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Magento Releases Security Patch – Feb 10 2015 for Enterprise and Community
A quick note: Magento just released a security patch for both Magento Enterprise and Community. Magento Security Patch - SUPEE-5344 (Feb 10, 2015) Although there have not been any reports of customers being impacted by this exploit, if an attacker knows what they are...
Most Common Job in Colorado is Computer Software Developer
NPR just did a study where they categorized the most common jobs in the US by state, and have animated it from 1978 to 2014. While truck drivers make up the most common jobs for most of the states, it was wonderful to see that Colorado (along with Utah, Washington...
Be Paranoid About Backing Up Your Site
I received quite a bit of feedback from last week's email about hacking. And one of the key things that I was asked was, "Is there an easy way to back my site?" Fortunately, there is. Backing up your site: Like any process, I'd recommend having multiple processes in...
Magento Admin – Changing Passwords to Lock Out Older Users
A quick note about changing Magento Admin users to lock out older users that you no longer want to have in your Magento admin area: If you have an older employee that you want to remove access for, make sure that you delete the user vs. just changing the password. If...
Net Neutrality Upheld – A Win For Anyone With a Website
I was thrilled to hear this week that the chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, is defending net neutrality. It's wonderful news for anyone that runs a Website, as well as for end users. I believe that the Internet has transformed the world economy, and Net Neutrality is...
Why PageSpeed and Fast Websites Matter
When we talk about improving PageSpeed to a 2 second or faster page load time, it can sound like a miniscule change from 6 seconds to 2 seconds. However, every second really counts when it comes to the patience of people. In the case of Amazon.com, they slowed down...
Magento Community USPS Shipping Error Bug – 1.9.1.0
USPS Shipping Bug in Magento (Solved!) Magento Bug Report: USPS Shipping Not Working in Magento Community 1.9.1.0 Cause of Bug: ZIP+4 vs. ZIP code - fails via USPS API Magento Error Message: Magento USPS Error Message: (Default) This shipping method is...
Magento Enterprise Home Page Error 404 Bug Solved
From the (Linux) Desktop of a Certified Magento Developer: Magento Enterprise Error 404 for Home Page (Solved!) Are you having difficulty with a Magento Enterprise site's home page showing a 404 error? We recently were doing an upgrade, and found a (bug) in the...
2014 eCommerce Review + 2015 Web Trends
I hope you had a great New Year and that 2015 is off to a good start! With the holidays right behind us, I wanted to give you a recap of how eCommerce grew in 2014, and some of the trends in online marketing I'm predicting for 2015. Read more below >> Online...
How to Speed Up Website Speeds with Caching
Have you noticed that some sites load really, really quickly, while others seem to take forever to load? Last week, we helped a client speed up their page load times by 300%, by using website caching. What's caching, and how does it affect page load times? Read more...
Another Magento Certified Developer on the Customer Paradigm team
A big congratulations! We had another programmer today here at Customer Paradigm successfully pass the Magento Certified Developer program. The Magento developer test was designed as a way to ensure that the programmer working on a Magento site has studied,...
Yellow Moon Rising Over Boulder, Colorado
Last night, one of my daughters noticed that a yellow moon was rising above Boulder, Colorado. I grabbed the camera, threw on a lens, and here's an image: View full size image >> Tech Specs on this image: Canon 5D Mark III, 400 mm lens with 2x Extender (800 mm...
Introducing Watchdog 3.1, Daily Sales Summary & Trigger Email Reports for Magento
A long, long time ago, I worked as a professional dog trainer for search and rescue. It was an amazing job, and one that taught me lessons that I still use today. As you probably know, dogs can hear and smell things that humans can't, and detect trouble before we can...
How to turn on Template Hints for the Magento Admin Area
Need a quick way to turn on Template Hints for the Magento admin area? It's easy to turn them on for the front-end of the site, but if you need to do this for your Magento Admin area (for example, you're building new modules or funtionality into the Magento admin...
I’m Paranoid: Human Testing vs. Automated Testing
It's possible that I'm paranoid. But one of the most frustrating things in the technology world is when something that was working perfectly yesterday... stops working today. But nobody notices for a day or two. Automated testing scripts don't always catch this. And...
I’m a Google Analytics Addict, and that led to a discovery
I'm an addict. I admit that I often have a window open on my computer, watching how many people are visiting the CustomerParadigm.com site at any given moment. To me, it's fascinating where they're coming from (all over the world) and what they're looking at (we have...
Amazon continues to dominate eCommerce (although they’re losing money)
Amazon has 23% marketshare for online retail sales (2nd quarter for 2014), according to an Internet Retailer estimate: http://www.internetretailer.com/2014/10/23/amazon-q3-revenue-increases-20 Even though their sales were up, Amazon lost half a billion dollars due to...
How to get an image to go viral on social media
Social media works best when it's a conversation with fans of your organization, who contribute images and content, because they love your brand. This weekend, I was flying over Copper Mountain, Colorado, and managed to take an ariel photograph that I shared with my...
How an expired SSL certificate can drive traffic away, even if you’re not using it
Thanks for all of the positive feedback on the full moon / lunar eclipse images... they seem to be a hit. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how sites that adopt full SSL (everything in https) may start to see higher search rankings from Google. (Read the article...
