Author: Pye Brook Company, Inc.

SEO and WP-eCommerce Performance Tuning

Pye Brook Company, Inc. 3 Comments

We have been doing some tuning work on the 80,000+ product Sparkle Gear WP e-Commerce store and wanted to share one experience with the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast.

Unless you are a SEO expert, Yoast’s WordPress Plugin is a a tool that will save you alot of work, and keep much the SEO process understandable and accessible to mere mortals.  It’s a great addition for any WordPress site, and especially useful for WPEC that create lots of posts (products are posts) and have lost of taxonomies (variations and categories are taxonomies). IMHO. the dynamic sitemap generation feature of the WorpPress SEO plugin alone makes it a must have.

WordPress SEO Plugin Developed by Joost de Valk

wpecHowever, there are some details about how WPEC is implemented that need to be addressed when you install the SEO plugin.First item, WPEC stores products as posts. WPEC stores 

variations of products as child posts of product posts.  These child posts are used to hold information about an individual product variation.  Details like the variation image, price, stock. etc.  The important detail to note is that these child posts are not directly accessible to the outside world. In WP speak, the permalink for these posts will give you a 404!

Check out this killer e-commerce site

Pye Brook Company, Inc. 1 Comment

Sparkle Gear, a retailer of premium customized rhinestone bling clothing and accessories engaged us to build their e-commerce site!  The site www.sparkle-gear.com is up and running.

Created completely from open-source software and our own custom WordPress plugins, including a product templating and generation plugin, this site rocks.  It is fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter, processes Paypal and credit card transactions, and tracks orders from start through shipping.

One of the best features of our integration is our WordPress plugin that manages giveaways.  Check out http://www.sparkle-gear.com/giveaway/santas-little-helper-martini-glasses-handbag-giveaway/ to see it in action.

Support the continued development of the Mail Queues Plugin

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If you find the Mail Queues plugin useful, if it saves you time, if it makes your customers and your hosting provider happier, please make a small contribution to the continued support and development of the software.

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form action=”https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr” method=”post”>

Health Apps: US FDA Plans Oversight of Mobile Medical Apps – CNBC

Pye Brook Company, Inc. 1 Comment

A fast-growing number of software applications offers doctors the chance to view X-rays or monitor heart rates from iPads or smartphones, prompting U.S. health officials on Tuesday to propose government oversight for some of the more complex health apps.

A portion of the apps perform tasks that mimic the work of medical devices and could cause harm if they failed to perform as promised,Food and Drug Administration officials said.

New FDA guidelines state that in some cases software developers would have to show their apps worked as well as non-mobile devices for the same use.

The agency would have to provide clearance for those apps before they could be sold. FDA officials said they recognized the potential benefits from mobile medical apps and aimed to encourage future development.

btHeart – Ongoing Audio Notifications?

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Does anyone want their phone to give them motivational messages while they are working out?

With winter here, any outdoor workouts probably mean the phone is buried in a pocket and the gloves are on.  So what’s the best way to get feedback on your performance? We are thinking that periodic SPEECH notification of heart rate, respiration rate, workout zone and intensity might work well.

With the earphones gloves and headset on this could be a great way of adjusting intensity without stopping to look at the device. What does everyone think? Which items should be spoken?  How configurable?    Let us know.

btHeart: Workout Zone Widget

Pye Brook Company, Inc. 1 Comment

So this is what we came up with for the workout zone widget…

The best news is that the application infrastructure we use for btHeart and btScale now has the full capability to support many different widgets, we’ll be rolling them out shortly, along with support for Zephyr’s BioHarness.

btHeart Widget?

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We had some requests for an Android Widget that could be placed along side your music player widget while you are working out.  Sounds like a good idea to us so we started working on it.  We will probably increase the price of the app by $0.25 when it is done, so buy the app now to save big!

This is what we are thinking the widget might look like, let us know if you have any ideas…

We are now on Facebook and Twitter!

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btHeart Help

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btHeart Help coming soon!

About btHeart

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We are working on the documentation for the application.  To get you started a primer of the main screen is below.  Tap on any of the graphs to zoom in on the live picture.

image

The heart rate data read from your heart rate monitor is recorded in a text log file.  The file is in the standard “CSV” format and can be imported into spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or Google Docs.  The  log files are on your device’s SDCARD, in a directory named “hrmlog” . btScale always writes its log to the file named “hrm.log”.

restartworkoutEvery time you select the “Restart Workout” option the “hrm.log” file will be renamed using the current date and time.  A new HRM.LOG file will then be created.   You can delete any of the logs in this directory at any time they are not in use.