I’ve always been one of those people that thought the path to success was putting your nose to the grindstone, working hard, blazing through projects and getting things done. It never cross my mind that I would be much more successful if I would just slow down, take my time and work less. How could that be? The thought of slowing down to be more successful doesn’t make sense? It goes against every thought I’ve ever had, but let me explain.

Throughout most of my career, I’ve been swamped. I’ve had too much to do, and not near enough time to do it. I’ve always worked insane hours and never seemed to understand how to dig myself out of the hole. To make the kind of money that I was comfortable with and felt was appropriate for someone with a College Education and my skill set and experience, I had to put in more hours than a normal person cares to work. Working that many hours you get burned out, productivity and quality of work suffers, but you have to keep putting in the hours to keep up. Nights, weekends, holidays, it didn’t matter – work was waiting to be done. I actually went a 4 year period when I was first getting started without taking a single day off. Not a weekend, vacation, sick day, or holiday. Of course I didn’t work a full day every day, but I put in at least a partial day of work for 4 years straight.

As the years wore on, I found I never got out from under the pile of work and I began to see long term flaws with this strategy. Everything was a quick fix. Whatever was needing to be done, I often had to do it in the simplest and quickest way so I could meet the client’s budget and quickly move on to the next in my list of pressing tasks. This led to difficult to maintain projects that compounded into difficult to update codebases that proved more time-consuming to maintain and update long-term.

At this stage in my career I had a dinner meeting with a client that would change my outlook on my business. We were just tossing around some of the problems I had, business-wise, and getting his thoughts on everything. His advice was a lesson that I’ll never forget and has set the stage for me to be a much more successful developer. His basic advice was for me to charge him double what I was charging him as long as that meant I could get to his updates in a timely manner, do a good job on them, and still be in business in a few years to continuing servicing his needs.

What? Really? A client telling me to double my rates for him?

After that meeting, I helped to find other developers for existing clients that could not afford my new rates, had projects that did not interest me, or were otherwise “problematic” for my new business strategy. I kept the remaining clients and began focusing on their work. I slowed down, got organized, and focused on delivering the best product I can deliver. By slowing down, it may take a little more time to complete the task, but it is much quicker to have it working from the start than it is to bug fix it later. My concern going into this shift in focus was that I would eventually run out of work. It is quite the opposite. I am as busy as I want to be, but putting in 80 hours is no longer needed to make a living due to the increased quality and appropriate pricing.

If I were able to go back and give some advice to a younger me, I had to try to explain that it is in your best interest to take your time and go above and beyond the client’s expectations on every project and charge the appropriate price for the level of quality that you provide.

I’ve used the Cart2Cart service on 4 transfers thus far and I’ll be using on on all of my future conversions as well. The service has had a few bugs on my past transfers, but it gets everything about 99% right and I just have to go back through and tweak a few things like the product attributes. With this service, transferring over 3 or 4 hundred products, a few thousand orders and customers can be done in one lazy day instead of a week of hard work. The transfers I have done start at around $100 and move up from there depending on the size of your sites.

$100 to save a weeks work? Sounds great to me.

Tiny Brick’s website is heavily customized with Ajax, so I had a little problem placing my order in Firefox. However, their live customer support was top notch and we quickly got my issues resolved. Downloading and installing the modules were unbelievably simple and configuring it and “punching holes” through the caching for some of our custom features wasn’t much more complicated. The performance improvements were immediately noticeable. The site went from taking 7 or 8 seconds to load in my browser to between 1-2 seconds.

If you are a developer and are building Magento sites for customers, I highly recommend that you just go ahead and build in the $500 fee for this module as well as installation costs into your estimates and make it mandatory to have it installed because it is well worth it, especially if they are on your server. I wish that I had been requiring this module for all of my Magento sites, but I will not make that mistake again.

If you love beer and want a social experience to help you discover new brews be sure to go over to Brewzle.com and add your name to the list!

