OT: Politics is local

Chuck Lasker makes it into the NY Times.

Find an Undervalued Asset. Fix It Up. Flip It. (Now It’s Web Sites, Not Houses)

The New York Times has an interesting article on buying fixer-upper web sites, including online stores.

Pulse (ELM5) Beta Release

A beta release of Pulse was made available earlier this week and we are now ready to make it more widely available. There are still some features we are adding, e.g. better pagination of long reports, more user options, but in terms of data collection, the module appears to be working well. Installing the beta will not jeopardize your data–each new release will retain your existing data. Get it here: Pulse - Store Statistics for Merchant 5
With us leaving for the Miva Merchant conference on Wednesday, updates are unlikely to be released during that time frame but we will be covering support.

p.s. Here are some of the forthcoming additions to Pulse:

- hide User Agents from general reports (so they don’t take up as much space). This will be optional though as many people get a buzz when the search bots show up

- truncate/wrap long referer* urls (need this in order to prevent long urls from bleeding)

- add pagination to long reports

These have already been partially implemented so we hope to have them available in the next update.

* Did you know that “Referer is a common misspelling of the word referrer. It is so common, in fact, that it made it into the official specification of HTTP – the communication protocol of the World Wide Web – and has therefore become the standard industry spelling when discussing HTTP referers.”?

Thanks Wikipedia.

Update 03/05/08: we’re back from the Miva Merchant conference and working on Pulse. Today we have added a product name field with sorting to the Product Stats, fixed a bug that arises when you are blocking IP addresses, and changed to Order Stats referer so that it picks up the initial referer–the site the visitor came from rather than the page that lead them to the checkout. (In hindsight, it’s obvious that’s what it should have been doing but these things sometimes get overlooked when you’re knee deep in the code!) There isn’t an update as yet as we also want to include a handful of other tweaks and fixes.

Update on Pulse

Well…we’d hoped to have this ready today but I have a shortened day–celebrating a belated Chinese New Year at my son’s (and wife’s) school. There are several cosmetic issues that need addressing but, more importantly, it hasn’t been tested extensively yet under the same condition that you will encounter when you install it, i.e. when the logs are still empty. So profuse apologies for the delay. Hopefully we can get some time over the weekend and have it ready for Monday.

Here are some screenshots so you know that it really does exist:

I have been pushed off the boat…it’s the Viking way

After months  of managing to find a millions reasons not to get my feet wet in the “blogosphere” my fellow Vikings have taken the “sink or swim” approach and pushed me off the boat.   I’m averse to death so here you have it, my first blog post.

Last year we attended the Rails Conference.  One of the speakers asked the crowd, a room of  maybe 1000 people, how many had blogs.  Very nearly 1/2 the crowd raised their hand.   I personally doubt that 500 people in that room really had something to say worth reading.  And I suspect the same can be said for most of what I  would really like to say (which is probably where all those other bloggers go wrong).  That said, I’m going to try to focus on what you might be interested in reading, mainly information on our modules and development (current and future).  Also feel free to make suggestions on subjects you’d like to hear me ramble on about.   At least that way I’m guaranteed at least one interested reader.

First up will likely be a discussion on the upgrade of Affiliate Manager to 5.x.

Michael Brock
a VikingCoder

USPS Advanced 5 BETA release

USPS Advanced 5 is finally ready for a beta release. Grab it now and help us work out any kinks. (Hey, it’s 7000+ lines of code and has all the complex functionality of our FedEx and UPS modules so there are bound to be some issues!)

We will have the documentation available for this next week (August 6 +)

We’re going to Rails Conf, May 16-21.

We’re heading out of town from May 16 and should be back online on the 21st or 22nd. We’re attending Rails Conf in Portland, OR. If you haven’t heard of Rails before, you’ll find a good introduction at the Ruby on Rails site. Basically, it’s a slick web development framework. We hope to use it with some Miva Merchant related projects in the not-too-distant future.

Welcome to the Viking Log

We’re activating this blog as a means to let you know what we’re busily hammering away at in our workshop. Sometimes we get a little too absorbed in that and forget to let you in on the secrets. But those days are no more! We’ve got a lot of modules under development–both new and upgrades for Merchant 5–and we have some major projects scheduled.

For starters, here’s a list of our current schedule for Merchant 5 upgrades:

• Soft Goods 5 - currently under development, will do away with the need for the php bridging script needed for the earlier version
• Affiliate Manager 5
• ELM Statistics 5
• USPS Advanced 5

The order is somewhat fluid–sponsorship and/or high demand tends to drive a module up the list.

We are also seriously considering a template system for Merchant 5 and would like you feedback on this. Our initial focus will be on current users of our Merchant 4 template modules, allowing them to get the same look in Merchant 5. But let us know–Are you satisfied with Merchant 5’s inbuilt templating system?

In case you missed it, Phone Order Manager 5 was recently released, joining our stable of popular upgrades from Miva Merchant 4. USPS Advanced soon followed, rounding out high-level shipping modules for the most commonly used shipping calculators. We’ll have a 5.x version out later in the year.