PC Scribbles Online Jottings

I’ve never been one for mobile phones but the increasing need to respond to customers email while I was out of the office caused me to upgrade to a Blackberry 9000 Bold.

Nice phone.

BUT!  Finding out that if you install a RSS reader like Viigo you can get away from your PC if needs be.

Trouble is…here was me, sitting on the toilet and normally I’d just do my business and go on my merry way.  But with the Blackberry, I find myself reading articles such as those on this wonderful SEO blog and time flies.  I realise how long I’ve been reading and notice how I should be doing other things (like work?) so try and stand up…but the lack of blood in my legs almost makes me fall over!

There really should be a public health notice on the Blackberry saying

WARNING:  Use of this device may make you fall down the toilet

Martin

p.s. joking aside, it’s a great device.

Technorati Tags: blackberry, bold

I have to admit that I’m a spoilt brat.  At Christmas my lovely wife gave me a PS3 (I think she noticed me looking at them at some point but got sick of the “I’m too busy…I’d never use it…” lines that came from me).  Unfortunately, I was too busy and never used it – the games I liked a) weren’t widespread on PS3′s (RPG games) and b) I’m so bad at game playing that it takes me ages to get anywhere c) I kept getting killed by 9 year old kids online.

But then I heard about a feature of the PS3…you can stream to it.

What Is Streaming?
“Streaming” is the delivery of media, such as movies and live presentations, over a network in real time. A computer (a streaming server) sends the media to another computer (a client computer), which plays the media as it is delivered. With streaming, no files are downloaded to the viewer’s hard disk.

And with the built in wireless networking, you can stream without all those horrible yellow network cables (as long as you have the PC hardware, of course).

To start with, I found that windows media player could stream music and video.  It worked with a bit of fiddling but the biggest problem was the PS3 – it could only play certain formats so if I wanted to play a .ogg format piece of music – the PS3 couldn’t handle it.

Then I found a great piece of software – TVersity.  It streams well – you tell TVersity where your music / pictures / movies are and it creates a library of files which it then gives access to your PS3.  But the best thing is if the file is in a format that your PS3 can’t handle – TVersity automatically converts it so you CAN play it on your PS3!

And the cost for this piece of wizardry?  Absolutely nothing – the software is free.  Not free from bugs, unfortunately (I never did get it to work as a system service) but it works fantastically.

In the past I would watch a (legally, of course) downloaded movie from my PC chair but now that I can watch it from the comfort of my living room on my nice, big telly it certainly improves the experience.

Now I just need to sort out my wireless network signal strength – there’s a lot of walls / kitchen in the way and sometimes can cause problems – but that’s another story…

Martin

Technorati Tags: tversity, streaming, ps3

OSCommerce is a very good e-commerce script and has a support network / user base that is extremely helpful.  But when you download and install it you won’t take long before thinking “Surely there’s more?”.  And there is – loads and loads of OSCommerce contributions that are (generally) free.  Trouble with open source software is that any Tom, Dick and Harry can throw together some code and release it; there’s nothing worse than spending time with a fiddly contribution just to find it doesn’t work or is just plain bad!

Recently, I started from a clean install of OSCommerce and the following are some of the contributions that I thought were the best and I installed them to make my store work better.  They are not in any particular order of preference because I wouldn’t want to run a store without any of them.

The OSCommerce universe is extremely dynamic with contributions being added all the time and I’ll be adding more when necessary.

As with all contributions BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP (both the code and your database).

STS (Simple Template System)

Out of the box, the templating system that OSCommerce uses is…not easy, shall we say.  A lot of modifications need to be performed in the php files to get anything sorted.

This is where STS is handy – when installed, by modifying just a few html files you can change the entire look of your site.  It can take a while to get your head around the addon especially when you want to do things like add infobox contributions but it’s pretty easily done although the support thread is (at time of writing this) 45 pages long with over 4,300 posts so unless you risk re-asking a question it can be a trial to find the answer to something.

Dynamic MOPics

Product images for OSCommerce by default are just a single picture which slows down the category pages a lot and uses a lot of your bandwidth.

