SurfiOnline

When you stop writing for months, and your general participation on the Internet drops, there’s always those few who are pondering what happened, where you’ve been and what you’re up to. It was last October that I’d actually written - and dare I say it, last January that I’d actually visited this place. In an attempt to start writing some more, I’m back.

The last 6 months have been nothing but a whirlwind of crazy insane for me.

• In October 2007, I took up a job as developer at a Sydney based web application company called Interspire. I’m working on what is the ultimate e-commerce and shopping cart software, Interspire Shopping Cart. I briefly touched on this in a previous post that I’ll be rewriting again shortly.

  I’m working with a great bunch of people - everyone knows their stuff and I’ve learnt a lot as well since starting. There’s a lot of great things that’ll be coming out of Interspire over the next 12 months and I’m especially excited with what we’ve got in store for Interspire Shopping Cart. We’ve got new people starting left, right and centre who we’re training up as quick as possible.

  Speaking of Shopping Cart, the release has been exceptional - we’ve seen lots of feedback, we’re loving what people are getting up to with the product and the stores they’re creating. A lot of the feedback focuses on the usability and ease of use of our Interspire Shopping Cart compared to our competitors. This is something we aim for at Interspire and can do very well - developing very easy to use but powerful web applications.

• Having purchased a Macbook Pro in December, I’ve slowly been transitioning to using Mac OS X full time (compared to a split share between my desktop and my Mac Mini). I’ve now essentially made the full time switch to Mac OS X, even using it for full time development at work - it’s amazing how much more productive you feel when you make the move.
• That being said, I’ve also been investing a fair amount of resources in to Microsoft Windows Home Server. It’s made managing the network at home, ridiculously easy without having to worry about backups, remote access and file sharing. The expanding file system by simply plugging in another hard drive make it ridiculously to expand. I’ve now racked up nearly 2.5 TB of storage in my home server and it’s all exclusively managed by the server itself - I don’t need to worry about shuffling anything around or if I’m going to run out of space on one volume/disk.
• In January 2008, we headed down to to Lake Conjola, as we do every year. This year was no exception to the norm with over 2,000 photos being taken - most of which I am still yet to finish post-processing before uploading them to flickr. By the way, am I the only one who hates the fact that they support video now?
• When Apple announced the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK, I decided it would be an excellent time to continue learning Objective C so that once the iPhone launches in Australia (which will hopefully be this July and include 3G as rumored), I can take advantage of the powerful platform it provides. I’m still reading and learning so there isn’t much to show for it at the moment.
• 6 months ago, if you’d told me to “go and read a book”, I’d have told you that I’d rather do other things to waste my times. Not only did I think books were a waste of time for myself I couldn’t understand how some people could just sit and read. These days it’s different. I read a lot of the time either on the train to work or on the way home during the week and sometimes at night when I’m not up to something else. I’ve been buying up from Amazon with still more books waiting to be delivered.
• Marketing is something I never thought I’d be interested in. Recently though, and since starting at Interspire, I’ve taken a bit of a liking to marketing and am eagerly learning as much as I can - especially about how you push a product in to an already very competitive market (e-commerce applications), and push your company as a global brand. I’ve learnt a lot regarding Search Engine Optimisation too. Previously I already knew a lot but now I’m learning all of the untold tips and tricks the most successful companies use to earn higher rankings.
• I’m reducing my participation with the MyBB Group. We’re doing some amazing things, but sadly I don’t have the time to develop the product like I used to. I’m now moving in to a more administrative role overseeing the product - the product development manager whilst our excellent development team continue to put together what is already the web’s most powerful free forum application. As difficult as this for me to do, it’s in the best interests of the project.
• Photography is something I’ve always been interested in but never really had the time to take it up properly as a hobby. Sadly, that hasn’t changed because I still don’t have the time. I’ve been reading up a bit recently about lightbox photography - white boxes you put objects in to take photos of and I’ve just ordered my own. It’ll be interesting when it arrives as to see what I can accomplish with it. I’m also wanting to get in to professional/model photography but not too sure where to start with that one.

That’s about all I’ve got in the tank for now. I’m really enjoying what I’m up to these days but don’t nearly have the amount of free time that I once did - the trade off though is that I’m (especially at work) working on a lot of exciting and new things. I’ll be back again shortly with some more adventures.

I’d like to introduce you to Interspire’s upcoming Interspire Shopping Cart product allowing users to set up their own e-commerce store. There’s a particular reason I’m writing about this and it isn’t because of the mention on this page (more of that later this week) but more because of what Interspire Shopping Cart brings to the market.

At the moment there are several open source and commercial e-commerce scripts written in PHP. OS-Commerce, CubeCart, and X-Cart, are a few of the more popular solutions with MonsterCommerce and Shopify being hosted equivalents. With the exception of Shopify, what each and every one of these solutions does wrong is assumes that store administrators have some sort of knowledge in the IT industry whether it is for running the store or customizing it. The majority too, are not aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Interspire Shopping Cart wins hands down on e-commerce done right - something that is powerful, easy to use, flexible and very customisable. This is a product that has been designed from the ground up, properly with lots of thought going in to the interface and usability. This may sound very hypocritical, for the reason linked to above, but this product is going to become one of the industry leaders in the PHP e-commerce market because it seriously is an awesome product.

