Stuff by Sarah

Brighten up the look

Fri, 24 March, 2006 – 12:44 am

I decided the other night to brighten up this site. I felt the blue was too dark. I've run through my own photos and intend to rotate randomly through them as and when I get them all set up. The current photo of a sunset was taken when leaving my parents in January this year. The first really clear great photo I took with my new Nikon Coolpix 7900. Admittedly I was hanging out the window as the car drove up to a roundabout and made Dave pause as I took the shot! The full size photo unfortunately gets a couple of electricity poles on the right side, but I like the photo and it reminds me of the months to come.

I've been having fun and games this week optimising none other than an osCommerce Store. Besides playing with my own installation I've never really used osCommerce. When I first started with PHP I was hired to finish a job that another developer had walked away from and most of the shopping cart was in place. Once I'd fixed that site I used the logic behind the shopping cart to recreate my own finely tuned version. It's now a full strict CSS/XHTML shopping cart and I'm just finishing it off now to make it even more lightweight and modular too. It's not something I would release like osCommerce but sell with templates or as an add on to a site off my own business site. So anyhow, a client referred to me by another has an osCommerce store running but is only getting visitors via their adwords campaign. The site has been set up with very little changes to the original code, just a new (orange!) front put on it in. Armed with an osCommerce SEO eBook that I bought off Gary Burton when he first wrote it (at the time for the general SEO info and his spider killer has been utilised a lot since!) I've been running through the site implementing his suggestions and also tinkering with the PHP to extend it further. I've not had time to do much on it yet especially as the original developers were working on the site on the weekend (not helpful when I'm updating older files which I'd downloaded last week!), however next step is to make the code validate - oh that's going to be fun Still the eBook has probably saved me so much time and to be fair it's not too hard to edit the files when you know how (So thanks for the book Gary!).

I've recently added a couple more sites to my Omea reader to keep an eye on. The first is Nothing Ventured from Tom, info about his money making schemes, Phudge from Richard about well I'm still working that one out, and Marketing Syndrome. I've also been trying to catch up my reading of The PHP Anthology, the book that Dave bought for me for Christmas. I know the info in it will improve my PHP even more, it's just finding the time when I can read it and concentrate when reading it too. Once that's finished I'll be on to PHP Security another book gathering dust on my shelf.

I'm now counting down the days until our holiday. A week in Lanzarote for Dave and I. Cheap return flights from Manchester Airport. I can't wait. I intend to leave my mobile phone as well as my laptop behind and ignore the world for a week (well besides the waiter bringing my wine and Dave of course!). I'll be away for my birthday which is good too as I always feel deflated on that day, probably because I feel like I should be really enjoying myself and having a good time and usually I'm not. I realise it's just another day really but I guess in my mind I think of it as something else. Still a nice first day in Lanzarote will do for it this year!

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