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Varnish and Magento Performance Mystery

One of the things that you think you will solve when you implement a Varnish caching server in front of a Magento website is performance problems. However, this is not necessarily the case. When I set Varnish up to cache content in front of my Magento website, I get what seems to be much improved performance. If I run a few tests in the developer tools of Chrome, it seems that the waterfall chart makes sense and the data is loaded appropriately and in a timely manner with the main HTML being downloaded in about 300ms.

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How Not to Use SQL Transactions

SQL Transactions allow you to isolate atomic operations so that you can ensure that a third party does not update the data affected during the atomic operation protected by the transaction. An example of an operation that you would want to protect with a SQL Transaction would be transferring funds from one bank account to another. The first step of this operation would be to subtract the funds from bank account A.

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Unexpected Results with SQL Server and Python pyodbc

Using the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) with SQL Server hides many of the API complications that can sometimes arise when working with SQL Server. One specific example would be when using Python on Windows with the pyodbc driver. If you have an update statement that performs a simple update to a status column and a datetime column, you can have some unexpected results. Lets say that the table you are running the update against has a before update trigger and an after update trigger configured on it.

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SQL Server Transaction Log Exponential Growth

There are few things more frustrating than seemingly random issues that crop up in software when configuration changes occur. One such occurrence is when you migrate your databases from Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition to Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition with High Availability and the transaction log suddenly begins to experience exponential growth without ceasing. It turns out that when using Python and pyodbc on Windows to access SQL Server, there can be some unpredictable results.

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WordPress and the Genesis Framework

It turns out that working with WordPress and the Genesis Framework is quite a bit different than working with Magento or other blogging platforms. Ghost is a blogging platform that runs on NodeJs that utilizes Handlebars templates for the layout of the content on the website itself. Similarly, Magento uses its own templating system in .phtml files for laying out content on the screen. However, WordPress, and specifically the Genesis Framework have taken this simple templating concept and added quite a few layers of abstraction to come to the end result.

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Saving Products in Magento Deletes Tier Pricing

Magento’s framework makes many things simple to accomplish when working with the products and categories of your eCommerce website. However, I have found one scenario that doesn’t exactly work as expected. Tier Pricing in Magento Magento allows you to setup custom pricing levels based upon the quantity purchased. You set the minimum quantity purchased to enable the lower price when the part is added to the customer’s cart. You could see where losing the tiered pricing for an entire catalog of products would be a big deal for a site.

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Creating a Best-Sellers Category with Magento

Magento allows you to organize products in categories, and a single product can be a member of quite a few separate categories. As a result, you can create a category that is specifically for your top selling products. You could manually keep track of which products sell the best, either by number of sales completed, or by the actual quantity of each product that were sold. If you want to spend all your time managing this category, then this is the way to go.

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Sticky Menus and Mega Drop Down Menus

  • 2 minutes - Apr 3, 2014
  • #ux

There are time when UX best practices for the web don’t always provide the best experience for the users of a website. One example would be Sticky Menus and Mega Drop Down Menus. A Sticky Menu is a navigation bar that is stuck to the top of the screen when scrolling, usually with position:fixed;top:0; set on the menu itself. This ensures that no matter how far the user scrolls on the page, the site’s navigation is always available to the user without having to scroll to the top of the page.

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Can Legacy Internet Explorer Go Away Already?

For years, Internet Explorer was a four-letter word around web developers. Recently, Microsoft has stepped up their game when it comes to their web browser. I almost have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming when I type this, but Internet Explorer 10 and 11 are decent and modern web browsers that many websites don’t have to do anything special to support. However, Internet Explorer 9 and before are another story.

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Hover Effects in JavaScript?

One of the things that can be annoying when looking at someone else’s code is when a more complex technology is used to solve a problem that can be handled more simply with another method. An example of this is when you utilize JavaScript to implement a hover effect on some elements. I know of one scenario when you would need JavaScript to trigger a hover effect, and that would be when you want to trigger the hover effect with a touch event.

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