Why do I think this?

Design Mode

Design Mode allows administrators with absolutely no or very little IT experience to customise their store. You can arrange the content on your store until you’re happy with the layout all via a drag and drop interface. You can also edit the front end language of the store directly inline quick editing similar to what flickr has.

Not only the above, but for those with experience in web development (or basic HTML knowledge) can edit the different panels, HTML and style sheets from the front end via a popup window called the Design Mode Editor. It provides a flexible interface similar to a text editor with syntax highlighting, resizable panels and very quick AJAX based file loading & saving routines.

An screenshot of Design Mode: (and video showing off the functionality)

The Design Mode functionality has also been completely rewritten and kicks way more ass than the demonstration above.

Product & Search Recommendations

Amazon’s product cross-selling and recommendations are a major player in their business model. They rely on product recommendations for a large amount of sales. Whilst Interspire Shopping Cart cannot exactly match the powerful recommendation features in place by Amazon (Amazon have hardware & custom developed software specifically designed to drive their recommendations system), it can do a damn good job of showing recommendations in several places.

When viewing a product, you’re shown a list of popular products also purchased by users who bought the item you’re viewing. Interspire Shopping Cart can also either automatically (based on title & description) or manually (a predefined list) pull a list of related products for the product a customer is viewing.

The brand new (as in finished and announced today) search functionality provides a list of related searches other users have performed as well as offers suggestions for misspellings.

I don’t know how many times, personally, I’ve visited a store and looked at a few products only to get distracted by something else and when I come back to the store in a few days time, I’m unable to remember exactly what products I was previously looking at. StoreSuite stores, for each customer, recent items they’ve viewed - a very powerful, and in my opinion necessary feature.

Customer Messaging

One of the pitfalls of all of the e-commerce solutions mentioned above is customer service & support facilities, or lack there-of. If you can’t provide good service to a customer then chances are you’re going to lose that sale - and that is a sale you’ll never actually make back.

Interspire Shopping Cart has a unique built in messaging platform allowing customers to quickly send a message off to the store for any queries relating to one of their orders. The messages are stored, staff are notified and replies can be made through the administration interface. Customers are then notified via email that there has been a reply to their support request.

Custom Saved Searches

Whilst it may seem like a really simple feature, saved searches are quite possibly a very powerful feature. I speak from experience when I say most stores (both online & bricks/mortar stores) generate sales reports on a daily basis.

Saved Searches are exactly this. You specify your search criteria, enter a name for your search and it is saved for quick future access. Example saved searches would be “All orders awaiting payment”, “Orders made with totals over $5,000″, “Frequent customers with 50 or more orders.” The good thing about Interspire Shopping Cart is that these searches are not hard coded and can be completely customised to view the kind of information that is important to your business.

Custom searches can be performed in the administration interface for the following:

• Orders
• Products
• Customers

Product Comparisons

It’s often a pain to manually have to differentiate between two different products in the same category on a store. Either you’ve got a store with a very long title containing all of the product specific features or you need to open each of the products you wish to look at, memorise the features and then do compare it with the others.

In Interspire Shopping Cart, customers can easily compare two or more products in a single list. This will definitely help with sales as customers can quickly & easily differentiate between features of a specific item.

Dynamic Promotions

It’s a no brainer that setting up a promotion on your store will guarantee you additional sales and stores often go about setting up promotions such as “The Bargain Bin” or “10% off.”. What most stores do wrong, is incorrectly advertise and market these promotions. As a result, they’re not getting the same throughput of sales as they could have been receiving.

StoreSuite makes it easy to place promotional banners on a site. You select your promotional image, enter the page you want it linked to and decide on the placement. StoreSuite does the rest with no template modifications on your behalf necessary.

Enhanced with AJAX

Interspire Shopping Cart makes extensive use of AJAX based functionality.. For those of you playing at home this allows users to quickly view extra information without an additional full page refresh or reload.

Interspire Shopping Cart allows administrators to quickly see all orders for a particular customer nested in a list below their customer information. Of course, this information is only shown & loaded when you request it.

You can manage the status of an order or view the products within an order all from the “View Orders” - two very powerful features.

StoreSuite also allows product & option inventory management directly from the product listing page. Updating the stock level of a particular item is as easy as expanding the product, entering the quantity and clicking Save. You can then carry on with the next product you wish to update without reloading the page.

Of course, Interspire Shopping Cart has many other powerful features and the above are just a few of what I believe are the most important and I’m most excited about.

