We rocked up at registration to collect our name badges and took a wander around the venue to get an understanding of where the workshops were being held, the location of the coffee and the theatre. We grabbed ourselves a seat in preparation for Richard Farleigh to take the keynote. His talk was great, far more down to earth than I was expecting. Starting out with his back-story and his childhood, realising that he could hustle people playing chess at the age of 14! Including his list of failures and successes. I was struck by his explanation “you may tick all the boxes but this does not guarantee success.”

I had a great chat to Sharon Vickery who explained her experience of dealing with website agencies and how frustrated she felt when dealing with inept companies and the lack of communication that caused her so much grief.

Then we grabbed a coffee and had a chat to GlobusHR about their questionnaires and the technology behind their website. Then we went to the first workshop of the day on social media marketing followed by a great talk from Liz Jackson.

Another few workshops – How to save TAX in 100 different ways – Top tips for branding – Using your website to grow your business.

Then on to the speed networking event. We decided to attend at the last minute as we thought by this time we’d be a bit cream-crackered, so we were rather unprepared.. Rule number one. Have a butt load of business cards.! Rule number two. Talk about yourself constantly until the bell rings! It’s an odd environment, but there’s not many opportunities in the real world to present to 30 people in the space of an hour, so I’ll definitely go again but I’ll ensure that I’m better prepared next time.

At the end of the networking session we were asked to drop our business card into a hat and one person was drawn out for a prize of a bottle of wine.. Guess what! yup, I won the wine :)

Ben had a theory on why I won “It’s because your business card is so crap and lightweight that it floated to the top of the pile.” I think he’s probably right, I really need to get some business cards sorted.

All in all, a great day. Everyone there was welcoming, which was great for us as new faces in the crowd. Best of all, I bumped into a number of old colleagues. Because of this, I felt even more relaxed and will be happy to go to future events of this type.

Thanks to all at BeInspired 09.

Upon receiving my copy of the Magento Beginners Guide I took a moment after dinner whilst my girlfriend watched some ‘Celebrity Increase My Profile’ program to absorb the first chapter.  I was presented with a nice introduction explaining the scope of the book and the conventions that are used throughout.  A nice and easy ‘in’ perfectly suited to reading on the couch.

Magento Beginners Guide - William Rice - Packt Publishing

I then began to flick through the ‘Installation’ chapter.  As I’ve installed Magento several times, the information in this section is familiar to me.  My eye is drawn to the titles ‘What Just Happened?’ this explains briefly the previous steps and if there’s something that I was not familiar with I’d flick back and take a closer look.

It’s nice to see there are a few instances of “I saw the following error message:”.  I’m glad the author has included the experience of miss-configuration and common errors.  It can be frustrating when a documented installation procedure does not go according to plan and there’s no help along the way.  This book is aimed at beginners, and it assists them from the get-go.

The book then takes you on to the planning phase of your site with explanations about the naming conventions used in Magento, although they are rather obvious it’s useful to know how Categories, Products and Attributes are related.  Take a look at this chapter extracted from the book: “Chapter 3: Categories and Attributes“.

Reading through this book it is apparent that the focus in mainly on the visitor, this is by far and away the best perspective to take.  If you were a shop owner you’d most certainly put yourself in the purchasers shoes and from the moment the shop door is opened it’s the experience that the customer has that is the most important.

Work in progress

The 'E' section in the index

Currently I’m in the process of launching our Surveillance, Display Converters and Gadgets website www.bytemart.co.uk.  The majority of the store is already configured but one job that’s on the to-do list is to change the default emails that are sent out from Magento, the order confirmation email etc.  To my dismay there is a rather sparse ‘E’ section in the index.  I was looking for ‘Email’ but here’s what you are presented with in the ‘E’ section ->

I was hoping for some information on how to modify the emails Magento sends out.  I strongly believe the emails sent to the customer from your store are very important, they must be branded with your logo and colours and the wording must be in the right context to help reflect your store.  Here’s a snippet from the default New Account template:-

If you have any questions about your account or any other matter, please feel free to contact us at dummyemail@magentocommerce.com or by phone at (555) 555-0123.

