TinyBrick is Moving, but We’re Still Here
November 17th, 2010 by Chris
Sorry everyone, it’s been a while since we’ve posted.
Delorum Commerce is proud to announce that TinyBrick has left the nest and begun to fly. You can now find everything TinyBrick including product information, product updates, detailed online documentation, and new releases, all at TinyBrick.com. You should also check out the new TinyBrick Blog.
For everything else ecommerce related, Delorum Commerce will still be here. We have some pretty amazing projects running in the background that you’ll definitely want to hear about. So check back. We’ll be posting soon.
Lightspeed & SpeedBooster Update
August 24th, 2010 by Chris
Great news! After a good round of testing, Lightspeed and SpeedBooster are now updated with a minor fix to reliability and an upgrade to include multiple-currency support.
Now even if the same page has multiple currencies, when you change session-set magento currency to another besides the default, Lightspeed and SpeedBooster re-cache the new currency on that page as if it were new.
If you already purchased Lightspeed or SpeedBooster, upgrading is free-of-charge. These newest versions can be downloaded from the “Account” section of store.delorumcommerce.com. Just click on the Download tab of the Lightspeed or SpeedBooster module. After you’ve downloaded the new version (2.9.2 – Lightspeed or 2.3 – SpeedBooster), update your installation with a single command from the terminal: ./pear upgrade /path/to/downloaded/PackageName.tar.gz
This multi-currency support is the manifestation of a newer functionality we’re considering (but haven’t implemented yet): session-aware caching. The idea is that when a session variable is set (like language, currency, or even a custom variable you choose) even if a URL remains the same, lightspeed would cache an entirely new page. This could open up new doors for developers and new possibilities for customized content based on certain session variables. The only question is: Would you use this on your site?
Leave a comment. Let us know.
New Product: Twitter “Tweet” Button for Magento
August 12th, 2010 by Chris
This morning Twitter announced a new official Tweet button. Right on the heels of that announcement, TinyBrick is proud to announce the launch of a new module that takes advantage of that official Twitter button. Tweet Button, as we call it, takes the ease of Magento’s quick installation model and combines it it with Twitter’s new Tweet button client.
After a quick 5-minute installation, TinyBrick’s Magento Tweet Button automatically adds a Tweet button to all your critical pages. This includes your CMS (including home page), category, and product pages–enabling your customers to directly comment on all of your products and even your entire site. (We have a demo setup here)
Also, if you have a store or company Twitter account, the default Twitter message that Tweet Button populates for users automatically attributes any Tweet back to your store Twitter account. This can quickly provide a growing crowd of customers who follow your tweets and make product announcements, sales, and other promotions social and communicative directly to your customers.
We’re offering this product at an competitive price of only $35. More features for this product are sure to come.
90% of my Traffic is Lightspeed fast, but I need more!
August 9th, 2010 by Chris
Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)
What’s going on?
First, understand from a high-level that Lightspeed caches entire pages. It’s like taking a picture of a group at a family reunion. Instead of having to get the family back together every time you want to show that particular page (or see that group of people), you just bring up the photo you took. With Lightspeed, instead of loading PHP, running through Magento, and making DB calls to generate a page, Apache simply returns the static HTML generated for that page when it was first cached (Or that picture was taken). This means much faster page loads and much less work for Apache/PHP (or whatever web server setup you use).
For typical Magento installations, a small portion of your traffic requires you to change something (like adding cousin Larry to the picture), which can require getting the whole gang back together (PHP/Magento/MySQL). In the case of Magento, this happens for a small number of your users when a user logs in, adds something to their cart, starts checking out, or you’re in the admin panel, which renders new HTML for every single page load. With Lightspeed, a fully re-rendered page is required only occasionally for your customers. If your admin is “too slow”, you probably have problems that a hardware upgrade could address.
Magento Order Edits – Simpler, Easier, No Duplicate Orders
July 15th, 2010 by keith@delorum.com
Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)
Well, we’ve just released another extension, this one centered around Magento order edits. We’ve worked through this solution a couple of times for other clients, working out the kinks. Essentially there were 3 issues we tried to address.
