NEWS/BLOG
Memorial Day Boulder CO Photos
Here are a few images from Memorial Day here in Boulder, Colorado, taken of US service members jumping out of an airplane and landing in the stadium. All were taken with a Canon 5D Mark III and a 400 mm f/5.6 lens, handheld. Need A Photographer? Call Jeff...
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Magento 2 Extension for section.io
We're thrilled to be working with now-local company, section.io, to help out with a new Magento 2 extensions to display performance metrics. Here's a link to their...
read moreMercury Transit of the Sun
In case you didn't wake up yesterday and point a big camera lens directly at the sun, I went outside and captured Mercury transiting across the Sun: That little dot that looks like a spot is the planet Mercury. (That said, the sun is 93 million miles from here.) About...
read moreBear on our street in Boulder, Colorado
This evening, a few houses up from ours here in south Boulder, there was a bear hanging out in a neighbor's tree. I grabbed a camera and took a few images before the sun set. Enjoy! Tech specs: these were taken with a Canon 5D Mark III, using a 300 mm f/4 lens with 2x...
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Happy Client Message
We had a client who had a site with issues... Our team was able to get it fixed quickly for them. Here's a screenshot of her thank you email...
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Magento Imagine 2016 Recap
Last week I was at my fifth Magento Imagine conference, and as I've done for the past five years, I'm doing a recap of my experience there, inducing what's new, what's the same, and what to expect for the year to come. The big elements from the event...
read moreCustomer Paradigm launches new thermo-responsive design
Customer Paradigm today launched a new thermo-responsive site. Instead of just responding to the type of device (i.e. mobile, tablet and desktop), we've added a new dimension of responsivenes to our site: temperature. During initial testing, we found a 42%...
read moreA few staff headshots from today
Here are a few Customer Paradigm staff photos we took earlier today in our studio. Some are retakes, and others are newer to the team. Enjoy! All were taken with a Canon 5D Mark III with an 85 mm lens at f/14, ISO 100. I used a black backdrop, and two Einstein 640s...
read morePhotography Image Backup – Workflow
Today is Pi day - 3.14. Our team is celebrating with a lot of fun pies at the office. I've recently had a few people ask me about backup strategies when it comes to photography; I had someone who accidentally erased images during a photoshoot and couldn't get them...
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Google Changes PPC Listings, Removes Right Hand Ads
Last week, Google made a pretty significant change to how ads are displayed for search results: They removed all of the right-hand ads from desktop search results: Instead, there are now up to four paid ads at the top of a search result, along with three text ads at...
read moreDo you know if your site is *really* backed up?
I'm a bit paranoid about backing up data. Last week, a story made the news about a hospital that was attacked by ransomware, and how they had to pay $17,500 to unscramble patient records and other data. A better backup strategy might have helped. (The hospital did...
read moreHow do CDN (Content Delivery Networks) affect Site speed?
I've been asked this question four times this week by different clients. So I wanted to respond and post an answer here as well. Most of our clients who are concerned with site speed are usually Magento merchants who want fast sites. But this also works for a...
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Two New Magento 2.0 Extensions
I hope your February is off to a good start! We've recently released two new Magento 2.0 modules into the marketplace, and are having great feedback. The first one is Custom Maintenance Mode extension, that allows a store owner to be able to put their store into a...
read morePowder Skiing at Copper Mountain
Here's a few images from earlier today at Copper Mountain, Colorado - skiing in 9" of fresh powder. I normally ski with my Canon 5D Mark III camera, but I wanted to travel light today, so I brought my Fuji X100T camera (with a fixed 35 mm equivalent lens). These...
read moreProduct Photography: Airplane Hardware
These are a few product photos that I did last week in the studio for one of our clients.The photos are of a wireless router that is used in commercial airplanes - that's why the system is built out of metal. I took them on a white seamless backdrop at the office here...
read moreQuick Headshots for Bourbon Distillery
Here are a quick couple of headshots from earlier today... Need A Photographer? Call Jeff Finkelstein... Call Today! 303.473.4400 Toll Free 888.772.0777 Or Click Here To Have A Real Person Contact You Now >>
read moreBobcat vs. Mountain Lion vs. Lynx
Last weekend, we heard something on the back deck. My 8 year old thought it was a raccoon. Turns out, it was a bobcat. I was able to grab a full frame camera and 400 mm lens and capture a few shots of the cat on the back fence. I did have to shoot from about 150 feet...
read moreCustomer Paradigm is now a Magento 2.0 Certified Development Agency
Late last night, we received word that our team had passed the extremely rigorous Magento 2.0 certified developer training program. Our team is thrilled!! What this means: Our team went through the rigorous process of training for this new platform, and enjoyed...
read moreMagento Bug: Magento Customer Create Date Juxtaposition
Magento Bug Report Summary: The Customer Account Creation Date is often wrong (i.e. Customer Account Create Date is in the past or future). Magento versions affected: Magento Community 1.8, 1.9; Magento Enterprise 1.12, 1.13, 1.14 Description of the Magento Bug: We’ve...
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Understanding Meta Robot Tags
The meta robot tags are used as part of the html code on a website and are created to tell search engines to not crawl specific parts of a website or an entire page. There are different ways you can use them and apply them. By default, major search engines index and...