Eliminating Single Points of Failures with Payment Gateways
One of the issues with any complex eCommerce site is the issue of single points of failure. This cropped up yesterday with a Payment Gateway issue, but we were able to quickly bypass it... saving customer orders in the process. What's Redundancy? What's Redundancy?...
Blood Moon – Full Moon Lunar Eclipse Photos from Oct 8, 2014
We love to help our customers shoot for the moon with their Websites and interactive marketing campaigns. So in that fashion, I was up a bit early today to watch the full moon lunar eclipse, known as the blood moon, high over Boulder, Colorado. In case you missed it,...
Godaddy’s Two Factor Authentication System DOWN – Oct 7 2014
I've been on a bit of a security kick recently... but there's a downfall, too. Perhaps it's because I shopped at Target (and got a new credit card when they were hacked), and then shopped at Home Depot (and then just got a new credit card after they, too, were...
Important Magento Security Patch – Oct 3 2014
Magento today sent out an alert to patch ALL Magento sites - both Community and Enterprise - for two potentially serious security flaws. Before I delve into what to do, I want to talk about why this update means that Magento is more secure (instead of worrying that it...
eBay to Spin Off PayPal into new and separate company
The news today is that eBay is going to spin off PayPal into a new and separate company. This should be great news for PayPal adoption, because any site that competes with eBay (i.e. Amazon) has been reluctant to take PayPal. What this means for Magento is not clear,...
The Internet has transformed the world economy, and Net Neutrality is a major reason why.
Net Neutrality is important; this is the response written by Jeff Finkelstein, founder of Customer Paradigm, as filed with the FCC during their public comment period: I cannot state strongly enough that bifurcating the Internet into a slow lane and a fast lane will...
Magento not sending emails to an exchange server? DNS records to the rescue.
I've seen this happen a couple of times this week, so I thought I'd briefly write about it. A Magento storefront is taking orders, but the emails aren't coming into the the company's corporate email system. Usually it's an Exchange account, but not always. Email gets...
Internet Explorer Shutting Down Old Versions
Internet Explorer has supported many of the old versions of their browser for years on end with plenty of people unaware of how outdated their browsers are. The current version available is IE 11 but the one with the most market share is IE 8, which came out 5 years...
Half Moon Over Boulder, CO
Tech specs: Canon 5D Mark III, 1600 mm, f/22, ISO 100, 1/30 second w/ mirror lockup.
Godaddy Hosting Servers Appear to be DOWN
FYI, on August 27, 2014 - 12:00 noon - Godaddy's Hosting servers appear to be DOWN for FTP users. They are aware of the issue, if you call in. UPDATE: This appears to have been fixed...
Magento Cron – How to list all cron entries for all Linux users
Our Magento Programming team here at Customer Paradigm was trying to figure out why a cron was not firing for a Magento Enterprise site. Cron is a system that tells a Magento site to start specific events at specific times. For example, if you want to have a coupon...
Customer Paradigm's Magento Code Audit… now working on Nexcess Shared Servers
Magento Code Audit Tool Updated... We're now on our fifth release of our Magento Code Audit Tool. We re-built it to work specifically with shared hosting platforms, including the ever popular Nexcess shared hosting Magento product. We had to go back to the basics to...
Marketing Case Study: How to reach an elusive client at their time of greatest need?
One of our customers came into the office recently. He wanted some online marketing ideas to help him reach his potential clients. We used our Customer-Centric Decision Branching process to drill down, and get inside the head of the end customer: I listened...
Google Boosting SSL-Encrypted Sites in their search results
Last week, Google announced that sites that use the lock (SSL) for secure, encrypted content will start to outrank ones that don't. What does this mean for sites? And why is Google doing this? Read more below >> Why Does Google Want All Sites to Use SSL?...
Magento No Longer Supporting Magento Go and ProStores
Companies using Magento Go and ProStores have less than a year to start transitioning over to another e-commerce platform because Magento is not going to support them starting February 1, 2015. Owned by eBay, they are shutting down these two products in favor of...
How Google Perceives Images for SEO
For everyone in the US, I hope you had a wonderful 4th of July. I was able to photograph the fireworks here in Boulder, Colorado... and of course that led me to think about how Google "perceives" images. Here's one of my favorite images from the...
Google My Business Features
Google has once again changed their Places/Local/Pages/Business/Maps/Plus features. This time, they are trying to make it easier for people to integrate their business across internet rather than harder. In the past, Google Local and Google Places were seemingly the...
Facebook Decreases Business Page Views to Followers
Many businesses are noticing that their Facebook pages are reaching less and less people compared to before. In fact, many businesses are protesting and even shutting down their Facebook pages. Eat24 wrote a breakup letter to Facebook on March 27th and shut down its...
Body Image & Photoshop: How to Turn Your Teacher into a Supermodel
Yesterday, I went into my older daughter's fourth grade class to teach how most images that kids see online and on the cover of magazines are not real - they're manipulated. The class was studying body image, and how comparing themselves to images of supermodels could...
Magento Enterprise: How to Use Customer Segmentation
One of the big themes from the Magento Imagine show was personalization. (And beyond just mail-merging in your name). The idea is to personalize a site, based on information you have from a user, so that their user experience is not like everyone else's. There...
Magento Imagine 2014 Conference – Recap in Photos
It was so wonderful to see so many people at Magento Imagine 2014 conference in Las Vegas last week. You might have seen me walking around with a camera during the conference; I've put together a summary of what I learned at the conference, using photos to help...