopify offers a very unique pricing. You only pay a very reasonable monthly fee plus a small percentage of your transaction fee (ranging from 0.5% to 2%). This makes sense, if you want to start your first online business you possibly do not want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollar each month. You can check their detailed pricing plans here.
Final Words
I have worked partially with other systems since then, nothing is as simple as Shopify. It really stands with its concept, to make everything as easy as possible. For a small and medium business, Shopify is perfect! But if you need more detailed features like bulk shipping update, more flexible coupon code creation options or customer membership, you might have to wait until they include them to the system.
I couldn’t believe it’s been almost a year since my last post. A lot has happened and I’ve learned so many new things. So now I will try to post more things here, share stuff that I think is interesting.
In addition, I completely change my blog theme. Thanks to Brian Gardner for this free & simple, yet super nice, Silhoutte theme.
Hocus Focus is a photo studio located in Senayan City, Jakarta. They offer new concept of children photography, babies, toodler, family picture, maternity and pregnancy.
Their site includes a gallery of their portfolio, contact info and promotions. Check it out: http://www.hocusfocuskids.com.
You are a website developer, use Mac and have not switched to Intel based one. Probably you are having a hard time to check how your websites look on Internet Explorer on Windows.
Every web developer knows that IE has not been too much a follower of the web standards, so any site that looks good in every other browser may not be the same on IE. So how to test this with your machine limitation?
If installing VirtuaPC software is not an option, here is another good alternative: NetRenderer. It is a web based IE previewer for IE 6 & 7. All you need is inputting your site’s address and click ‘Render’, then it will give you the result as if it is seen from IE.
This site really helps me a lot and quite fast doing its job. So, kudos for the developers!
Flash does not give native support for connecting to database (DB). There are many variations of how to do this, especially to MySQL. The most simple is by using XML and PHP. I always prefer to use the most easy one (as I’m not a real programmer) even it would add the server requirements.
Amfphp is the answer for me. It is a remoting service, a term which I did not understand at all at first. To make it simple, it translates all the hard coding into very short lines in your ActionScript and PHP files.
This is all what you need to know/have to start learning:
Then go download the files on their site. They also provide nice to tutorials on how to install and set it up for the first time.
Tips: You might also want to google around to look for some example of using it. Here’s one site that I remember: www.flash-db.com.
For all of you who ever use other than Safari as your primary browser, you might notice that Safari is lacking the feature to disable/enable CSS on a page/site. So it is always enabled.
We can use something called Safari bookmarklets to solve this. Here’s how:
Note that this trick does not work 100% on every site, but more than enough as an alternative.
Designing and developing websites needs a lot of knowledge in browser compatibilities. Knowing a list of most popular browsers is mandatory, so you you can know which browsers you have to do the testing on and make sure everything goes well.
Here is the link I used to monitor the ‘competition of popularity’ of different kinds of browsers: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Creating a website that can work flawlessly on every type of browser is very hard (sometimes impossible), but make sure it works on major browsers and at least 90% of overall browsers available.