Recently, Google has started to require that shipping costs be consistent between what is estimated for the product and the final shipping cost. When you setup your Google Merchant Feed you have to setup your shipping costs to adequately reflect what you charge on your site. Debugging issues between your costs and what Google sees can be quite a challenge, so we put together a quick script to make the process easier.
5th Annual St. Patty’s Day 5k ShockRun
Stacy and I ran in the 5th annual St. Patty’s Day 5k ShockRun at The Village Tavern. The Run/Walk raises money to donate defibrillators to … Read More
A Brave New Connected World
Having read an article by Yashar Sahaleh on LinkedIn about Google’s bids for a fully connected world, it made me feel positive that we are … Read More
JetPack and Google+ Default Setup Steps
Just a quick tip. When you setup Jetpack with WordPress, and then connect to Google+, make sure you do a test run and ensure your post to Google+ is actually shared publicly.
XenServer Upgrading Ubuntu Issue
After ugrading an Ubuntu instance in Xenserver, I received the following error message. The bootloader for this VM returned an error – did the VM … Read More
Magento Google Custom Search Integration
We have a lot of experience setting up Google Custom Search engines for both CE and EE versions of Magento. Before making the jump to outright purchasing the Google CSE (Custom Search Engine), we recommend installing the free/ad-supported version on a site to see how relevant the results are with the site. Below is a brief, step-by-step overview to setting it up.
1.) Setup your custom Google Search Engine at Google and copy the code they provide.
WordPress Upgrade Causing Admin Issues
Recently after the latest round of updates to several client sites, we noticed that we started seeing a bunch of weird wp-admin issues. Some issues occurred in the widget section where we couldn’t move or edit widgets and others happened in the WYSIWYG section of the post editor, where the “link” button wouldn’t popup.
Magento EE Load Product By URL Key
Just a quick tip. If you are using Magento Enterprise and finding that “loadByRequestPath” doesn’t always work when you try and load a product by the url key, it is because it’s a “feature”. According to Magento Enterprise support, Magento EE, uses its own urlrewrite model.
State and Local Tax Report Automation
We do a fair deal of data reporting and extraction on local county tax records for a variety of clients (Tax collection, lawyers, accountants, etc). One of the more interesting aspects of this data mining, is when we are required to retrieve, normalize and create reports based on the data from state or local sources.
The local sources are often challenging as they sometimes have no data integrity rules in place to dictate the format for either first or last names. Often times, the data does not have any “legend” or data specification, so we need to deduce our own rules.
When the data can also include sub-owners, the problem becomes exponentially greater.