Monthly Archives: December 2011

2011 – A year of change

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2011 was an amazing year for me. Full of struggles, change, and excitement. Here are few of the highlights I had for the year (minus a few struggles):

  • First year of be married to my wonderful wife, we now collectively have five kids in the house!
  • I turned 40 this year, really starting to feel old in the mornings
  • I changed career direction – moved out of Lotus and into Industry Solutions – having a great time, love the new job!
  • Kim (my beautiful wife) got me a Harley for my 40th
  • My daughter made Varsity cheer in football and basketball and is in 10th grade.
  • My son Nathan was quarterback and line backer in tackle football.
  • My son Bobby got his first job.
  • My blog took a back seat to many things this year, family.
  • We joined the Disney Vacation club and went on our first vacation, awesome, highly recommend it.
  • Got my second tattoo, which I designed – “Devil Dog Inside me”
  • I finally switched over to Chrome as my default browser
  • I launched KidWrite.net
  • I launched PlanetWebSphere.net
  • 28 Days of Dojo was the best month for my blog, continues to get a lot of hits, thank you!
  • My cat Mindy died, she was 12 years old.
  • I upgraded to the iPhone 4GS, totally love Siri

12 Days of commerce: Flash Sales

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In this demo I show how you can set up a flash sale in WebSphere Commerce. This mixes date and time driven promotions and web activities. The setup is a sale for a new Nike shirt will happen on Friday from noon to five where the shirt will be 20% off. The advertisement helps on the home page but you could also use remote widgets to advertise on other sites like Facebook and blogs.

Solr synonym file for different segments and industries

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I have gotten asked in previous conversations if there are standard synonym files for different product sets and industries for the Solr search engine. Interestingly enough I could not find anything out there so I decided to create an online repository on GitHub for such files. I envision files for all kinds of industries and product sets. I put some ideas out there and if anyone else has more please share with the community.  If you happen to have a large set of synonyms today also share those!

You can check out the repository here.

WebSphere Commerce welcomes iOS to its arsenal!

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This isn’t part of the originally planned “Twelve Days of Commerce” but it fits in well!

A few weeks ago IBM announced a native application for Android based devices. Being an Apple guy myself I have been waiting to announce this. WebSphere Commerce now has a native iOS application that uses the same REST base services the Android version uses. Even better, this solution is published as Open Source – talk about a great way to learn the WebSphere Commerce API’s!

You can check out the announcement and offering on the IBM site. You can also learn about the new offering on the InfoCenter.

12 Days of commerce: Proximity Alerts

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In this video I show how you can create basic proximity alerts in WebSphere Commerce. An example is, you can show an alert when the shopper is close to a promotion. Example, say you have a proximity alert set for a minimum order of $120 and a discount of $30 when the cart contents reach $200. This alert will show to the shopper if they have a total cart value between $120 and $199.99.

Pissed off Penguins

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I have been a user and fan of the Blender tool for quite some time. There is a KickStarter project looking for less than $250 to complete the bidding process for the project. If you believe in Open Source and education for the masses then help Kris complete this project. Whether you are a low level developer, artist or just someone who like doing this stuff for a hobby (like me) then this is a great project to learn from.

Donate a $1 or $5 today!

12 Days of commerce: Product Page recommendations

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In this video I show how to set up some basic product page recommendations using WebSphere Commerce Management Center. Similar to Category page recommendations this sets up recommendations for all product pages in the Lounge Chair category. I show how things like Copy and Paste and Drag and Drop in the business tool allow the business user to quickly copy other rules and change them

12 Days of commerce: Category page recommendations

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In this video I show how you can set up some basic category page recommendations. In WebSphere Commerce you can set up a category recommendation for all pages or have specific recommendations based on shopper attributes, category, cart contents, search and many more factors. In this example I show how to set up a specific set of recommendations for the Lounge Chairs category page.