December 20, 2014

Use Git Bisect to Find Bugs in Your Codebase

This is post 27 of 31 in the series “Blogging for Hippo”

A month long blogging contest leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 Handsome Hippo.

I've spent most of this week talking about business. But today I really wanted to share a cool tool with you. If you're a fan of using Git on the command line you'll love this. I'm going to show you how to use git bisect to find bugs. It will help you narrow down when exactly a bug was created.

You'll find this very helpful when you start working on repositories that have hundreds of contributors (WooCommerce has more than 300!). Many times it's hard to figure out exactly when a bug was created and with hundreds of commits between releases it's critical you know how to go through them quickly.

December 18, 2014

Let Projects Die

This is post 25 of 31 in the series “Blogging for Hippo”

A month long blogging contest leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 Handsome Hippo.

I've been thinking a lot about business this week. I've actually published three posts on it already and I could probably write a dozen more. This week I wrote about how to grow your business, minding your own business when you work for someone else, and the numbers of my own business. I've been trying to think of the best decision I made this year and it took me a while to come up with the answer. I had to look at some numbers, some products, and dig through my email. And once I saw that email I knew I found it.

December 15, 2014

2014 Business Review

This is post 22 of 31 in the series “Blogging for Hippo”

A month long blogging contest leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 Handsome Hippo.

One of the most important things you can do is to look back from time to time and review where you are. Where did you start this year? Where did you end? Are you on the right path?

I did this last year after just getting into doing commercial plugin development and a lot has changed and my end of the year numbers (below) are very different.

December 14, 2014

Tell Users What You’re Doing

This is post 21 of 31 in the series “Blogging for Hippo”

A month long blogging contest leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 Handsome Hippo.

Imagine coming home from a long day of work. You open the front door, set down your keys, take off your shoes, and then see a present on the kitchen table. If you have a partner living with you it's probably a nice gesture of some sort. But what if you're the only person with keys to your home? Then it gets creepy right?

That's what I experienced today. Not with my home but with my site.

December 12, 2014

Enable Free Shipping on a Per Product Basis

This is post 19 of 31 in the series “Blogging for Hippo”

A month long blogging contest leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 Handsome Hippo.

Just over a year ago I wrote a post which shows how to disable free shipping on a per product basis. That's really useful for stores that like offering free shipping on just about everything everything and want to disable it one or two items. But what about people in the opposite situation? You might have one or two really tiny items like bookmarks don't want to charge people $5 for flat rate shipping.

I figured it was time to revisit this and write a snippet that helps these people out. We can use the shipping classes built into WooCommerce combined with just a couple lines of code to make it really easy to mark any number of products eligible for free shipping.

December 11, 2014

Wishlists Done Right

This is post 18 of 31 in the series “Blogging for Hippo”

A month long blogging contest leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 Handsome Hippo.

Earlier this summer I was planning my 16 hour drive to Colorado and knew that podcasts wouldn't be enough. I needed some longer stories to keep me engaged for hours at a time. I heard about Audible many times over the last couple years but it took me until this summer to finally signup.

One of the things that's surprised me is how effective their marketing is. They maximize every piece of data they have. I've been especially impressed with their wishlists. I started adding books to my wishlist so that when I finished a book I could reference my list to buy the next book. What I didn't realize was that they would use that data to get me to buy the book today.

December 9, 2014

A Happiness Podcast?

This is post 16 of 31 in the series “Blogging for Hippo”

A month long blogging contest leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 Handsome Hippo.

Earlier this month I spent a lot of time thinking about why I like to write. I really like sharing information. I have a lot of technical knowledge about WooCommerce so if I can explain how to do something complex in a step by step process I like doing that. I like knowing that people use the information I have to make their business better.

December 8, 2014

Making Email from Your Website More Reliable with Email Delivery Tools

This is post 15 of 31 in the series “Blogging for Hippo”

A month long blogging contest leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 Handsome Hippo.

Today's post was brought to you by an email I received about making their website's email more reliable:

I am in the process now of launching a new event. I just did a test purchase, and unlike the previous events I did not receive an email alerting me that a new order had been placed. Do you know why this might be the case? I have not changed my settings in WooCommerce, and I just checked Settings>Emails>New Order, and it indicates email to be sent on New Order.

So it looks like they have all of the same settings, it sounds like it's going to the same email address, and this is happening on an otherwise working website. Sound work right? Unfortunately without using some really technical tools (which you might not have access to) to see exactly what your server is doing you don't really know what happened. Did something in WooCommerce break? Did the email get marked as spam before getting to your inbox? Or is the your web server limited in how much email it can send? All of those things could happen. Luckily there are some tools you can use to diagnose the problem and make your email a lot more reliable in the process.

December 7, 2014

Content Marketing Works – Even with Furnace Filters

This is post 14 of 31 in the series “Blogging for Hippo”

A month long blogging contest leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 Handsome Hippo.

A few months ago I wrote about the importance of blogging and content marketing for e-commerce stores of all sizes. Good quality content can bring in thousands of visitors to your site which can turn into tens of thousands of dollars of revenue. To me it's a no brainer to make sure your e-commerce platform can create good quality of content. And that's where one of the joys of blogging comes in.

A thoughtful fellow left a comment about the ineffectiveness of content marketing in some industries and I was so impressed that I didn't want to leave just another comment in response. I wanted to continue this discussion and create a brand new post.

December 6, 2014

Blog Comments Policy

This is post 13 of 31 in the series “Blogging for Hippo”

A month long blogging contest leading up to the release of WooCommerce 2.3 Handsome Hippo.

Now that I have a pretty solid archive of posts I get comments on my posts just about everyday. Many of these comments are really helpful. Sometimes they ask for more information to clarify a point I made, sometimes they add some extra resources that I didn't mention, and sometimes they thank me for sharing my opinion or a tutorial. I love those comments because they help everyone. What I don't love are the comments that don't add anything to the conversation. Too many of the comments that come through don't add information they just drop a link for their product.

I've debated on and off what to do about these types of comments. Do I delete them? Do I edit them to remove the link? Do I ban them? All of those seem pretty harsh and I've mostly resisted doing that up till now. A few days ago Chris Lema wrote a post about his policy when it comes to blog comments and that pushed me over the edge to share what I do with my comments.

Patrick's Programming Blog

Build cool stuff. Share cool stuff. Repeat.

Search Results for: woocommerce

Use Git Bisect to Find Bugs in Your Codebase

Let Projects Die

2014 Business Review

Tell Users What You’re Doing

Enable Free Shipping on a Per Product Basis

Wishlists Done Right

A Happiness Podcast?

Making Email from Your Website More Reliable with Email Delivery Tools

Content Marketing Works – Even with Furnace Filters

Blog Comments Policy