Sorry that it has been a while since my last update but I have been extremely busy creating a new online store. After days of designing I have just started to code the thing which is a relief to be honest because all this thinking about the design had been extremely boring – although very worthwhile as it always should be. I was originally going to go with a open source solution such as oscommerce/zen cart and although being very good they just don’t offer what I want. It occurred to me the other day what problems could occur when I was trying to locate something in the code and it took me bloody ages, and it was only something simple. I worked out that it would be easier for me to write a custom cart that could then provide all the custom features that I require and none of the overhead that the open source ones have.
Now that I have said this about the open source carts I just know that I will get some emails telling me just how wrong I am etc etc, so here I will explain once again that I don’t think that they are bad in any way. Infact they are very good for simple online carts and with the extensions available even some powerful carts, its just that I like total control so I understand what’s going on when things go wrong and I like to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) . As you can imagine, the open source carts have to try and cater for every possibility which adds plenty of features that I just do not need and would prefer not to have. Creating the cart myself will provide me with many neat features that I need and a very simple code base that will be easier to understand and mainly to maintain. I also have some ideas to take the site a little up market and provide some neat AJAX features which I think come in handy. I have basically nicked (*cough cough* borrowed) all the features that I like from other good sites and hope to put of a few of them into my cart. The funny thing is that this online store that I am creating was meant to be a side business that could hopefully bring in some pocket money as such, and was hoping to get it out for Christmas using an open source cart. After having thought about it a lot I have decided to open the site after Christmas and then ramp up over the year so that hopefully I will be in a better position to take advantage of next Christmas. After all, I am not looking for this site to make me a millionaire or anything as its just there to bring in some money to keep with going for them main idea which is still in full swing by the way 
Just to let you all know that landoblog will be down for a couple of days from the 2nd December because UK2 has decided that it wants to rip me off for hosting. I originally paid about £15 for the entire year and now they want about £90 which a slight increase for just basic PHP hosting. I am getting my own server soon so will port it over to that ASAP so please bare with me for a while until this is done 