Thanks again!

This MUST be changed and it appears not to be as straight forward as one would like, so some explanation here would be really useful.  There is a section available in the Magento wiki on this topic.  I did find the following statement within the Customer Relationships section of the book “Modifying email templates is beyond the scope of this quick-start guide.” This is a shame as it does state in the Preface “This book provides guidance in the form of step-by-step approach to building a simple, effective online store.” It appears to fall short on this I’m afraid.

Conclusion

This book is great, I would advise anyone who wants to set up a Magento store with little technical knowledge/confidence to pick up a copy.  If you’re after a helping hand along the way whilst you setup your store then this is a good companion to have.

I would advise everyone to turn to http://www.magentocommerce.com/ and search the wiki and forum for further documentation and solved problems alongside this book.

It’s step-by-step approach is really helpful for the uninitiated and also a good ‘memory jogger’ to help a more competent/confident administrator not to forget key steps of a Magento configuration.

Thanks to Jude at Packt Publishing for inviting me to write this review.

Really looking forward to Brett Welch talk about marketing for start-ups and Mark Boulton on design and frontend goodness.  I’ve seen Drew McLellan and Elliot Jay Stocks before at Oxford Geek Nights and thought that both talks were great, especially Drew’s ability to use old school childrens programs as a metaphore for current web topics.

I’m not too sure who I’ll know at the event, we will meet up with Ben and Brett from FHOKE at some point and I expect to bump into others that I’ve spent time with at recent barcamps.

It’s been a little while since we decided to go to FOWD and we’ve been chatting about it on and off for a while. Now that it’s tomorrow we’re almost ready.  Rob has managed to arrange accommodation for us in Canary Wharf with a friend, so that’s awesome! (Thanks Sheena)

Looking forward to the FOWD experience.!

Variety is the spice of life, or so I’ve been told.  After building the fencing with my neighbour, the spring weather finally arriving, continuing to develop my ecommerce shop Bytemart, my decision to start a new hobby of 12th scale radio control car racing, attending and speaking at another conference (Barcamp Bournemouth) and the pending bathroom replacement I reckon there’s much more value in doing these things alongside my ’specialty’ of Freelance Website Designer.

I spend most of my days building websites and consulting on different aspects of the internet for my clients and occasionally contracting as a Frontend Web Developer.  I am rather privileged to find myself in this situation of being able to please myself by adding value to my life on a daily basis.  As an example, I love to cook.  This stimulates my creativity and gives me pleasure not only in the consumption but on the thought that I’ve been able to please others too.

To this end I’ve decided to change my job title to ‘handyman’ I feel that it will allow me to pick and choose what I do each and every day, maybe it will be a talking point when I hand out my business cards to perspective cilents.  The idea being that I’m willing to take on a challenge of any type.  So, if you need a creative handyman then I’m available for hire!  Feel free to get in contact if you’d like a helping hand with your current challenge.

Last year I attended BathCamp which was a superb event. I got a lot from it and hopefully gave a little to the other attendees too with our ‘double act’ talk on Stu’s sfImageTransformPlugin for Symfony.

As with most barcampers (the ones that don’t do public speaking), it’s a struggle to think of a topic for your own talk. At this point in time my main idea is to discuss with a group in an open forum style about freelancing, titled “How do YOU freelance?”.

Hopefully it will be popular enough as I’d like to have a few well established freelancers and a bunch of people thinking about taking the plunge and going freelance to ask questions and discuss answers.

First of all I put together a ‘lightbox’ to use as the environment to take the photos, this required some mounting board and a roll of white paper and some sticky-tape. One of the major features of this ‘lightbox’ was the lights (surprise surprise) daylight light-bulbs to be prescise, specialist suppliers only.

