http://www.vikingcoders.com/log Fantastic Tales from our Adventures in Software Land Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:14:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I recently came across a nice little Firefox plugin called Alertbox that can be used to monitor changes in web pages. The Miva Merchant store I was working on needed needed a way to monitor inventory on a range of products. (Their inventory is updated automatically every 15 minutes from ... http://www.vikingcoders.com/log/2009/11/13/features-a-firefox-plugin-a-handy-inventory-check/ A few fixes were added to USPS Advanced 5 over the past couple of months but some did not make it into the version available on the server. We have made all of these available now as version 5.025. http://www.vikingcoders.com/log/2009/08/11/maintenance-update-for-usps-advanced-5/ This feature is a little late and something of an oversight in our development, so our apologies on that. The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley. We've added a Purge option to the Live Stats table that will clear out the table manually. Future releases will ... http://www.vikingcoders.com/log/2009/08/10/pulse-updatea-purge-in-time/ A Pulse user, trying to track down an issue they were having with customers creating accounts, asked us for a list of that Actions they were seeing in their logs. Here is a list of them and a brief explanation of what they refer to: ALGI    affiliate login UAFL    update affiliate's information IAFL    ... http://www.vikingcoders.com/log/2009/02/24/action-codes-for-miva-merchant/ Google VP Marissa Mayer just spoke at the Web 2.0 Conference and offered tidbits on what Google has learned about speed, the user experience, and user satisfaction...Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction. More at Geeking with Greg. http://www.vikingcoders.com/log/2009/02/04/speed-matters/ Zen Habits is one of my favorite sites and I generally check every tweet. Here's a great article on using Twitter for increased productivity. http://www.vikingcoders.com/log/2009/01/28/how-to-get-things-done-with-twitter/ Hmm, time to take a look at your checkout process? As my brother said when forwarding me the link, this reminded him of Merchant: It's hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from ... http://www.vikingcoders.com/log/2009/01/27/the-300-million-button/ Here's a great Flickr set on insprirational site designs. (Got the link from a tweet by Chuck--thx!) http://www.vikingcoders.com/log/2009/01/24/web-design-inspiration/ We are pleased to announce a long awaited module, Coupons. The module offers many of the same features as the 4.x version of the module, Coupon Manager. Coupons offers all the typical bells and whistles that you'd expect from a coupon module. One of the notable features is to have category ... http://www.vikingcoders.com/log/2009/01/22/merchant-5-coupons/ I just completed a new version of the FedEx Advanced for Merchant 5.x module which adds LTL as a shipping method.  It is handled in much the same way as the freight methods that were already in the module.  I.e. a single order's shipping can be split between regular FedEx ... http://www.vikingcoders.com/log/2009/01/16/fedex-advanced-ltl-shipping/