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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Programming
Breaking Down The New Detailed Image
Over on The Detailed Image Blog I wrote a post outlining the features of the new DetailedImage.com. I copied that post below, and then added in some additional thoughts about each feature in italics. — Yesterday we were extremely excited to unveil our new DetailedImage.com website. Our goal is to provide you with the simplest, fastest, and most secure shopping experience in the industry. Let’s take a look at what’s new: The Design We’ve kept the important functionality where it’s familiar – navigation on the left, search box up top, My Account and Cart information in the header – while … Continue reading
A Post About Not Posting
My posts have come to a screeching halt lately. I don’t think I’ve ever gone a month without a post since I started blogging back in 2005 so I didn’t want to start now! Mike and I have been pushing really hard to release the aforementioned new version of Detailed Image. As a company we’re probably devoting close to 40% of our time right now working on new site related tasks. Things are busy for me personally right now as well, so I’m pretty much ripping through my day-to-day work tasks as fast as possible and then spending every remaining … Continue reading
Our Caching System, Guide Improvements, and the Exciting Next Step
Continuing the theme from Adding To The Foundation [Of Our Cart] and A Better Search Experience on Detailed Image, I recently wrapped up a few more important features. Caching One big opportunity for improvement on any database driven website is caching. Let’s take the example of our sitemap. When someone used to land on that page, it would run a database query to extract the product name and URL of every product on our site. If it’s hypothetically accessed 100x/day, that would have been 100 queries. They’re not particularly taxing queries, but there are hundreds of similar scenarios happening simultaneously … Continue reading
A Better Search Experience on Detailed Image
I’ve been chipping away at the next round of improvements to our shopping cart. The past week was one of those really good weeks where I deployed a ton of code. jQuery A precursor to moving forward was to (finally) switch our javascript library from using the outdated script.aculo.us to the more lightweight and more powerful jQuery. This required quite a bit of code to be rewritten, most of it critical to the shopping experience, but it has paid immediate dividends: the site is significantly faster, jQuery is much easier to develop with, and the plug-ins available make it extremely … Continue reading
Figuring Out The Best Time To Deploy New Features
In my last post I wrote about all of the small features that we’ve been rapidly releasing lately for Detailed Image. One of the challenges I always have is figuring out when to deploy a new feature to the live website. I used to just deploy as soon as the work was done. The problem was, this would usually be towards the end of a long hard day, and if anything went wrong I’d be left working in a sub-optimal state to fix things. I ruined many a nights by doing this. Once I get into 10+ hours of serious … Continue reading
Adding To The Foundation [Of Our Cart]
In the coming months we’ll be rolling out some big improvements to the Detailed Image website. We launched the current site in mid-2009. Since then we’ve iterated with the Ask-a-Pro Blog, Free Weekly Special, a new home page, a mobile site, free shipping every day, and more, but the site has largely remained the same as we’ve hired and trained two new full-time employees, launched the new version of LockerPulse, refined our warehouse operations and customer service process, and dealt with all of the other many challenges that come with growth. In the meantime, we’ve been collecting data. Lots and … Continue reading
HTML5 or Native Apps? Why We Chose HTML5 for LockerPulse. Plus – Our Awesome New Shirts
Over on the popular Speckyboy Design Magazine I wrote a guest post entitled Why We Chose HTML5 Over Native Apps that went up yesterday. I go in to detail about why HTML5 was a better choice for LockerPulse. I had been itching to write the post for a while. I wanted to get it out to a large designer/developer audience, and also hopefully get a little pub for LockerPulse. I contacted Paul over at Speckyboy, one of my favorite web design sites, and he agreed to publish the post. In the post, I mentioned that we purchased the official HTML5 … Continue reading
On the LockerPulse Blog: Making HTML5 and Responsive Design Work for Web Apps Like LockerPulse
Over on the LockerPulse Product Blog I wrote an in-depth post about the design and development of the new LockerPulse. One of the big decisions we made early on was to build one single HTML5 app for all devices. A big part of making that work is using CSS3 media queries to do what’s called “responsive design.” Early on we realized that responsive design, while awesome, still has plenty of limitations. This post dives in to the challenges and how we solved them. It’s probably a 10-15 minute read, but you can get the gist just by reading the headings … Continue reading
Developing Half a Product
One of our major objectives this year is to take some big chances with LockerPulse. We want to know if it’s a viable business, and if so, how viable. Is it a profitable side project or is it something much much bigger? While it’s been almost two years since it launched, we were unable to give it the attention we planned on during 2011 due to the yearlong chaos. So we made it completely free and collected as much data as we could. At the end of last year, we sat down and decided that we were going to throw … Continue reading
LockerPulse Fantasy Player Tracking Launched!
On Saturday we wrapped up and released one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on: LockerPulse fantasy player news tracking. My partners and I have all been avid fantasy players for years (I was in leagues where Barry Sanders and Emmitt Smith were the consensus top 2 picks!) and like all fantasy football players, we’re looking for any informational edge that we can get to help us win. Especially Sunday mornings, and especially when injuries are involved. There’s nothing worse than starting a guy who isn’t going to play. After launching LockerPulse it didn’t take us long to realize … Continue reading