• The easiest shipping configuration that you’ll ever see including real time shipping quotes
• Supports the leading payment gateways by default as well as manual payment methods
• Ability to browse a store via price point
• Real time inventory control - AJAX based
• Ability to specify shipping tracking numbers for a particular order
• Supports both tangible and intangible products (you can sell software downloads for example)
• Full customer order tracking via the web interface
• Multiple customer shipping addresses
• What product these days does not have tag clouds?
• Advanced search functionality which makes use of the powerful MySQL Boolean Fulltext search capabilities
• Product ratings & reviews
• Integration with SendStudio for powerful email marketing & campaign support
• + More!

You’ll be hearing more from me in the upcoming days - but for now, go have a good read through the Interspire & Interspire Shopping Cart websites.

Australian “teen-pop hit sensation”, The Veronicas, stopped off at work yesterday to kick off the launch of their new kids and teens clothing range. Being the opportunist I am, I had my camera ready. Of course, it was a bit of a shit fight with all of the press and photographers to try and get the shots..

The Veronicas at Target Miranda on flickr
Check out all 70 photos from the Veronicas visit to Target Miranda on flickr.

Note: Personally, I am not really a fan of them.

& I thought Vista was supposed to be the most secure edition of Windows yet?

I much prefer the OS X security updates all rolled in to one nice package.

Dear NVIDIA,

Because of you and your inability to provide stable video card drivers for my NVIDIA based 6800GT video card, I’m now running Microsoft Windows Vista without any video drivers - just the generic adapter drivers Microsoft provides (”Standard PCI Video Card”)

Why, you ask? Because whenever I seem to boot my Windows Vista based PC, I’ve begun receiving a blank screen which shows up right where the login screen works. Safe mode works fine, and on the rare occasion Windows will actually boot using some form of NVIDIA drivers.

Without proper video card based acceleration and drivers I’m very limited in what I can do on this machine - I can’t play back videos or use Windows Media Center (the primary reason I have this machine), dragging Windows takes a ridiculously long time, and generally it’s just a major loss of productivity on my behalf.

Because you seem to lack the ability to actually provide support for your customers on widespread issues such as these, I’ve done your work and mine and taken the liberty of preparing a list of questions which I’ve also prepared the answers for.

When did this start happening?

This started happening in the middle of last week for absolutely no reason at all. I rebooted my Windows Vista based desktop PC and was presented with a blank screen right after the “Loading” animation and right before the login screen. Sometimes I’ll receive a dreaded blue screen of death (for nvlddmkm.sys) as a result.

I have not changed any of the hardware in this machine.

How do you know it is our crappy drivers?

When I boot in to Windows Vista using safe mode, I am alerted to the fact that Microsoft Windows has recovered from a serious error and asked if I’d like to report this to Microsoft and check for solutions. Of course I would - so I do.

Running the “Problem Reports & Solutions” applet in the Control Panel lets me know the problem was caused by an NVIDIA Graphics Driver and there is no solution available but I should check to see if there is an updated driver available, or contact yourself for other support options.

Windows Vista is only new - we haven’t had the time to polish our drivers.

Don’t give me that rubbish - you’ve had plenty of time. NVIDIA is a Microsoft Partner, you have had access to all of the beta releases throughout the Windows Vista development period and adequate information and assistance from Microsoft for developing WHQL based drivers - in fact, how are these drivers even signed WHQL drivers if there are so many problems with them?

This is not a widespread issue - our drivers work perfectly fine for everyone else.

No, they don’t. There’s a 90 page thread scattered with problems over on the official NVIDIA forums, a long with a 48 page thread on driver issues, and a similar 11 page thread filled with even more problems.

What’s more is you don’t seem to care very much about your customers - yes, you’re pushing forward a few new driver releases but it isn’t solving much and you aren’t communicating very well with your customers either. Acknowledge there are severe driver related issues with Windows Vista and actually participate in your forums a bit more to establish common causes and problems.

What version of the NVIDIA drivers are you using?

I’m currently running your latest “stable” drivers for Microsoft Windows Vista, v. 158.24.

Have you tried reinstalling our drivers?

Yes. Numerous times. I’ve completely removed the NVIDIA drivers from my system as well as run Driver Cleaner to remove all traces left by your drivers (you should really fix that too - when I uninstall something, I actually want it uninstalled)

The drivers will install again and I’ll be able to boot in to Windows Vista generally for the first reboot - subsequent reboots leave me with the blank black screen again.

Maybe it is your video card?

My video card works fine with Microsoft Windows XP and under the latest release of Ubuntu Linux. Don’t even try and tell me it is my video card.

I’ve also installed your “nTune” application which monitors the GPU of the video card - it’s well within a suitable temperature range and has not once overheated. The card is adequately cooled by the two fans also attached to the video card itself.

Could your RAM be faulty?

No. I’ve checked, double checked and then checked again for peace of mind. There are no problems with my RAM.

It could be your Windows Vista installation. Have you tried reinstalling?

Not yet. I don’t have the time at the moment but if it comes down to it, then yes, I will also try reinstalling Windows Vista but I don’t hold much hope.

Why would things go “bung up” for no apparent reason?

I’m not particularly happy here - as can be established from the above. I’m looking for a solution however everything I’ve tried has worked once and then the same problem still persists.