Stephan Miller

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Reason Not To Blog:Just Who Do I Think I Am?

Today I started to write and this started to come out. A bunch of reasons not to blog again. This time, instead of analyzing each one separately with an article for this series, I just kept going.  Read more... (520 words, 2 images, estimated 2:05 mins reading time)

• With time I do know that I know myself better. And I actually think at times that in knowing myself better, I like myself less.

• Magento block caching | Inchoo

  If you have a Magento site and slow loading configurable products pages, download and use the extension listed here. The same concept of caching applies to any html block in Magento. Setting this up reloads a copy of the block the second time and does not call the database. Blocks can be cached until edited.

  This change actually sped up the configurable products page almost 1000%. Our configurable products were based off of over 1000 underlying skus so needless to say, the page loaded slow before this and now loads at a decent speed. But Magento is never really “fast”. It’s just such a change, that comparing it to the one minute load times it was having, it seems fast, below 3 seconds.

  But I do plan on going on with it, finding the bottlenecks in the code and applying block caching. The next target is the category products lists. The worst I think is the layered navigation but a default installation of Magento already has caching built in for the layered navigation.

  tags: magento, product, view, cache, html, block, sml  Read more... (775 words, 2 images, estimated 3:06 mins reading time)

Reason Not To Blog: It is too hard to write

Then don’t. That’s the simple solution. Stop driving yourself crazy and beating your head against the wall.

And if you can’t. Then deal with it. You will have to find a way.

Writing and blogging is a bitch. There are times when you are in the groove.

I had been slowly writing a post a day for a few weeks when I wrote this post. Today I edited about 7 to get them ready for publishing, wrote another 3 and came up with about 20 new ideas for articles.  Read more... (414 words, 2 images, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)

• 43 ways to use Wordpress | JustCoded

  I have been messing around with Wordpress a lot more lately, building blogs, stores, review sites and feed aggregators. This post gave me even more ideas.

  tags: wordpress, uses, sml

• HINT.FM: Web Seer

  Compare one Google Suggest result to another. Interesting concept.

  tags: google, suggest, compare, keyword, tool, sml

• snippi | MAGENTO CODE SNIPPETS

  Magento is hard to work with. This site is very helpful if you ever run into the beast.

  tags: magento, snippets, sml  Read more... (423 words, 2 images, estimated 1:42 mins reading time)

Reason Not to Blog: I Have a Crappy Writing Style

I don’t really like pictures of me. I know that unless they are taken from very specific angles that one of my eyes is higher than the other one. Shannon Daugherty can get away with it, but I am not Shannon Daugherty. And I am really not sure of the point of that sentence, because this is not a post about my profile picture being grainy on purpose. It is a post about being a naturally nervous person and getting things done in public.  Read more... (616 words, 2 images, estimated 2:28 mins reading time)