This week Miva Merchant rolled out version 5.5 of their renowned shopping cart application. It's a free upgrade for Miva Merchant users already running version 5.0, and it's offered as a streaming update. The bad news is that it's quite easy to upgrade. The good news is that it's quite easy to upgrade. Here's what I mean: When you log into your store's administrative interface, depending on your notification settings, you may see a popup window that looks like this:

I've been the last 4 days recovering from jetlag and decompressing from the 2008 Miva Merchant conference, held last week at the Marina Village conference center in San Diego. I felt pretty lucky to attend this year, because it had been 4 years since NetBlazon had attended, and 5 years since I had personally made the trip. It was WELL worth it. The conference started out with a social hour of finger foods and cocktails on Thursday night. Our clients who attended didn't make it into town for this event, leaving me with a lot of time to wander around. I met a lot of new end users and developers, and became re-acquainted with people I'd met five years ago. It was great to get the lay of the land.