Last week saw Google unveil some exciting new developments with their Inside Search 2011 talk. One of them caught my eye – the amazing Google Image Search. As you can see from the video below, the guys from Google upload an unindexed image of a solitary figure on a barren landscape. Miraculously, they upload this […]
A Brief History Of Search Engines And SEO
Most search engines were created in the days when the web was in its infancy, when pages were little more than plain text and hyperlinks. Search Engine developers made spiders that read through html in order to determine how relevant a page was to any particular search term. In 1994 this was somewhat easier than […]
Google SiteClinic London 2011
Last night, I attended the first London Google site clinic at TechHub in London. Tickets were limited to the first 175 people to sign up, so when I arrived with 15 minutes to spare, the air was thick with with excitement. Californian accents floated through the air mingled with the sounds of furious keyboard tapping […]
Stop Intellitxt parsing certain elements
I have a few clients who use IntelliTxt, the “in-text” advertising platform from Vibrant Media. Mostly, you simply add some JS at the bottom of your page and IntelliTxt scans your HTML for keywords that advertisers have bid on. But I had a situation today where I wanted to exclude a certain section of the […]
Requirements for an ecommerce website
I’m often asked to quote for ecommerce sites, here I give a beginner’s guide to the requirements of setting up your own.
Slow Mac Mini – RSS the culprit
For the past few weeks, my mac mini has been cursed by the spinning beachball of death. My mac was so slow, I couldn’t perform simple operations like opening up a new browser window without waiting a minute or so. I was at my wits end and even tried erasing the HD and starting again, […]
Mac Web Based Till System – Keep It In The Family
Sometimes, I need to keep the static site that runs off the G4 updated with live data. Most notably with web orders and any products that are updated on the live CMS. So, to begin with, I built a bespoke function that would spit out data and a process that would ingest this data. But […]
Mac Web Based Till System – launch teething problems
Turns out, the G4 really doesn’t like CakePHP all that much. Whilst I had tested the system on the G4, I hadn’t tested it in a shop full noise, children and mothers anxious to pay and leave. Waiting 2-3 seconds for a barcode item to enter the system once it has been scanned is simply […]
Mac Web Based Till System – Infinite scrolling with jQuery and Safari
As well as being able to scan barcodes to get products, I wanted staff to be able to keyword search products or simply scroll through the list of all products. I have uploaded a quick video of the infinite scroll to youtube, so please take a quick peek and see how it’s done below… First, […]
Mac Web Based Till System – Considerations & solutions
The initial momentum for the till system came from not being able to find suitable solutions out there to suit our needs. To that end, here are is an incomplete list of things I need a till system to do: Act like a Casio till. Simples. Ability to connect to current online toy shop, and […]