Over a year ago, Google released a tool called Page Speed which gave simple suggestions to developers interested in speeding up their sites. Typically these suggestions were not too difficult, and if you were already aware of many front-end best practices (as relating to HTML, CSS, and Javascript) you likely implemented such suggestions to begin with, or soon after hearing about this tool. But, some of the recommendations, particularly relating to server configuration may have been too complicated or possibly inaccessible if on a shared hosting environment.
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This is a quick tut for the fastest way to install Magento. You’ll need SSH access and the wget utility if you don’t already. First step is to visit Magento and make a note of the latest stable release. At the time this post was written, the latest release was 1.4.1.1 Next, log into your root directory via SSH and run the following commands:
wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.4.1.1/magento-1.4.1.1.tar.gz
tar -zxvf magento-1.4.1.1.tar.gz
mv magento/* magento/.htaccess .
chmod -R o+w media
./pear mage-setup .
./pear install magento-core/Mage_All_Latest-stable
touch var/.htaccess | mkdir app/etc
chmod o+w var var/.htaccess app/etc
rm -rf downloader/pearlib/cache/* downloader/pearlib/download/*
rm -rf magento/ magento-1.4.1.1.tar.gz
After that all it takes is to point your browser to the URL associated with the root directory and follow the simple web based install.
Note: This article is for the latest version of the tracking code. If you are using the older version, please read the following article.
To determine which tracking code you are using, please see Which version of the tracking code am I using?
It’s easy to have Google Analytics track clicks on links that lead to file downloads. Since downloads generally do not lead to a pull page that would contain the tracking code, we have to make notifying Analytics of a special event. We do this through _trackPageview(). The following code will assign a pageview to the specified link so Analytics will treat clicks to it as a a view of this pseudo-page.
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There are a whole bunch of good OS X apps for coding. As a professional though, I choose the most powerful, and lightest package TextMate. After a small amount of customization you’ll see that no other editor is as fast as TextMate. If you’re looking for something to hold your hand as you code and auto-fill CSS or JS functions… hit the books… this is for the developer who knows how to develop.
minimal design has a couple of excellent additions to the program (as do many other developers, GO OPEN SOURCE) that increase the “out-of-the-box” power of TextMate.
Yes, you can install a local web server in 5 minutes. Mac users rejoice and behold the covenant of MAMP. PC users, see XAMPP.
Any web developer worth talking to will speak to the importance of being able to create a staging site for a project on the fly. MAMP really makes this easy. MAMP Pro is worth it’s weight in gold, because not only can you have a local server up and running in no time, but you can have unlimited hosts easily added with a few clicks. Oh, and you can server it up through dyndns.com, and configure the server modules, and… tumble.
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