Vacation

I just got back from a 2 week (mostly) "staycation". We did go to Niagara Falls for one night, the Canadian side. The falls were great and we took our daughter on the Maid of the Mist, which was pretty exciting for a 6 year old. I always remembered the US side as being a tacky tourist trap, but the Canadians have really caught up. Junk stores and indoor amusements, all with blaring speakers out on the side walk. It really was stressful walking through all of that stuff, and I noticed a lot of people arguing and bitching at their kids. The next morning we walked down the stairs by the Skylon tower (another tourist trap) which was much more relaxing.

We also spent a day at Kelly's Island in Lake Erie, which was very relaxing. Long drive to the ferry in Marblehead though. We rented a golf cart and drove around to the beach and through the laid back island community. Nothing like Put-In-Bay, perhaps the most obnoxious place I have ever visited.

War in Georgia

No coincidence that Russia waited until the opening day of the Olympics to start aggressive actions in the Caucasus. The news outlets will be too busy covering the games, and we all know they can only cover one story at a time.

Seems like they might have duped the Georgians into attacking South Ossettia, and are now reatliating with an invasion. Glad that we would never do anything like that..:--)

Yahoo Stores Fiasco

A few weeks ago I signed up for a Yahoos Stores account. After a lot of thought I felt it was time to convert to this platform. My decision was based a desire to simplify my programming, improve inventory management and order tracking and to able to have more sophisticated sales, discounts and shipping options.

What a disaster this turned out to be. Getting up and running was not so hard, using the online wizards. One big problem I ran into was the Store Editor function. I downloaded a detailed 300 page PDF file that was a guide to Store Editor Version 2.0 Lots of good walkthroughs. After working with for a while I realized that I was working with Verison 3.0 of Store Editor which was considerably different. But there is no equivalent PDF guide for the new version (and 3.0 has been around since 2006). I called tech support and they told me to use the online help files, and I pointed out that these file were nowhere near as detailed as the downloadable guide. In the end I had them switch me back to using version 2.0, so at least it matched my guide.

So far so good. As I worked through the Store Editor I became more and more disillusioned with how the platform worked. To go beyond a very basic inflexible design you have to learn how to manipulate page templates with a proprietary language called RTML. The main point of trying to use Yahoo was to simplify the programming involved in maintaining the website, yet now I have to learn a new scripting language. And by the way, Yahoo provides no resources for learning RTML, instead pointing you to 3rd party developers who can build your store for you: the last thing I want.

I gave it good 2-3 days and finally called it quits. Yahoo gave me a prorated refund, so I guess it was worth the $60 to learn that for sure I do not ever want to use Yahoo stores as my ecommerce platform.

Back to PHP and MySql I guess.