The way I use Dynamic MOPics is I have two seperate images – the thumbnail and a popup image.  On the category pages (and elsewhere that a small image is needed) OSCommerce shows the thumbnail but in the product info page, when you click on the thumbnail, it brings up the main, large picture.  This is handy as you can have two images that are different e.g. if you have a bracelet, the large image can be of the whole item but the thumbnail can be a closeup image of just a few links to hopefully make the product look better.

Fast Easy Checkout

I never liked the checkout system of OSCommerce – there’s just too many pages and customers have a terribly short attention span.  FEC (Fast Easy Checkout) cuts down on the amount of pages that the surfer has to navigate by putting most of the options together.  It also has a “Purchase without account” feature built in which is handy.  There are a lot of pages that get changed so this was the first contribution I installed and was able to just overwrite the original OSCommerce files.

Batch Print Center

For my stores I have a label printer that is perfect for address.  In the olden days…I would have to copy the address from the admin pages of OSCommerce one by one and put them in the Dymo software to print out…but with Batch Print Center you can just generate all the labels required at the click of a few buttons and have a pdf created of the addresses to be printed to labels – handy when you have a load of orders you want the addresses for at one time.  You can also use it to generate invoices / packing slips, etc. – a very handy contribution indeed.

RSS Feed

This little contribution creates a RSS feed of your latest products.  You can then submit it to feed aggregators or if you have blogs, have the products automatically imported.  Easy to install but handy, in my opinion.

XSell

This most valuable contribution allows you to cross sell your products.  Often you have an item that goes with something else – this addon links them together.  e.g. you may sell a DVD player and want to give the customer a choice of adding a SCART lead – you can cross sell the items so each product is displayed on the others product info page.

Magic SEO URL

This is actually a paid for contribution.  I wasn’t sure about it to begin with after all, there’s loads of free contributions out there.  But one of my personal bug bears is that OSCommerce creates so many duplicate pages which I’m sure isn’t good for Google.  To check to see how many pages have been created on your site, take a look at Xenu which is a free piece of software that can create a list of links on a site – chances are, you’ll see many, many more links than you need.  At the very least, it lowers the value of the product pages in the eyes of the search engines.

Magic SEO Url does it so that there’s only one URL for each product.  It also uses a 301 redirect so that any page that is indexed currently will be redirected to the proper URL.  When I first installed Magic on an existing site, I initially saw a reduction in traffic (where the old pages suddenly disappeared from Google) but within a week (and a few sleepless nights) I saw an increase in traffic because all the link juice that was flowing around my site was being redirected to a single product destination.

Recover Cart Sales

Sometimes customers spend a long time in your site, add items to their cart, create an account, go to checkout and then…just drop off the face of the earth.  There could be a lot of reasons – they didn’t like your delivery prices, they weren’t sure how long it would take, wanted a different colour, etc.  Normally you’d never know what the problem is as the vast majority never asks you but with Recover Cart Sales you can send out emails to customers who didn’t quite order and ask what’s up.  Hopefully you can then sort out the problem with the customer or get feedback for the future.  Info is important and this certainly increases sales and customer satisfaction.

Google XML Sitemap

It’s good to let google know where all your pages are and this contribution automatically creates sitemaps that you can then submit to google base.  Install the contribution, tell google about it and then forget it – just how I like it.

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Hopefully this list proves to be helpful and if you have any suggestions on useful contributions to add then please leave a comment.

Martin

Technorati Tags: oscommerce, contributions

I had a phone call yesterday (got to love customers who call on lovely sunny Sunday afternoons – what’s worse was I was here working!) and someone wanted to buy a product but was having trouble with the checkout.  Now, I could have created the order manually and spent 10 mins on it or I could have used the account the customers account and saved all that time.  But there was the problem of the password – I just don’t feel right asking what peoples passwords are so I had a look around and found this little contribution…Master Password for OSCommerce.

What it allows you to do is go to the login screen, enter the customers email address and then instead of using the customers password, enter your master password. 

Installation is extremely easy – you need to run a mySQL command and change a line in a single file – that’s it.  One thing I had a problem with is that the mySQL had a configuration_id of 188 but that ID was already used by me which caused an error (nothing serious – phpmyadmin just said that the command couldn’t be executed) so I had to change that number to something unused and it worked a treat.

When I had access to the customers account, I then was able to take the customers payment manually via my payment processor – ProTX has an online terminal system – and then go through checkout but instead of saying that the payment method was credit card, say it was via cheque.  That way, I don’t have to enter the credit card details again and the order gets created in the system.

