This week’s highlight was the launch of a redesigned site for a good client – hardwaresource.com.  This new look makes the site more user friendly and visually appealing.  I turned it live early one morning, moving the files around, and keeping downtime minimal.  No matter how many cutovers I do, there’s always the concern that something goes wrong.  In this case, things went very smoothly, with few hitches.

I’ve also been working more with Adobe Connect.  This is a high end offering for online meetings, training, webinars, and self-paced training and testing.  It’s very comprehensive.  I’ve been doing a lot with the API, mostly to pull data for use with other applications.  It competes in a crowded space (eg. WebEx), but I’m surprised how many features and capabilities the product has.

Here’s my weekly wrap up of activities for the week.

I added gallery functionality just in time for the Drinker’s Choice awards article.  The image bar along the top uses some jquery, and of course there’s lots of php / mysql on the back end.

Another new site using WordPress – this one pretty small, but nice, using a responsive design template – Pharm-spend.com.

As an aside, I’m doing more WordPress sites lately and enjoying the platform and plugins.

The rest of the week included some perl scripting, nothing I can show here, but believe me, it was good stuff.  I also did a fair amount of Sunshop work – hacking it up, upgrading, you name it, I did it.

That’s about it for a busy week.  I’m ready for a rest!

Here’s my work log for the week of March 11, 2013:

– I moved an ecommerce website running Sunshop from 1&1 to Godaddy. The move was precipitated by 1&1’s decision to only support php 5.4 come April, which many programs, including Sunshop, do not currently support. The move was a bit rocky, because getting the SSL certificate working correctly took GoDaddy way to long! We worked around it, though and otherwise the move went pretty smoothly.  This contrasts with another customer service experience…see below.

– Another client with several ecommerce sites (again Sunshop) was having issues with timeouts, and also some SSL certificate trust problems.  The hosting provider Knownhost, provided excellent support, and stuck with us until the issues were resolved.  I learned a lot about CA Intermediate certificates in the process.  Knownhost now joins my favorite hosting providers: Rackspace and Liquidweb.   All provide amazing service.

– I helped a new client with some emergency work getting an authorize.net script working, for taking payments online.

– The week rounded out with a lot of php and perl programming.  Overall it was very busy week.