Resumo: Mi trovas min tre okupata, sed ankoraŭ tre feliĉa. Mi estas multa lernanta kun mia laboro.

It would be accurate to say that i have been pretty busy! My job has been totally excellent. I've been learning a whole bunch, but it's difficult to grasp and i have been slightly frustrated with myself at times for not picking it up as fast as i'd like to. I recommend peepcode.com for some really great video tutorials about Ruby, Rails, REST, Git, Rspec, Ajax, Prototype. It makes me realise that i was never a Rails programmer before. I was a Rails dabbler! Now i can see myself getting becoming super proficient at Rails, but it's going to take a while!

In my spare time i have also been busy with a PHP project for a friend: a web shop sheabliss.co.uk. My friend sells some top quality products made with shea butter. I use them every day, and thoroughly recommend them. It has been fun to work on the site, which is FreeWebshop with some heavy modifications. It's an opensource community project so i have shared my mods on the forum and some of them are being included with the next release version! :)

For the experience, and to help me get used to it, i have installed Git at home and i'm using it for revision control on the web shop. It's really amazing how you can switch branches and it instantly modifies the necessary files in your filesystem. It means i can work on separate things simultaneously without worrying about them interfering with each other. When the time comes and the changes have gone live and been verified, i can merge the changes back into the master branch.

This is a trivial example showing how i branched this evening to do the reCAPTCHA separately from icon changes and then merged them together later. At work we get far more elaborate branching, quickly resembling a map of the London Underground! It's fun! :D

Speaking of London, we are going there tomorrow! :) We'll be meeting a friend for lunch and then going to a midsummer party. Should be excellent, i imagine! :)

1. Geoffrey Grosenbach Says:
   June 21st, 2008 at 06:56

   It's great to hear that you've found PeepCode useful! Thanks for the kind words.

2. chaozz Says:
   June 21st, 2008 at 16:53

   thanks for using my FreeWebshop script, and even more so for all the mods you provide to the user community. keep up the excellent work!

   chaozz

3. sixfeet Says:
   June 21st, 2008 at 19:56

   i'm glad that you're loving your new job. no worries … you'll learn fast. have fun in london. gosh, i haven't been there in WAY too long — so, i'm hoping for pictures, please.

4. Jennifer Says:
   June 24th, 2008 at 23:07

   Glad to hear about your job going so well!

   I'm curious to know what factors had you choose FreeWebShop (if it wasn't chosen for you by your friend using it already). I'm pondering Open Source shopping carts at the moment. (I've been following the progress of Magento and there are certainly wonderful things about the design, but I'm not convinced it's stable yet, and there are current issues about support and documentation.)

   If you don't mind me picking your brains a bit more about it, I'd also like to ask: If you customise FreeWebShop and then there's an upgrade, do you have to re-do some or all of your customisations after upgrading? or are the custom bits and templates and suchlike cleanly separated so you can just upgrade and carry on?

5. Aimee Says:
   June 25th, 2008 at 22:24

   Hi Jennifer,

   I chose FreeWebshop because it is free(!) and because it is easy to customise. It is very easy to add PayPal and Google checkout integration, as well as any others. It is very flexible on shipping methods and costs depending on weight. You can include or exclude VAT which can be set at a rate of your choosing. You can choose which links to show or hide, and you can add your own pages. It is great with the email and PDF creation.

   It has a really nice active community sharing questions, making suggestions and contributing mods.

   The template is completely separate from the content, so if that's all you want to change you'll be fine. However, we have decided to make some changes to the overall structure for search-engine optimization so we have made a decision to separate from the core product and cut ourselves off from future upgrades. It was a great place to start, but we will move on and re-shape it into something we really want it to be.

   I hope that answers some of your questions.

6. Jennifer Says:
   June 26th, 2008 at 08:38

   Thanks Aimee!