Last week I had a few problems when I was trying to export my Magento Product feed with 10k products for Google Shopping. The script kept timing out and giving me Fatal error: Maximum execution time of x seconds exceeded warnings. I tried changing the php.ini parameters like max_execution_time, but no luck.

Once I switched to the Feedonomics API, exporting a Magento feed with thousands of products for Google Shopping was easy, because it took care of implementing the database logic in a scalable, and it worked flawlessly. Better yet, the Magento export took only about 40 seconds.

The melody from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is mesmerizing, but I couldn’t help feeling like I’ve heard it before.

That amazing melody in the song Step Out “composed” by Jose Gonzalez from Walter Mitty is NOT original, and is plagiarized directly from Closing Time by Semisonic! Just listen to these two audio samples and compare the dominant melodies:

After spending lots of time creating your Google Shopping feed, you might think that your feed is great and done with for the next few years. You upload it to Google Adwords and head over to Google Search to check if any of your products are showing up. You try searching for the names of your first 5 products and see that NONE of the are showing up for Product Listing Ads (PLAs)!

From my experience the best way to optimize your feed is to see what your competition is doing. Are their prices, titles and description better than yours? If you have several thousand SKUs, it will take forever to cross compare this manually. Luckily for you there are pretty cool tools that can automatically tell you where your Google Shopping feed needs optimization. All you need to do then is adjust the feed accordingly. The IM-PACT tool tells you if you are price competitive on all your products as well as where you’re losing exposure because or poor keywords in the title.

When you create an Adwords campaign for Google Shopping or Product Listing Ads (PLAs), one thing you are NOT able to do (unlike with regular PPC) is see which of your products show up for particular keywords.
To get this kind of exposure data, I tried manually searching on Google to see if I was coming up for keywords like:
men’s ties
neck-ties
long men’s ties
fancy ties
modern ties

Of course my actual keyword list was several thousand keywords long. It would take me 5-6 hours to search for a thousand keywords, which is frankly too long.

I looked for tools that automated this annoying process, and found the IM-PACT tool, which tells you exactly which keywords I didn’t show up for in PLAs. Even more amazing is that it tells you which competitors are ahead of you by showing up on more PLAs than you are. Also interesting is that even the top guys like eBay and Ties.com had less than 30% coverage. Now I’m going to work on getting my coverage higher by adjusting keyword descriptions and bid prices.

Turns out you can use Handbrake for more than just converting video files. You can also make large videos that take forever to upload to youtube far smaller by following this easy answer to make video sizes smaller.

Depending on the quality you want, you can decrease the video size by a factor of 2-3x!

I had this problem with my macbook air 2012. The colors were very washed out and the contrast ratio was completely off. I tried calibrating the external monitor, but to no avail. I was using the moshi mini displayport to HDMI adapter (purchased from the Apple store). It turns out this is a driver error on Apple’s part that has still not been corrected as of August 2013. Hundreds of people report the same color problem. The only way to fix it is to use a mini displayport to dvi connector. You can get this one for $5-$10:

I just finished testing the Indeed.com jobs affiliate program on a high traffic (60% United States) programming website. I used the JobRoll code that I copied and pasted into my website with the option to automatically detect the city of the user. On the first day the CPM was decent (but not great at $0.61, but for the next few days absolutely no conversions, dropping the CPM to $0.02.

Has anyone tried out the monster.com affiliate program or another job affiliate program and had better results?

By Brian Roizen

I’ve been playing piano for many years now, and one question that many parents have is if it is better to memorize sheet music and play from memory, or to just have the sheet music in front of you.

When starting to play a new piece, it’s better to simply have the sheet music in front of you rather than memorize it. But once you practice a piece enough you start to memorize it without even trying (if you haven’t started to memorize the song, you probably haven’t practiced enough). When are you at this point, you are at the level of performing it. Do you ever see professional pianists performing with sheet music in a solo piano performance or in a piano concerto performance? The only pianists you see with sheet music are accompanists, who have not really mastered the piece as they are most likely sight-reading it or playing the song for the second or third time.

My sister and a few other people I know still haven’t received their SAT scores despite being promised the scores at a certain date. Looks like this is why their scores still say Not Yet Available.

If scaling is not an issue, I highly recommend using MySQL. But of course we need to understand when scaling becomes an issue. If you are using PHP or Python with a MySQL database with more than 100M rows and more than 10 GB of data, scaling becomes a problem. You can try optimizing MyISAM or Innodb tables, but you won’t see more than a 30% performance gain in most cases. If you have 470M rows with 200 GB of data in a MyISAM table, you are probably at the limits of what MySQL can do for you (unless you shard and use master-slave tables).

In terms of scaling, NoSQL is great. It’s not as easy or intuitive as MySQL, but MongoDB has pretty good documentation, and a smaller learning curve than most NoSQL databases.