I know, I know... I promised it long time ago but I decided to take some time off from coding, not even mentioning nerve-wracking Magento(; But I'm back in business now so here is your short guide on how to crop your images. You can use it for almost everything but it's great for designs with square (ish) products images.

Yes, well... not your usual blog post but I thought it'd be a nice change. Anyway, to cut a long story short, just before the awful 2009 ended and a 3 days before my move I was contacted by Dominika, who was very determined to find a design skilled individual to help her promoting local concerts for the largest Polish charity called Wielka Orkiestra Świątecznej Pomocy (Great Orchestra of Christmas Help) which collects money all around the world to fund ridiculously expensive hospital equipment saving children's life. Each year is ended with these massive concerts in all major cities on all continents and this time Brighton proudly joined the long list of participating branches with me more than happy to help.

I'm not going to hide the fact that photography is my biggest passion. In fact if I could drop everything and don't worry about paying my rent, I would very likely leave Brighton to discover the world with my camera. But since it's hardly possible, I tend to feed my hunger for adventure with other people's experiences and stories. I'll never stop being amazed by all those things and places that can be explored and all of them in so many different ways! And I'm not even going to start talking about people themselves. Anyway, I did promise you to share all kinds of things that inspire me and I believe photography is the biggest influence in both my private and professional life. I also thought, I should post some pretty pictures, instead of trying to be smart and eloquent(; So here they are - people whose photography I truly admire!

There are quite few ways to optimise and speed up Magento. If you run a Google search you'll get different solutions from minifying js to some nice server settings. There is one thing though I couldn't see being mentioned anywhere - built-in image caching system. By default Magento captures all resize method calls from phtml templates and saves processed images to /media/catalog/product/cache/{store_id}/{source_image_type:original, small_image, thumbnail}/{image_dimensions}/... which sounds perfectly reasonable, except for one tiny thing which I lately discovered.

Have you ever had that helplessness feeling while scrolling through veeeery long stylesheets, trying to find one selector? Sure - tabbing helps a lot but it's not as good as using proper nesting. I've seen few solutions giving you that functionality but it was Anthony Short's CSScaffold I decided to try out, mainly due its mixins support. I'm not going to go into details on how it actually works (if you're interested in it make sure you visit project homepage) but instead I'll show you real examples on how I used it on this site.