Nexcess Blog

I think cron is a wonderful creation. It is simple in what it does while being extremely useful. Allow me to present a short introduction to it for those unfamiliar, then I will show you a handy trick you may need someday. Keep reading this blog to learn about cron and the crontab command — […]

How do you set your microwave to one minute? For some (like the one I used to have at home) you could just press the number 1 and it would start running at one minute. I like that because I’m lazy it’s efficient. Do you press 6 – 0 or 1 – 0 – 0 […]

If you use Magento, then you depend on its email functionality to send order confirmations, invoices, and shipping confirmations to your clients. Aside from technical people, many Magento users do not know how Magento sends email. While knowing how Magento sends email may not be essential to running your online store, it becomes extremely useful […]

When you do a fresh install of x86_64 CentOS 5, you might be surprised and annoyed to find yum trying to install 32 bit packages on your 64 bit server. You’ve got a 64 bit processor and operating system so why is it trying to install these un-needed 32 bit packages? CentOS comes with multilib […]

This week sees the release of a new version of everyone’s favorite Content Management System. It’s an opportune time to take a look at the new features and improvements we can expect from WordPress 3.4, which is scheduled for release on Tuesday. Improved Theme Control One of the improvements to WordPress we are most excited […]

You’ve compressed and minified your JavaScript and CSS, optimized your database, and tweaked your caching config, and yet you still can’t seem to get that time-to-first-byte to drop below one second. Tweaking dynamic applications like Magento can be frustrating. Sometimes there’s so much behind-the-scenes processing that goes into generating that catalog page that even your […]

Recently, I was notified of an “out of disk space” error message which showed up in one of our applications while trying to send an email. I knew right away the source of the problem and while the short term solution was easy (I renamed the problem directory and created a new one – these […]

A survey of e-commerce sites in the Alexa top million websites has found that, as of the first quarter of 2012, Magento is by far the most popular e-commerce solution. Alexa Internet Inc. tracks the web use of millions of internet users and gathers information about the sites they visit. A recent analysis of their […]

Apache’s mod_rewrite and mod_alias can be very useful, but they can also be a huge pain to debug when a problem arises. Luckily, there are a few things that can help, and since you’re probably not the first person attempting to rewrite or redirect something in a specific way, you’ll likely be able to find […]

At Nexcess, we commonly run across problematic extension. Whether the issue is version incompatibilities, database problems, permissions problems, or anything else, the ability to quickly disable an extension or two for troubleshooting is extremely useful. First, a bit about Magento’s file and folder structure. While the guide I just linked to shows some of the […]