Category Archives: Development

Being a “Solo Developer”

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My buddie Joe has had a link to an article by Jeff Atwood on Coding Horror about how in programming, one is the loneliest number. I read the article a while back, but I started thinking about it again tonight when I was putting up a new version of Fright Catalog that contained a few bug fixes.

The frustration I was having was on several levels. One, I don’t have another set of eyes to help test the site and make sure my code is what it should be. I have to update the database myself (luckily I have some nice tools to help with this), but it starts to take longer to do the update. If there are issues with any code changes, there aren’t enough resources to debug the problem quickly.

What adds to the frustration is that that’s only when we’re launching new versions of our platform. Not only am I the application developer (writing C# code predominantly), I’m also the database guy, the IT guy, and help with some of the day to day business decisions. What worries me is that we depend so much on our web applications, if something goes wrong, we’ll lose money, money that could one day be used to help alleviate the situation.

I don’t like being the only developer. I’m a social guy by nature (not an introvert like some programmers are). I have a great group of colleagues that I can tap into (Kyle, Joe, Dan etc.) that I can bounce ideas off of. But that doesn’t compare to being able to turn around and have a discussion. So, you could say I flourish when there’s a great team of people around me that I can depend on and that can depend on me. The situation isn’t by choice either. Its really just a lack of resources. I hope that one day, we can have the resources again to bring back or rebuild the great team we once had.

Affiliate Data Feed Standard

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As I posted in a reply here I’m kind of annoyed that there is a lack of an affiliate data feed standard. I’d like to come up with a standard based on XML that could be adopted by the affiliate community (unless there’s one buried somewhere out there). Due to the lack of time, I haven’t done it yet but would be very interested in working with others to come up with some ideas. Drop me a line if this is of any interest to you so we can maybe start a discussion on it.

Frightcatalog.com Re-Launch First Impressions

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We’ve had the new version of FrightCatalog.com up for a week now. We’ve had lots of great comments and feedback, but success is never really gauged by that. To that end, its good to see that a lot of hard work has paid off and I think we’re starting to see that from the numbers in Google Analytics

The first half of the month (July 1 – July 18) we saw 83,796 uniques, 9.27 pages/visit, and a 0.33% conversion rate.
The last week (July 19 – July 25), with the re-launch, we’ve seen 41,673 uniques, 12.00 pages/visit, and a 0.75% conversion rate.

Almost half the uniques in a 1 week period than we had in the first 18 days of the month. Page visits are up by almost 3.5, and our conversion rate has more than doubled. Good initial numbers after week one.

This is starting to prove that our de-facto framework for our e-commerce sites is pretty solid (all software can always be improved and we’ll continue to do so), and has a lot of promise. It’ll be nice to see how we do through the entire Halloween season with some new marketing initiatives in place. I hope this is a sign of good things to come in the coming months.

New FrightCatalog.com – 2007

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Its been quite a long week. Late last night saw the coming of the latest edition of FrightCatalog.com. I think you’ll notice the more product centric slant its taken on this year. A little less glitz, a little more practicality. It should be MUCH faster too. Same framework as YumDrop.com and the soon to come ImportCostumes.com. Thanks for Kyle’s help, even though he’s moved on to a new venture.

PayPal Web Payments Pro Testing

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It appears that testing PayPal’s Web Payments Pro in their Sandbox doesn’t work like it would in a live environment. It won’t return error codes for address verification failures out of the box unless you set it up to do so. I was lucky enough to get a response in the developer forum that showed me this blog post on how to test AVS failures.

Also, it doesn’t look like you can test Discover Card or American Express credit cards in the Sandbox either. If there are any PayPal developers out there that come across this blog post, that’s a feature I’d like to see! I need to know that my code works 100% before it goes live!

Building an Ecometry Shipping Station

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For this upcoming Halloween, we’re moving the Morbid Industries warehouse out to California. It was a business decision a long time coming. Shipping product from China to the East Coast and then back across the country was getting expensive. A lot of our customers are on the West Coast too, so we were basically shipping product in containers across the country for nothing. So, because we were doing this, and we use Escalate Retail’s Ecometry for order management, I needed to build a shipping station to send out there. Ecometry sends you to Agilysys, for pre-built shipping stations, however, they’re really expensive and we were looking to save some money. I had read on the Ecometry Google newsgroup that people had built their own, so I decided to brave it and do the same.

