I spent a lot of time this week cleaning up some data used to synchronize two databases for one of my clients. Essentially, this involves taking inconsistent or otherwise messy data from system A, and applying changes or rules to it when updating system B. Ideally, data would be clean from the start, but that never is the case. NEVER!

For tasks like this, my goto tool is Perl (see www.perl.org). It’s old school, I know, and most programmers today never heard of it, or used it. It’s sort of like the COBOL of the 90’s. Everybody says it’s obselete, but there’s a lot of legacy code out there written in Perl.

Perl is ideally suited for text / data processing, in my opinion. It’s a scripting language, so it’s quick to make changes and re-run, great with regular expressions, and generally pretty fast. Oh, and it’s ubiquitous. That means, practically every Unix system you run into has it installed already, and it easily installs to Windows if for some reason you have to use it there. That makes it easy to copy and reuse code, without lots of setup.

So, use Perl. Or ask me for help!

I spent some time this week reviewing shopify.com’s offerings. It’s been a while since I have used it for a client, and wanted to refamiliarize myself with it. The platform is a “SAAS” ecommerce application, with different paid tiers based on features and volume.

Generally I recommend these types of platforms to my clients, as the security and upgrades are handled by the hosting platform. Shopify can be customized and fine tuned to the needs of the particular store, with new features and options released regularly.

Overall, it’s a solid platform for building or extending your ecommerce business.

It’s been a few weeks since I wrote anything, but I’ve been keeping busy.

Much of what I’ve been doing has been using tools I’ve written about in other posts, so I thought I’d mention “Linked In Learning” (formerly Lynda.com).

These are online courses, mostly with a technology and business focus, that you can take for about $30 / month. They are generally well done, and there are many topics available. You can subscribe month to month, and cancel whenever you want. Over the years, I’ve taken courses on various technologies, sometimes to quickly put the knowledge to use, and sometimes just to get an overview of the technology.

If you have some downtime, or can work some time into your day, consider taking courses. Your employer may even have a subscription you can use for free.

This week I found myself in need of some design help for a client. I went to a site I’ve used before – guru.com. This is a spot where you can post jobs for freelancers to bid on. The platform allows you to pay directly through that and go from there.

It’s always a little challenging working with someone you’ve never met, and aren’t sure how they will work out. So far this is going well, but a few tips if you need to sub out a job:

1. Clear requirements – the clearer you are in your request, the better chance of getting bids from relevant pros. If the project is time-sensitive, clarify that up front, so you don’t get pros who have a backlog of work.
2. Ignore placeholder bids – bids that are just generic, or don’t seem tailored to your needs, you should probably ignore.
3. Communicate often – set milestones and get / give feedback often. If you can do a live phone call, that is best to ensure the other person is understanding.

I spent some of this week working with an old friend – wget. For those that don’t know, wget is a command line tool to query a remote website and get the response (a web page, or whatever). Anyway, in my case, I was tasked to build a tool to check various URL’s and send alerts if any were not responding or responding incorrectly. With php, I should have been able to the built in curl functions, but couldn’t figure out how to make curl use the system proxy settings (some urls needed to go through a proxy). Anyway, sometimes I go with what works, rather than beat my head against a wall for too long.

Also, I moved this website to hostgator, an old hosting friend. For a long time I’d had the site on AWS, to learn more about cloud services. But AWS doesn’t give all the bells and whistles of a hosting platform out of the box, and it just got too tedious to get set up. Who wants to set up a load balancer just to add SSL to your website anyway?

So it was a week of old friends, if you can call technology a friend!