Just a security caution – if someone found out the master password then could get into any of your customer accounts.  While not the end of the world (they would have to know the password and the email address of your customers) it’s still a security problem (not that the person would have access to information like credit cards, of course).  One recommendation I would have is to use a secure password and to change it regularly.

Remember…BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!

Martin

Technorati Tags: oscommerce, master password, contribution

…Permalinks

I almost forgot and that isn’t good.

Permalinks in wordpress are how the links look for the pages in your blog.  I have it set so that a link looks like

http://www.pcscribbles.com/2008/05/oops-important-wordpress-plugin-all-in-one-seo-pack/

rather than

http://www.pcscribbles.com/?p=10

So, more keywords on the page for the search engines to crawl and, generally, looks better (I think).

The permalinks (found in settings) need to be set once and then left – changing it in the future can cause there to be copies of your pages giving you duplicate content problems – you don’t want that!  I put a dot in the “Month and Name” option – but you can be fancier if you like.

Martin

Technorati Tags: permalinks, wordpress

An important wordpress plugin this one, All in One Seo Pack.  The curse of the search engines these days (IMHO) is duplicate content and WordPress blogs by default can cause a lot of it.

What is duplicate content?

Well, let me tell you.  It’s pages / parts of pages on the internet that are the same / extremely similar.  From the view of the search engines, why would they want two or more copies of the same page in their index?  Their customers i.e. the surfers only want one copy so any other copies just get dumped and never see the light of day in the search engines results.

In a WordPress blog, if you write a post you can get a copy on the front page, a copy in all the categories that the post is in, a copy in the tag pages, a copy in the archives and probably other pages.  What the SEO Pack does is to make it so that all copies except one aren’t indexed by the search engines.  It also helps with sorting out titles, descriptions and keywords for your pages and that helps with the search engines to a small extent.

Installation is easy, just upload the plugin and activate it – I have left the default settings and it seems to do the trick but I’ll be doing some tweaking at some point.

Martin

Technorati Tags: all in one seo, duplicate content, wordpress

In my previous post (Getting More Traffic to my Blog – Technorati) I went about getting a technorati account for PC Scribbles.  I have also found out that you can put tags on your posts which allows Technorati to classify your articles.  That way, you can direct Technorati what the post is about.

I’m still reading up on tagging (which has a new version built into WordPress 2.5, I believe) but I’ll certainly be adding tags to my posts for Technorati – just to see what it does.

To make it easy, I have installed the plugin called Simple Tags (simply upload to your plugin folder and activate it) and then at the end of the post, you put in the code

<tags>tag1, tag2, tag…</tags>

Replace the < and > with [ and ] because if I put it in this post it gets converted to the tags for technorati and you can’t see what I’ve typed in!

Then, when Technorati gets pinged and crawls your new pages, it knows what it’s about – easy!

What it does, tho – that’s another matter.  Perhaps some stats would help…I’ll have to look at that.

Martin

Technorati Tags: simple tags, simpletags, plugin, technorati

Well, there’s only a couple of posts on my blog so far but it’s never too early to think about how you’re going to get more people to your site.  I’m not after mega traffic – the site is mainly for me to keep my notes in but while I’m here, I might as well go for the search engines.

There are quite a few blog directories out here on the internet but the biggest (as far as I can see) is Technorati so I have decided to give that a go.

You need to create an account with them – it enables you to have multiple blogs in one place which is handy.  One thing I’m not keen on is that it’s not too easy to navigate but after a batch of clicking around, I find that you have to “Claim a blog”.  Choose that and enter your details. 

When claiming, you have to prove that the blog is yours (fair enough…).  Technorati give you 2 options to do that – one is to post a message (Technorati gives you a code to put in your post, you put it up on your site, tell Technorati it’s there and when it’s checked its existance it tells you to remove the post…) the other is to give it the admin username / password of your blog.  I chose this option – I trust Technorati but you can always change the password later if you choose.

You can enter a title / description / keywords and I’d certainly recommend putting as much as you can.  Technorati is a search engine and can use this info for surfers.