It would be nice if they had some sort of messaging system like ebay where you can log in to your account and see the messages that were sent and what listings the messages applied to. This little bit of comfort would make me feel much more confident that the person on the other end of that ad actually received the message I sent.

http://www.SITENAME.com/MODULE/OBJECT-KEY

This could be useful for numerous things like /user/tjgamble pulling up a profile.  As expected, I found no documentation or examples on how to do this in SocialEngine, so I looked at the last Zend Framework code I wrote that did precisely this. In Zend, simply add the following to your Bootstrap.php file and the route is setup:

$fc = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$router = $fc->getRouter();
 
$router->addRoute('CONTROLLER', new Zend_Controller_Router_Route('/CONTROLLER/:urlKey',array(
'controller' => 'CONTROLLER',
'action' => 'index'
)));

This code passes anything after the controller name to the index action as a parameter named “urlKey”.  To access this urlKey, you simply need the following code in your controller:

$urlKey = $this->getRequest()->getParam("urlKey");

Accomplishing this in SocialEngine is very similar.  Each module has it’s own Bootstrap.php.  However, you must add a function in this bootstrap to get it to pickup your route.  Add the following to your module’s Bootstrap.php:

protected function _initRouter()
{
$fc = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$router = $fc->getRouter();
 
$router->addRoute('MODULE_NAME', new Zend_Controller_Router_Route('MODULE_NAME/:urlKey',array(
'module' => 'MODULE_NAME',
'controller' => 'index',
'action' => 'index'
)));
 
return $router;
}

The primary difference in this code and the previous example is the fact that the module uses the module name instead of controller name and you have the module parameter when creating the route.

Save this bootstrap, ,upload it, and you can retrieve the urlKey in your controller using the same method as if you were using the Zend Framework directly.

Do you really want to spend countless hours perfecting “likes”, user groups, or interaction between your users?   I had much rather work on some cool new technology than recoding something that has been done a thousand times.

The down side to Social Engine is that there appears to be very little documentation about how to write your own modules.  They provide a SDK that generates the module outline for you, but after that you are on your own.

Luckily for me, I have a little experience with the Zend Framework, and if you are stuck on how to do something in particular with Social Engine, look to the Zend Framework documentation for clues.

I arrived at noon and the line was only about 50 people long, so I left and got lunch and took the wife shopping at a different store. We made it back around 2:00 and the line had reached about 75 people so I figured I would go stake out my spot. It was proven the right move as by 3:30 the line was twice as long.

I had been standing for 5+ hours the previous day at a concert, so my legs were already exhausted. The 4 hour wait was made easier by having some people to talk to in the line. The Apple Store Employees came out at about 4:45 and started going through the line and giving you a card for the type of iPad you wanted. This was smart and seemed to speed things up as most people had to make the decision quickly and didn’t loiter in the store asking silly questions.

Once in the store, it went quickly and the iPad was ordered and activated. I went with the 64G wifi version as I can tether it to my jail-broken phone and don’t care for the extra expense of another data plan (my phone bill is already ridiculous) .

I did not own an original iPad, so I am still testing it’s usefulness. However, after only having a few hours to play with it, I can assure you it is a fun toy. The jury is still out on it as a productive work tool.

SUGGESTION: If Apple wanted to make a few extra dollars, they should sell those cheap portable camping-style chairs with an apple logo on them. They would sell thousands of them at each one of these launch events.

1. Create a new layout file in your themes folder:  app/design/frontend/default/THEME/template/page/homepage.phtml.  For now, just paste the contents from 1column.phtml into this file.  You can customize it later.   Upload this file.
2. Edit the following file:  app/code/local/Mage/Page/etc/config.xml.  If you don’t have this file, copy it from app/code/core/Mage/Page/etc/config.xml.  You don’t want to edit the file inside of core because this will break your site if you ever upgrade.  Edit the site, and add the following right after the tag “</three_columns>”:

   <homepage module="page" translate="label">
   <label>Homepage</label>
   <template>page/homepage.phtml</template>
   <layout_handle>page_homepage</layout_handle>
   </homepage>

   Save and upload this file.

3. In the following file:  app/design/frontend/default/THEME/layout/page.xml, just after the code “</page_three_columns>” add the following:

   
   <page_homepage translate="label">
   <label>Homepage</label>
   <reference name="root">
   <action method="setTemplate"><template>page/homepage.phtml</template></action>
   <!-- Mark root page block that template is applied -->
   <action method="setIsHandle"><applied>1</applied></action>
   </reference>
   </page_homepage>

4. In the following file:  app/etc/modules/Mage_All.xml  find the lines that read:

   
   <Mage_Page>
   <active>true</active>
   <codePool>core</codePool>
   <depends>
   <Mage_Core/>
   </depends>
   </Mage_Page>

   and edit them to read:

   
   <Mage_Page>
   <active>true</active>
   <codePool>local</codePool>
   <depends>
   <Mage_Core/>
   </depends>
   </Mage_Page>

   Save and upload this file.

5. Now login to the admin and choose this layout for the page you want to use it.