Interviews

Stephen Bissett

Community Profile: 241
Date Added: 8th June 2004

Tell us a little about yourself (Name, Age, Residency, ..)

Ciamar at tha sibh-fhèin (How are you yourself?)

I am Stephen Bissett a 35 year old from Scotland, recently made redundant from the satellite communication industry and trying to go it alone as a freelance webmaster.

I have mainly worked in an electrical capacity for the industrial sector for the last 15 years on and off with a good variety of differing employment throughout, with the oil industry side taking me from the seabed and ROV's, as a JAM Technician running casing and tubular on the drill floor, through to electrical maintenance which took me to the very top of the derrick wiring the pilot light.

Currently I am negotiating for some website contracts and to this is my primary focus.

How and when did you get introduced to PHP and osCommerce?

I came across osCommerce by chance at the same time as joining this community at the tail end of October 2003 whilst searching for a solution for a client, having found and tried various ecommerce solutions and finding none of them with the flexibility to meet the requirement.

I decided to take the chance with osCommerce having never worked with mysql or php before, as all my experience had been with html, css and JavaScript.

My thanks and hats off to Matti Ressler whom was the first person in the Forum to aid me and "one vertical climb" later I embrace it and will not be looking back.

Has osCommerce met your expectations? What would you like to see done in osCommerce?

The osCommerce solution has met and exceeded my expectations; however as with all things web related will continue to develop lest stagnation set.

I feel that the release of the next milestone 3 will alleviate any thoughts that I may have to the direction of osCommerce and this is most evident in the forum itself and the recent release of the Knowledge base.

Can you describe the contributions you have made to osCommerce, if any?

To date I have mainly reworked code as follows:

Newsdesk - fixed a lot of the bugs and added some functionality (this is still ongoing) with the main fix being to the I.E.6 crash.

Manufacturers Box Image Rotate - This is rotates the manufacturers' images.

Categories Box Bullet and Line - This adds an image to the categories and sub categories with a line divider to separate the categories.

Shadowbox - This places a shadow below the infoboxes.

InfoBox Admin - Fixed an error in the sql for sort order and added an arrow select function for the columns.

Works in progress to be released:

FAQdesk - This will be a fixed version with a few minor added functions.

Featured Products - This will have added admin functions to allow selection of different featured sets (different layouts) selected from the admin and a function to control vertical line dividers.

Tell a Friend - Fixed function to stop the sending of blank emails.

Other than these minor contributions my main contribution has been in helping others.

What keeps you motivated to work on osCommerce?

In a word failure, having to resign myself to using something else, fuelled by my need to learn and experience. With osCommerce I am lucky in that everyday brings a new challenge and a chance to learn something different what more can I ask of myself?

Can you describe your experiences as a store administrator so far had with osCommerce?

A quasi-contract-exercise in relation to customer and client.

What advice would you provide to those being introduced to osCommerce?

Prior to installation read the instructions several times and also take a trip through the forum, when you learn to walk running becomes much easier. If possible set up a development solution on your local machine for all your experimental work, as this will save you from breaking your online solution. Always remember that the people whom give time to help in the forum do so willingly and for free, they give what resolves to issues they can, so please do not demand answers but ask courteously.

What do you think about the osCommerce community? Have you gained friends and contacts here?

The osCommerce community is an ever expanding melting pot of fruition akin to a tesseract portal, where I have indeed met many diverse contacts.

What slogan or logo would you wear on a t-shirt?

fallain agus gòrach - healthy and stupid

or

Dorftrottel - village idiot

How do you spend your average day?

I work from home and spend a few hours working on contracts, then take a break and go for a blast on my motorbike to unwind, and then back to the computers for a few hours. I take a bit of time off to do some cooking and general chores. I am always searching for work. I can sometimes spend a good bit of time in the forum (need to get a life). With this all said no day is ever the same (fear of stagnation prevents this).

How does your desktop look like?

I run several systems as a network, to try and keep the contracted work separate from personal work and development work.

The image I took on a visit to the island of Komodo.