When your blog has been entered into the system, you then need to arrange for your WordPress script to “ping” Technorati every time you make a new post to your blog.  This will cause the post to be added to Technorati for people to find and help the search engine spiders to find you.  To have WordPress automatically ping Technorati (and other services), check in your blogs settings / writing section.  Down the bottom it has a box titled “Update Services”.  In here, hopefully you have at least http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ listed (perhaps more).  Basically, it means that whenever you place a post, your WordPress will send a message to pingomatic.com which in turn will tell Technorati / other sites that you’ve been updated and need to be reindexed.

If you wish, you can manually ping Technorati from your account – if you click around for 10 mins and find the option

Being in Technorati won’t bring enormous traffic for you but it’s a start and it helps…hopefully.

I’ve just found a plugin that can help with Technorati (allegedly).  Just checking into it and I will probably be making a post about it very soon…

Martin

Technorati Tags: technorati, wordpress, increase traffic

When I uploaded my first post last night I had a quick look around PC Scribbles and the template I’m currently using – just to see what needs to be added.  Certainly a lot, at the moment, but it’s growing and in time it’ll be sorted (as much as it can…).

One thing I’ve thought in the past was strange is that WordPress doesn’t have a “contact us” page – this is just a simple form that allows surfers to contact me rather than having a link that opens up outlook express.  The form automatically gets converted to an email which gets mailed to you.  Not a hard job and they’ve been around for years / decades.  I can only assume that it’s due to security – years ago there was a perl script called “mailform” which had a flaw that allowed 3rd parties to send spam out using your server.  It wasn’t long before the loophole was closed but I’d imagine there’s still servers online with the dodgy version of the script sending out thousands of emails 24 hours a day without the owner knowing.

Anyway, the plugin I chose is called Contact Form 7 and it has some nice features.  The main one is that it requires a captcha which is an image with some numbers on it.  To successfully send the message, the user needs to enter the numbers – it stops automated messages being sent from your server (in theory!)  There are some programs that can read the images and fill in the numbers so you need to keep an eye out for excessive bounced back messages which could indicate spams being sent.

Anyway, installation wasn’t too bad.  The usual – upload the plugin to the wp-content/plugins folder on the server.  Make sure that the captcha/tmp folder is write enabled otherwise the captcha won’t display (caught me out…).

Enable the plugin and go to settings / Contact Form 7 and there’s a default form there for you which works but didn’t have the captcha code in it.  Below is my version of the code…you need to click on default form in the Contact 7 settings and paste the code in the top box (removing the old code, of course). 

Your Name (required)
[text* your-name]
Your Email (required)
[email* your-email]
Subject
[text your-subject]
Your Message
[textarea your-message]
[captchac captcha-76 size:m]
Enter the code above: [captchar captcha-76]
[submit "Send"]

You will have to change the captcha-76 number to the code of your captcha.  To find it out there’s a button called Generate Tag.  Click on that, find where it says Captcha and a box will appear and it’ll have a name – in my case it’s captcha-76

Lastly, you need to create your contact us page which is really easy.  Go to manage, choose page and I called it Contact Us.  Swap to HTML view (if you use Visual WordPress changes the code…not good) and copy in the following…

<edit>I tried to post the code needed here but it brought up the form…so you need to go to the Contact 7 settings, choose your form and at the top there’s some code saying “Copy and paste this code into your post content.”  Take the code below that and post away…simple!  Remember to post it via HTML view…</edit>

Remember to change the name if necessary (the code above was for the default form that came with the script).  Save the page and that’s it.  Check the page on your wordpress form, send yourself a mail and hopefully the contact us page is there for you – congrats!

Any problems…post in the comments…don’t send me an email via contact us

Martin

Technorati Tags: wordpress, contact us plugin

Well, I have at last done it.

For ages now I have kept either paper notes or text files when I have found a solution to a certain problem related to computers.  Now, I have decided to put these notes in a blog format – hence PC Scribbles.  It is where I will put solutions to problems that have appeared in my working life.

What is my working life?  I run a batch of e-commerce sites using a range of software and scripts and I spend quite a bit of my life attached to a computer and these pesky problems crop up too often but with them entered into the blog I hope to be able to have an easily searchable archive.

In the next couple of blog posts I will start off by listing the software I use and should also be putting up solutions that I come across for making my life a little easier and hopefully yours too.

Cheers.

Martin