After putting the ‘lightbox’ together some testing was required to get the correct results, so lots of adjusting the camera settings and the environment. This required darkness to provide the quality I was after, duvet fasioned over the window helped to keep the room dark.

Once the environment was setup I started to take photos of the products, the entire contents of the box, the product from one angle of 8 different sides, another few from a lower and closer angle with some close-ups in there for good measure. Add that lot together with the 14 different products that are somewhat similar and there’s a requirement for about 280 finished photos!!

Doing a couple of the photo sets took a few hours, all in all it took about 1-2hrs to do each set. Multiply that by 14 and I realised I was going to in for the long-haul.

Cabin fever set in on Wednesday, and I tried my best to complete all the photo processing on Thursday morning, so by lunchtime I had finished. – No – wait – there’s a problem with a few of the photos! – what – what! – some of them have a ‘red hue’ to them. Oh, great. My stupid colour-blindness did not see that the white balance had changed and 4 sets of pics were rubbish. Another afternoon re-taking the photos that were ruined.

All in all the photos are really great, they can be seen on Bytemart’s Flickr

The Wellington Inn

A great finish to the week mainly spend hauled up in the office taking product photographs for the new Bytemart website.

One top priority on my list was to concentrate on my business accounts to ensure that my tax return was completed properly and my future accountancy records are kept in an orderly fashion. Up steps FreeAgent a magnificent online application for all freelance and contractor accountancy needs.

I have been featured on FreeAgent’s User Testimonial page

A simple to use and flexible image manipulation symfony plugin. The plugin allows you to perform “transforms” on an image. A transform maybe simple like a resizing or mirroring or more complex like overlays and pixelizing. The transforms can be chained together or applied individually. New transforms can be simple created by extending the sfImageTranform abstract class.

Download

http://plugins.symfony-project.org/sfImageTransformPlugin

Plugin page

http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfImageTransformPlugin

Examples

Starting with the original image:-

Here is an example of a transform that:-

• scales ‘logo.png’ by 50%

public function executeDemo1()
{
 $img = new sfImage(sfConfig::get('sf_upload_dir') . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'logo.png', 'image/png');
 $response = $this->getResponse();
 $response->setContentType($img->getMIMEType());

 $img->scale(0.5);

 $response->setContent($img);

 return sfView::NONE;
}

Result:-

Here is an example of a transform that:-

• flood fill’s ‘logo.png’ at ‘x100,y170′ with #000000
• scales by 50%
• rotate by 120%
• draw a rectancle of 5 pixels around edge and colour it #00FF00
• write the text “bathcamp 2008″ at ‘x10,y10′ 10px Verdana coloured #FF9900

public function executeDemo5()
{
 $img = new sfImage(sfConfig::get('sf_upload_dir') . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'logo.png', 'image/png');
 $response = $this->getResponse();
 $response->setContentType($img->getMIMEType());

 $img->fill(100,170)->scale(0.5)->rotate(120)->rectangle(1, 1, $img->getWidth() - 1, $img->getHeight() - 5, 5, '#00FF00')->text('bathcamp 2008', 10, 10, 10, 'Verdana', '#FF9900');

 $response->setContent($img);

 return sfView::NONE;
}

Result

Stunami has provided a collection of transforms for the GD and ImageMagick libraries.

sfImageTransform logo

I took the idea of “transform” and thought of a new butterfly emerging from it’s chrysalis, seeing as my mum is the Publicity Officer of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Butterfly Conservation the idea sprung to mind. Having seen the bathCamp logo on the bathCamp Blog

bathCamp Logo

I thought it fitting to use some of the logo’s elements and colours, it fitted perfectly so now let’s hope that Stu likes it!

Both Stu and I are going to bathCamp this weekend to enjoy the company of the cool geeks in the south-west. It’s our first time doing this kid of thing, so it’s with open eyes and an open mind that we take with us to this event. We’re both looking forward to it and hope that our talk is going to be of use to some.