- Elimnate Magento’s duplicate order on edit
- Make editing an order more user friendly for Customer Service Reps
- Provide flexibility for developers to adjust the module as needed
Magento Add X PromoBot Module Released
July 13th, 2010 by keith@delorum.com
After an incredibly long dry spell (yes, we’ve been that busy), we’re releasing another Magento Module. While there are several who’ve been asking for True Edit Order, we’re releasing module to fix a promotional issue that has been requested since our first install: the Magento ‘Add X, PromoBot’ Module.
Since our first Magento client, we’ve thought you ought to be able to add a product to the cart, and get another product automatically added to the cart for free without having to bundle the products. We like the conditions available in Magento Shopping Cart Price Rules, and naturally expected to be able to leverage those to trigger the addition of a product to the cart. Now we can, and by extension, the rest of the Magento Community can as well.
The module allows the creation of Shopping Cart Price Rules as they currently stand in Magento, but adds an additional action which automatically adds product(s) to the cart for free. While bundling products together seems to accomplish the immediate need, this module provides the ability to set a rule once for an entire category, and layering conditions (ex: 2 jeans, Men’s category, priced above $50 ea.). Obviously, there are benefits for this flexibility.
The module does have a single restriction, which we may address in the future: a condition which does not specify actual products (ex: shopping cart subtotal) MUST be layered with a condition which does. Any rule using this new extended promotional action must include at least 1 condition to specify product (sku, category, item price, etc.). We can live with that for now.
As an additional note, we are releasing True Edit Orders within the next few weeks… if luck holds.
LightSpeed Update
July 2nd, 2010 by keith@delorum.com
The TinyBrick team is continually working to squash bugs and make our products even better. Today, we’ve released a new version of Lightspeed (2.8.2) as a free upgrade. This upgrade is highly recommended for all Lightspeed users.
This new version of Lightspeed more accurately clears cache tags. This means you’ll only be clearing the cache on exactly the items you update.
This newest version can be downloaded from the account section of store.delorumcommerce.com. Just click on the Download tab of the Lightspeed module. After you’ve downloaded the new version (2.8.2), update your installation with a single command from the terminal: ./pear upgrade /path/to/downloaded/Ligthspeed.tar.gz
Be sure to check back often for new module releases and updates.
Block Caching vs. Page Caching
June 16th, 2010 by keith@delorum.com
Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)
A common question we have is, “How does LightSpeed and Speed Booster differ and how do they compare to Magento Caching and AITOC Magento Booster?” The biggest difference is block caching vs. page caching.
Magento uses block caching to reduce page load time. When a page is requested from the server, Magento knows which blocks make up each page, and requests those cached blocks rather than calling the database. AITOC uses a very similar method, but also compresses CSS and JavaScript.
Tiny Brick Speed Booster also uses block caching for Magento. Speed Booster automatically caches the most frequently used elements of your site, and configures them properly for caching. When you make changes to categories, products, CMS pages and CMS blocks individually, Speed Booster will recognize the individual changes resets the cache for you.
Lightspeed Magento Module improves user experience and aids SEO.
June 2nd, 2010 by keith@delorum.com
Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)
In April Google announced that they are officially considering page load times as part of their algorithm. Google decided that this is important because users spend less time on slow sites, and quick page load times make happier users. From an SEO standpoint load times don’t carry the weight of relevant content or incoming links, but in competitive keywords, load times can give you an edge on the competition. According to Google any page load slower than 1.5 seconds is slow.
Google Page Load Time Graph
Pushing the limits of Rackspace’s Cloud Hosting for Magento
May 19th, 2010 by keith@delorum.com
Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand… You won’t go back to Rackspace (Guides)
I’m the almost business guy, so don’t expect a lot of technical information as you read this. However, there are some interesting Magento / Environment things happening in our office that are worth mentioning. I’ll do it, since the real technical people are busy changing the world.
Our big push right now is extending the limits of Rackspace’s cloud environment. We’re finishing an enterprise ecommerce deployment that’s fully scalable, billed only for the hardware / bandwidth usage (which means automatically down to 1 web server at night, up to 6+ during peak traffic) in a totally secure, redundant cloud environment. Amazon has tools that make this possible, but the business guys for this large client said “No” (some sort of corporate jockeying).