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Keyword Research to Optimize Success
Keyword research is a way to find and examine words that people are searching on engines such as Google and identify the best ones to optimize a website for in order to better target the website and rank better on the search results page. A customer’s purpose is to...
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New Magento Security Patches
The e-commerce business is growing at a very fast rate and it is important to keep your sites protected. They include very sensitive customer data that, if stolen, can be devastating not only to the consumer but the business as well. Most customers buy from e-commerce...
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Magento Security Vulnerability with Open Git Directory
Is your Magento .git repository exposed and vulnerable? Git is an amazing platform that allows for version control on many sites, including Magento commerce sites. According to the official Git website, Git is a "free and open source distributed version control system...
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Magento 2.0: How to Create a Custom Maintenance Mode Page
In Magento 2.0, there is currently no documented way to set a custom message or page if you want to put your site into maintenance mode. (This is as of August 2015.) Update: Nov 2015: We've turned this into a Free Magento 2.0 Module, to make it easy to put a Magento...
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Magento 2.0 Community & Enterprise: Full Page Caching Explained
Full Page Cache in Magento 2.0 In Magento 2.0, full page cache is built-in for both the Magento 2.0 Community platform, as well as the Magento 2.0 Enterprise system. I can't emphasize how amazing this feature is to have for an eCommerce store. Full page caching...
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Magento 2.0: Location of Database Configuration File
In Magento 1.0, the configuration file that contains database settings and other information is located here: /app/etc/local.xml In Magento 2.0, the configuration is in the same directory (/app/etc/) but has been renamed to env.php. The file path is: /app/etc/env.php...
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Magento 2.0 Community Speed Test with Full Page Cache
I just ran a speed test on a new Magento 2.0 community installation. It's still in Beta and still has a few bugs; it's due for an October or November 2015 release. One of our developers just downloaded the latest version - Magento ver. 1.0.0-beta from Git Hub, and...
read moreMagento Imagine 2015 Recap
888.772.0777 303.473.4400 As you may know, I went out to Las Vegas for the Magento Imagine show in April, to find out the new trends in eCommerce, and get an overview for what's going on within the Magento company and in the industry in general. I've let me thoughts...
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DNS Caching & Why My Site Doesn’t Show Up After Moving Hosting Companies
Why does my site not show up after I moved it to a different hosting company? We had a client issue this week where after he moved his site from one hosting company to the next, he wasn't able to view the site in his browser. To him, it looked like his website was...
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Emergency Bypass: Magento's Saved Credit Card Option
Last Tuesday (and for a little while on Wednesday), Authorize.net's payment gateway was down. Authorize.net is one of the top ways that eCommerce stores take payments, so it meant a lot of lost sales yesterday for companies all around the Internet. It's very...
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Magento API Shipping Email Notification Bug (Solved)
Magento Nerf Gun Battle
Just in case you ever wanted to see some of the behind-the-scenes of what goes on at a Magento Web development / programming company, here's a quick video. Background: I was out of the office for a couple of hours, and the team had a bit of a nerf gun battle....
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Authorize.net Payment Gateway is DOWN (May 26, 2015 – 2:59 pm)
If you're en eCommerce site, please know the Authorize.net payment gateway is DOWN right now, and not accepting payments. If you're running an eCommerce site like Magento and use Authorize.net for payments, and the payment is failing / people are not able to check...
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Punny Error 404 Page for Peanut.com
If you know my sense of humor, I came up with this pun of a 404 page for one of our clients, Peanut.com... Check it out here:
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Godaddy Crons Not Working / Not Firing
Over the weekend (May 9, 2015) , a couple of cron functions stopped working for a client that is hosted on Godaddy. For whatever reason, the site's path to execute the cron was not working. And even the Godaddy hosting system that allows you to create a cron didn't...
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Google Update: April 21, 2015
In case you didn't know, Google is rolling out an important update to their algorithm on April 21, 2015. And if your site is not mobile-friendly, you may see decreased search rankings. April 21, 2015 - Google's Mobile Ranking Change Google doesn't often come out an...
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Why Remove .php and .html From the End of URLs
You might have noticed that the end of your website’s URLs have .php or .html at the end of it whereas others do not. Should you remove yours? URL rewriting doesn’t actually remove the index.php but instead hides it. While your website won’t suffer leaving them on,...
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Google Favors Secure Sites for Search Rankings
Google put out a notice in August 2014 that their algorithms would incorporate the existence of a website security certificate to affect website rankings in their search results. It is easy to tell if a website is secure through the HTTPS (hypertext transfer protocol...
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Expert Tip for Magento – Searching The Entire Magento Database
If you're trying to find a specific piece of content in the Magento database, there's usually not an easy way to search through all of the tables quickly and easily. (At least without a lot of higher-end access to the system.) You could run a shell script that...
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Oops. I just made a big email marketing mistake
Ooops. I just made a big mistake and broadcast it out to (many) thousand people via email. In this case, I was moving too quickly, and mis-typed my email address that was in the FROM line of the email. I made a mistake in the domain name - the part after the @ symbol....
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