excels at mediocrity

I’ve decided i’m going to blog here about how to use Americommerce from time to time. More for my own benefit than anyone elses. I’ve been using Americommerce for a little over a year and the software is capable of all kinds of things that i don’t even know how to use yet. And since they are growing, i sometimes can’t find answers to my questions in the help section or knowledgebase. And honestly sometimes, I just need it in laymans terms to understand it. Since i use their system for several websites I am sure I will be trying to fix something on one site that have already fixed on another – but i guaruntee there will be times that I forget what I did to fix the issue. So, I’m blogging about it so when that happens i can search my own blog and find the answer to my own question. Maybe someone else can benefit as well.

So here is the first thing I figured out after monkeying with it and finally speaking to Eric at Americommerce about it.

I’ve been wanting to update a whole category with thumbnails to see if the page loads any faster. Right now, I use one large image on the admin of Americommerce and specify the thumb size in the site template. This works very well, but I was curious if the generation of thumbs slows down the speed since as the page loads it is stretched out and then shrinks to the right size as it generates (as if it’s starting out with huge images so the page is really wide). Actually I know that is the issue because I spoke to Stefan about it and he explained that is why it starts out wide.

So i exported the products, added the file names to the thumb image field and uploaded the file. Then I uploaded the thumb images. I could not get the site to update and start using the new file names for the thumbs. So i exported again and noticed that my thumb file names had been change from [for example] k-1005sm.jpg, to smk-1005.jpg. I was baffled so I tried multiple times. Still the site was using the large images to generate the thumbs and my file names kept getting changes. I spoke with Eric and he explained the problem. Apparently as the images are processed and cached a field is created in the database called ItemImage. In that field is the file names for main image and thumb, as well as their alt tags. Since this column had already been populated it was overwriting my new file names I had imported. So, i deleted this field, imported the file again with my correct file names and now it works like a charm. Thanks Eric.

You can see the results here: Dynasty Cabinet Knobs

The end result however is that so far the pages do not seem to load any faster with thumbs rather than the auto-gen images. So I’m not going to go through 5k products and add thumbs to them all for no speed gain. But I’m glad to know that if I update a bunch of images at once, that ItemImage column in the export file could be the culprit if I’m having issues. This is not a bad thing, it’s just understanding the system.