Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Just like busses

Nothing for over a month and then two in quick succession, or it could just be a reference to my capacious behind!

Not only the miracle of two posts, but I've actually managed to fix some of the missing image problems. I've relocated them to another section of webspace that doesn't cost me anything. You may notice I have a new shop logo now, it's the one I've created to go at the top of my new shop website. At the moment the link will still take you to ebay, but I'm hoping it won't be too much longer before it takes you to my very own shop instead. You may also notice that the text is a bit larger, I hope it makes things easier to read now Mamacita.

I'm using an out-of-the-box eCommerce package, that's free to use, called osCommerce. It's an excellent bit of software but it requires tweaking. It's the tweaking that's taking all my time at the moment. There are hundreds of little add-ons that have been created by other users with more PHP programming experience than myself (i.e. some) and I'm finding that I have to use some of them to allow me to configure the shop the way I want it.

It goes something like this:
I decide I want the facility to do x.
I dig around in the current system to try and figure out how to make it do x.
Realise that it can't do x.
Go to the osCommerce website and dig through all the contributions to see if someone else has created a patch to make it do x.
Usually find one.
Download it.
Install it.
Make my site do x.

None of it is particularly tricky, it's just time consuming, and all made more entertaining when you have a squirming baby sitting on your knee who is determined to reach the keyboard and add his own special contribution to the programming.

Most of the time he's quite content to be on the floor with his toys, but sometimes he gets grumpy when I just need to spend a couple more minutes finishing something off. That's when he gets to sit on my knee while I work. It does then tend to take more than a couple of minutes, but it keeps him happy.

He's now at the 'grab at everything that's almost within reach' stage, the shinier the better. Why do manufacturers have to make remote controls shiny? He's learning to sit up on his own, he can sit for a good few seconds now and usually only falls over because of the aforementioned stage he's in. He's also been having swimming lessons for a few weeks, although they're more 'mummy taking baby swimming' lessons than anything else at this stage. He seems to enjoy them although he's really not keen about being on his back, but it's one of the safety things they like babies to learn as early as possible. If they can learn to float on their back, then it makes them that little bit safer if they ever do fall into the water. For the first couple of weeks it was mostly me moving him through the water and him just going with the flow, now he's started joining in and thrashing about a bit when he's being moved. We'll make a swimmer of him yet.

The only reason I've got time to post this is that he's still in bed. I'm waiting for the garage to come and collect my car for a service and MOT. It's going to be expensive. There's a slow puncture on one of the tyres, there's a horrible squealing noise that starts up after I've been driving for a while and a couple of minor things like bulbs and wipers that need replacing.

Well they've just taken the car away so I'd better go and get his lorship out of bed.

TTFN