Monthly Specials
We are putting a new page on our website here within the next few days. It is called the Monthly Specials for eCommerce Merchants page, and is essentially a listing of the advertisers that appear in our magazine. It is a pretty cool page, especially from my end. There are a couple of neat little development features in there, which someone out there might care about.
The first is that the listings are all given a date range that they will appear, so obviously an ad won't appear if the date range isn't active. That is nice since we can then have them in our system but not showing on the website, since we occasionally have repeats. Another thing about the display page is that is randomizes the listings to some degree each time you visit the page. Just a little trick, but it helps the page out.
On the back end, it was a pain. Since each advertising listing can have a podcast, a logo, and a print advertising image associated with it. This means that to create a new listing, all three of these files (or not) has to be uploaded. This means a lot of checking and error handling, especially since the listings to not HAVE to have these files associated with them. Either way, from a development standpoint it had it's challenges, but for the most part was pretty straightforward. All I will say is that it is important to have a project completely planned out and agreed upon before beginning development work. Things will always come up, but most of them can be pre-planned. That saves many, many hours of work in the end.
More importantly, today is my birthday. Even more important than that today is my niece's birthday as well. I have the honor of being born on the same day at nearly the same time as my beautiful niece, Caroline. And that is all I will say about that.
Update: We no longer offer our printed magazine. We apologize for any confusion.
