Our Blog
Solutions. Made Simple.

We’re pleased to launch a new site design for the summer of 2015. This is based on design sketches provided by Wayne Christian which he kindly made for us while working with Studio View, he can now be found at A Digital Engagement.

The site has been put together by our Summer Intern, Hannah Elias, who stayed with us for nearly 4 months over the summer while on vacation between the second and third years of her degree at Northumbria University. Thanks Hannah, you’ve done a lovely job. While here, Hannah also worked on a major data forms project for Osiris Educational, OTI Forms (sadly you can’t see much of this without a login), re-worked the templating in William Reviews to be mobile-friendly and responsive, and worked extensively on The Best Of Staffroom, a website showcasing educational articles. Best of luck this year, Hannah!

We recently developed an online shop in Magento and were looking at ways to improve the site’s responsiveness. Magento can be a lumbering beast at times, with it’s endless feature list and huge number of database tables, so performance tweaking is essential if you want to build a successful e-commerce platform.

Having worked on a number of Magento shops before we ran through the usual optimisation techniques (enabling caching, enabling compilation, using Apache’s GZIP compression to compress pages and setting up reasonable caching times for resources) but we were still hungry for more speed. Our research then lead us to Redis, an open source, in-memory, key-value store which can be used to replace the filesystem based cache built into Magento.

So, we knew we wanted to use Redis… What next?! Some more research threw up the key points which will be important to anyone wanting to implement Redis with Magento.

Firstly, Magento CE 1.8 and up comes with the required modules built in and is therefore much easier to get up and running. The modules do exist for versions 1.7 and below, so it’s still possible, but it does involve more work and it could simply be easier to upgrade Magento to the latest version (1.9.0.1 at the time of writing). Forgive the shameless plug but if you do need help upgrading Magento we have experience all the way back to 1.3 so get in touch.

Secondly there are a number of prerequisites you’ll need to take care of before configuring Magento. Specifically you’ll need the following, latest versions are always preferable:

• Redis server (naturally!)
• PHP Redis extension

And that’s about it! The above can be installed on most Linux systems using yum, as follows:

yum install redis php-pecl-redis

And you should be left with a system that’s ready to go. First off we need to start the Redis server, make sure it comes back if the server is ever restarted and check it’s running:

/etc/init.d/redis start
chkconfig redis on
redis-cli ping

And reply of ‘PONG’ means everything is looking good. We also need to restart Apache and check the Redis support we just installed is loaded:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart
php -m | grep redis

You should see a single word response from the last command, ‘redis’, which confirms the module is ready to go. Next we need to modify the Magento local.xml file with details of our new Redis server and what we want to use it for. Open up app/etc/local.xml and add the following anywhere in the <config><global>…</global></config> block:

<redis_session>

<host>127.0.0.1</host>

<port>6379</port>

<persistent>sess-db1</persistent>

<db>1</db>

<compression_threshold>2048</compression_threshold>

</redis_session>

<cache>

<backend>Cm_Cache_Backend_Redis</backend>

<backend_options>

<server>127.0.0.1</server>

<port>6379</port>

<persistent>cache-db1</persistent>

<database>2</database>

<compress_data>1</compress_data>

<compress_tags>1</compress_tags>

<compress_threshold>20480</compress_threshold>

</backend_options>

</cache>

All of these are basically defaults, with the exception of the <database>/<db> and <persistent> settings. These need to be set uniquely for the server otherwise you will most likely get weirdness of all kinds which is never a good thing. At this point you’ll also want to make sure the <session_save> option already in your local.xml is set to ‘db’ as this is overwritten at runtime by the Redis module.

Next step? There isn’t one! Magento will now use the Redis server to store user sessions and page cache, which should see your page response times cut in half. We had some basic benchmarks and we saw a 25%-50% reduction in page response times across the site, even including pages which wouldn’t normally receive a boost from caching (such as the checkout). Maybe this reduced the server load sufficiently that it appeared to speed up these pages despite not having a direct effect? We haven’t looked into it enough yet to know for sure but we do know the site is now running great and using less resources than we’ve ever seen Magento use before.

Fight!

