Man, it’s been an exhaustive past ten days for me full of vacation, a cold, work, work and more work. It’s been a while since I last posted and felt I should update everyone as to what has been going on lately with me and also some recent updates to eCommerce Optimization, our articles and the guides.

First, I got sick over Labor Day weekend and wasn’t able to dedicate any time to installing the new open-source commerce solution, Magento, that I posted about on Friday the 31st of August. I had intended on installing it and giving full feedback and review on what I found, features, tools and anything else. Since I got a summer cold, I wasn’t able to and should have time later this week or this coming weekend to dedicate to getting that done and posted.

Not only did my cold affect that post, it also kept me from any revisions, updates and new post ideas (much of my time was spent in bed or near it), but expect the normal post rate to continue once I get a moment to catch up this week and over the coming weekend. I was however able to update a few things last week towards the tail end of my cold and before my vacation.

On Monday, I left for my yearly week vacation and was without Internet connection the whole time. It was a little weird, but gave me a lot of time with my loved ones and allowed me to spend some time doing other things I love like going to movies (saw Bourne Ultimatum, Superbad and War), spending time outdoors (walked my dog, hiked, spent time at the river) and catching up on TV programs I like (court TV, VH1, A&E, History, etc).

All in all, I am glad my cold came and went quickly. I had a wonderful vacation and got to spend some time away from my full time job and Internet life. I usually feel really bad about being away from work and worry when I am not able to post at the normal rate, but we all have to take breaks. At least the time over the past ten days wasn’t a total work loss, I was still able to update several posts and guides on the site and even found time to get one article written, just didn’t have time to edit it or finalize it for posting.

Recent eCommerce Optimization Updates:

The first article that got an update was one we did on a newly reported Google Base feature (that isn’t really new, just more prominently used lately), called Google Base Question feature. We had speculated as to why the feature was being used and what the information is going to be used for. At the time of the article there was no word from Google, but last week I was able to get their answers to my questions back and posted them as an update to the original article called Google Base Product Questions & Human Interaction To Improve Relevancy. See Google’s answers to my questions about the Google Base Question feature near the bottom of the article.

I was also able to update a couple of our guides last week. Both the Shopping Cart Solutions Guide and our Comparison Shopping Listing Guide received updates and additional work to get them more complete, accurate and informative for our readers.

The Shopping Carts guide now has pages created for all the carts listed and each section should appear in alphabetical order for easier viewing and quicker access to discovering eCommerce shopping cart solutions. We are still planning on reviewing each cart or software solution and will certainly keep you all informed of any new additions, changes or updates to that guide in the future.

The Shopping Sites guide also got an update which included new comparison shopping engines, re-ordering of the listed sites and new description updates. We have also added a few new interview links next to the ‘find out more’ links for some of the CSE’s. Keep your eye out for a data feed solution section on that page which should appear within the next week to ten days. For now, I plan on adding new shopping sites to each section once I have two new additions that fall under the same section.

Lastly, I would like to comment briefly on the new upper right header on the site. You may have noticed we added a search function and links to our main page, about page and contact us page for easier navigation to those areas. The links are meant for newer site visitors who may not know about those pages or how to get to them and will replace the current about and contact links that appear in the main navigation. I have something special planned for that area and the sections I need to link to are not quite ready to go live, but should be soon. The search function is meant for everyone, including myself. We are getting quite a bit of content stacked up and I want to be sure it is all easily accessible. Having the search function, in addition to the advanced search page, should make finding anything on the site a breeze. We also have a post all about finding information on the site and where to look.

I hope none of you gave up on me and understand the sickness, vacation and my job sometimes getting in the way of my personal projects. I plan on a lot more, so don’t give up, keep coming back and consider subscribing to our Articles Web feed for updates to content, articles and guides.