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

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

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

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