Last days to order for Christmas from Al Young Studios

Last days for US orders from Al Young Studios to ensure delivery by Christmas*

Product Type	Economy Shipping	Priority Shipping	Express Shipping	In-store pickup
Books	Tues. Dec. 20th 6:30pm MST	Tues. Dec. 20th 6:30pm MST	Wed. Dec. 21st 6:30pm MST	Sat. Dec. 24th 2:30pm MST
Calendars	Thur. Dec. 15th 6:30pm MST	Thur. Dec. 15th 6:30pm MST	Fri. Dec. 16th 6:30pm MST	Sat. Dec. 18th 6:30pm MST
Magazines	Thur. Dec. 15th 6:30pm MST	Thur. Dec. 15th 6:30pm MST	Sat. Dec. 17th 6:30pm MST	Tues. Dec. 20th 6:30pm MST
Paper/Poster Art Prints	Thur. Dec. 15th 6:30pm MST	Thur. Dec. 15th 6:30pm MST	Sat. Dec. 17th 6:30pm MST	Tues. Dec. 20th 6:30pm MST
Giclee Art Prints	Thur. Dec. 15th 6:30pm MST	Sat. Dec. 17th 6:30pm MST	Mon. Dec. 19th 10:30am MST	Tues. Dec. 20th 6:30pm MST
Music Albums	Tues. Dec. 20th 6:30pm MST	Tues. Dec. 20th 6:30pm MST	Wed. Dec. 21st 6:30pm MST	Wed. Dec. 21st 6:30pm MST

* These dates are for guaranteed delivery, but orders made after these dates may still reach their destination in time, but we strongly recommend--particularly if you are outside of the Inter-mountain west--that you order no later than the dates listed above.

For all international orders, please call or email us for a shipping price quote for Global Express Guarantee shipping (GXG).  Rates, availability, and other parameters vary by country, so we will make special arrangements on a customer-by-customer basis.

Want your Al Young Studios products faster?

With the holidays just around the corner, Al Young Studios has added two major new options for customers this Christmas season (along with another thousand new prints): faster shipping speeds and bulk discounts for nearly every product Al Young Studios sells.

The new bulk discounts are automatically taken off in the shopping cart and faster shipping options (Economy, Priority, or Express) are available for nearly all products at checkout.  This means you can get more items faster and for much less money.

The bulk discounts apply to certain types of products (for example paper prints that are 5 in x 7 in or smaller are bundled together so 12 or more of any print that size qualify for a discounted rate).  Discounts are available for all Storybook Home Journal issues--when buying multiple years at the same time--every fine art print--giclee or poster--and other select products on www.alyoung.com.  Bulk breakdowns are listed in the product's description on the product page.

These changes are permanent (though quantities and prices are subject to change at any time): so if an expedited shipping option or a bulk discount is available now, it will be available through the Christmas season and after it.

In addition to these new discounts, the annual Al Young Studios Engagement Calendar / Weekly Planner is available for pre-order (expect it to ship on or before November 17).  This year it features more than 100 full-color pages with a total of over 200 works of art from the artists at Al Young Studios and the Old Masters that have inspired much of our art.  You can use it as a journal or a weekly planner or just enjoy the largest collection of Al Young Studios art that can be purchased as a single product.

New Shopping Cart and Shipping Costs

My recent blog silence has been brought on by spending the past three months rebuilding our order fulfillment technology from the ground up and redesigning our shopping cart software to better help our customers and make ordering and order fulfillment much faster--and ten thousand lines of new code later, our new system is now on www.alyoung.com.

Our biggest change in this massive update is a new way we charge shipping.  Instead of doing it differently for every individual product, it's now handled by product type with major discounts for ordering multiple products of a given size or classification.  For example, in our old system, 10 5x7 prints--of any image or group of images--would cost customers $20 in shipping.  In the new system, 10 5x7 prints cost $3.50 to ship--a difference of 83%.  The more that gets ordered, the greater the savings for the customer: for example, 100 5x7 prints would only cost $14.00 to ship--instead of $200--a savings of 93%.

Furthermore, all orders will ship much more quickly.  We've worked with out local vendors to reduce order fulfillment time by several days or more for every product we sell.  Most products on the site will possibly ship even faster than their shipping estimates.

Additionally, we have posted over 1600 new products to the site, including a new line of smaller, more affordable pre-mounted giclee canvas prints of our all of our artworks--making them very simple for anyone to frame and give as a gift this Christmas.

So, visit the site and tell us what you think of the new changes.

Major website update: 2011-06-26

We've rolled out another major web site update including:

• New support for "Like," "Follow" and "+1" Buttons
• New Currency Converter for international orders
• New Article Index viewer
• New side menu options
• 104+ new prints available for sale
• Better mp3 support
• Faster page load times
• More interactivity and accessibility

Open Source Software for Emergency Prepardness at Al Young Studios

Recently as part of joint effort between Al Young Studios and several other developers, we've started exploring how Open Source software could help in emergency preparedness and response; though there are tools already designed for this purpose, we're experimenting with improvements and new tools and new workflows in emergency response that can be freely available to the public in the US and internationally.

Plans and code have been made for mobile apps, emergency data management tools, and add-ons for existing applications to help responders and victims in various major disaster scenarios.  Feedback and information from emergency responders, survivors, medical personnel, government agencies, software engineers, and anyone else interested is welcome.  As source code for these projects enter the alpha and beta stages, links and more information will be available on this blog.

PHP Code: Two functions for adding th, st, and rd to numbers/integers

Recently, I wanted to find the fastest way of appending suffixes like "st" and "rd" and "th" to numbers using PHP.  There is at least one other freely available function to do this--from PHP Snippets; which works well, but there are two faster ways to do it.  The first uses string manipulation:

function nsuffix($n) {
  $n = (STRING) $n;
  $l = strlen($n);
  if ($l>1 && $n[$l-2]==='1')
    return $n.'th';
  switch($n[$l-1]) {
    case '1':
      return $n.'st';
    case '2':
      return $n.'nd';
    case '3':
      return $n.'rd';
  }
  return $n.'th';
}

Though faster (and--depend on your coding style--cleaner).  The fastest version of the function is an optimization of his original function, which looks like this:

function ordinal($a){
  $b = abs($a);
  $c = $b % 10;
  $e = (($b %100 < 21 && $b %100 > 4) ? 'th'
          : (($c < 4) ? ($c < 3) ? ($c < 2) ? ($c < 1)
          ? 'th' : 'st' : 'nd' : 'rd' : 'th'));
  return $a.$e;
}

Neither function has very good type handling--both work best when you can ensure they are being passed an integer (the former is even faster if it is being passed a string and then you can omit the type casting)--but the lack of type handling greatly increases speed.  Both functions have the same memory consumption (148 bits difference at peak memory and 52 bits different after 10,000 function calls).

The first function is available under the cc-zero license, which means it is in the public domain and may be used for any purpose.  The second function is released under the licensing terms of PHP Snippets, as it is derived from his original function, and I waive any of my rights to the modification of it.  Neither PHP Snippets or myself is liable for what you do with the code or the results of using it.

Website Update: 2011-06-01

Since the memorial day update some users have experienced redirect issues.  We have updated the site, and now redirects should be working properly.  Otherwise no new front-end features were included in the update.