Have you ever wondered how someone can trademark a colour?  Well, we have, and we were slightly perturbed to discover that LastMinute.com has trademarked the colour pink:

Why were we perturbed, you may ask?  Because, our sharp-eyed MD Ross spotted that the T-Mobile pink appears to be the exact same colour:

Both appear to be #ec008c which is the RGB code for this particular shade.  Surely T-Mobile is just as well trademark-protected as LastMinute?  Surely both companies can afford brand advisers who would spot such an obvious clash.

Let’s bring it on!

In the left corner, representing lovers of not-actually any cheaper holiday and hotel deals across the UK and the world, springboard for their less than stellar (and arguably token) CEO to political prominence, and general competition bulldozer, we have LastMinute.com.

In the right corner, with more mergers and brand name changes than the Royal Mail, and so much internal competition that OFCOM becomes superfluous, undefeated in several rip-off spectrum auctions and always busy siphoning our hard-earned cash out of the country almost as well as the Chinese eBay dumpers, we have the T-Mobile.

Who can afford the best lawyers?  How long can they drag it out?  Contenders ready… fight!

I’m sorry to announce that due to a break-in at our new office in Huddersfield last night, we’re running at reduced capacity while we replace some vandalised equipment and get back on top of things. Please bear with us.

For the curious, apparently Lion Chambers was broken into late last night and several offices were ransacked, including ours. Some cash and electronic devices (including a camera) was stolen from our office, but our computers and data storage devices were left in place, so there is definitely no risk to personal/business data. Unfortunately the thief/thieves also vandalised a lot of the equipment that they left behind, which we are rapidly working to replace.

Apparently the police have somebody in custody who was picked up last night with a camera and some cash. We’re hoping that there’s an admission of guilt and a swift resolution.

I’m pleased to announce that today we’ve opened our second office, this one is in Huddersfield (actually, you could consider it the third if we also included our hot-desk arrangement at C4DI in Hull). We’ve taken office space in the iconic Lion Chambers, which sits in the town centre, across the square from the train station. Benjamin Allen is moving there to head up the team in the new office, and we’ll be moving our Pants2You operations over there shortly. We’ll be advertising staff positions there shortly, so watch this space or get in touch if you want to jump the gun!

Lion Chambers

SteamDesk – Alford – Hull – Huddersfield

I like to cycle to work as often as I can, for a variety of reasons. It’s good for my general fitness, it saves the hassle of finding a place to park (not really a great hassle, we have our own car park, but it’s a bit over-subscribed, and the entrance often gets blocked by the delivery truck for our local Kwik-E-Mart). It also saves a bit of cash in fuel, although not a vast amount, I only live about a mile from the office. It’s also the quickest way to get from the office to the fire station (I’m a retained firefighter).

My Bike, nicely modelled by Gabriel the Pants2You mannequin

18 months ago I heard from a friend about the government’s Cycle To Work scheme, which sounded like it gave you a chance to buy a bike without paying income tax on the spending, saving about 20% of the cost, with the cost coming out of my salary every month over 18 months. My old bike was getting a bit tired, so it sounded worth a punt. I filled out the forms on the Cycle Scheme web site, then visited my friendly local bike store, James’ Cycles, picked a nice bike and various other bits of gear, and rode home a happy boy.

Skip forward a few weeks to when SteamDesk received an invoice for the full amount from CycleScheme. Hmm, methinks, I thought we were paying in installments? It looks like I haven’t really saved myself anything here after all (I own the company). Oh well, at least I can claim the VAT back, and fortunately I hadn’t picked something expensive, so it wasn’t a nasty surprise in the cashflow.

Skip forward 18 months, and I get a letter from CycleScheme saying that now the 18 months are up I have three options. I can buy the bike that they have been lending me for £58, rent it for another 3 years for a “deposit” of £10.98 (at which point they might sell it to me for market value), or return it to them at my cost. What a scam! If I want to keep it now, I’ll have essentially saved nothing. If I pay the deposit then they still might not offer it to me for sale at a fair price (there’s no promise to do so, which is apparently some kind of way to avoid a “payment in kind” tax liability). If I return it, I’ve simply had a pretty expensive rental for 18 months.

So all in all – it’s a crummy scheme, especially for company owners! I bet I could have got a better deal if I’d walked into the bike shop offering the same cash amount that I had to pay to CycleScheme just a few weeks later, saved myself all the time and paperwork hassles. The moral here is – always read the small print.

Addendum: I probably still won’t ever read the small print, I don’t believe in it!