I’d like to thank a couple of people for there help right off the bat. Paul, a support engineer from Datalogic/PSC was a big help getting the right interface cable I needed and helping with programming the scanner to read our barcodes properly. Also, Daniel Lively for his suggestions on the Ecometry Google newsgroup. Thanks guys!

Here’s the list of parts I used:

  • Dell Optiplex computer
  • Zebra Z4MPlus Thermal Printer
  • Mettler Toledo PS60 scale
  • SIIG Cyber 2S1P (model #JJ-P21012-S6) Dual serial port and Parallel port card
  • PSC Powerscan PSSR-1110
  • PSC AT keyboard wedge Y cable Model #8-0738-03
  • AT to PS/2 adapter
  • PS/2 to AT adapter

Pretty much you can hook up the entire thing and it will work. For the scale, you need to set your COM port to the following settings:

  • Baud Rate: 9600
  • Databits: 7
  • Parity: Event
  • Stop Bits: 2
  • Flow control: X on X off

For programming the scanner, you can find documentation on Datalogic’s website here. The programming guide that I needed for the model scanner I purchased is here. Depending on the scanner model you use, you’ll need a different programming guide so that you can scan the right bar codes for your application. We enabled Code 39 and Code 128 since we scan FedEx bar codes.

A couple of additional notes. I’m not sure I actually needed the SIIG Cyber 2S1P card as I would have had enough ports to hook up all the equipment. It was recommended on the newsgroup to get one for the scale. I was also told an easier setup with the PSC Powerscans is to use PSSR-7000 and a USB interface. They’re really easy to set up I guess. Also, in place of the Zebra Z4MPlus thermal printer, you can supposedly use a Zebra S600 or a S400, which are cheaper.

Most of the parts I sourced on eBay. I think all said and done, we paid less than $1,000 for the entire shipping station. The computer was free as we had one kicking around, but you can use pretty much any computer running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I just recommend having a bit of memory in it so it isn’t a complete slug. I believe this is significantly less expensive than buying a pre-built shipping station through Agilysys. It’s faster than the one we originally bought from them too!

Paypal Sandbox & Web Payments Pro

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We’re integrating Paypal’s Web Payments Pro into a new e-commerce site we’re building. To test, we set up our Paypal Sandbox account and began the process of setting up the Web Payments Pro account that we’d need. Interestingly, when I got to the part when it asked for a social security number, it wouldn’t validate the number. Also, there was no business owner address displayed there, which I believe was the cause of the issue. After about an hour and change on the phone trying to talk to the right technical person at Paypal, I was finally told that I could put in a fake social security number, as long as it began with ‘111’. Wow, awesome. Off and running. Now wouldn’t that be useful information in the development docs or maybe even on the site?

E-Commerce Marketing, Conversion Rates, & SEO Tidbits

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Ever since we launched YumDrop, we’ve been trying to find a way to not only get more eyeballs, but to increase conversions. Our site is really slick and from what we can tell, very usable. But the conversions still aren’t there. We’ve known for a while that the issue is marketing, or a lack thereof. Because of that, I decided to do some quick research tonight (yeah, never stop working…go figure) and found some really good articles. Hopefully you find them as insightful (and in other was reaffirming things already working well) as I did.

Another blog I found while searching for e-commerce conversion rate was by Rick Whittington. The first post of his I read was here. But when reading through the latest posts of his from the last few months, I found a bunch of other useful stuff, including some of the links above.

Where’s Coding Horror?

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Shame on me for not having gone to the site in a couple of weeks due to lack of time. I went to go read up on what Jeff had cooking lately only to find a 404 where I thought I’d find some insightful info. I did some digging around, and only found his other blog over at Veritgo Software but it hasn’t been updated since the start of the year. Does anyone know where Coding Horror has gone?

Update
Looks like its back. Maybe it didn’t go away and the internet was being its flaky self.