Create A Website

It has been a while since I last posted. I have been building a few online stores lately and came across this article via osCommerce Watch (Questions to Answer for the Online Shopper) that I thought was worth sharing for anyone who owns or builds online stores:

The Shopping Cart: How to Answer the 5 Unanswered Customer Questions

Besides questions related to shipping costs they identify five questions that are commonly in the minds of online shoppers …

1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?
2. Are you safe and secure?
3. Why are you asking for this information?
4. Do I have to set up an account to buy?
5. Do I get to review my order before we transact?

A good list and definitely worth reading the discussion in the comments too.

The function reference for wp_schedule_event provides code examples for creating a plugin using Wordpress’ “Cron” or scheduling functionality.

Hopefully this saves someone the few minutes it took for me to find this - pretty much everything you need to know!

This is a cool CSS Sprite Generator:
http://www.csssprites.com/

Upload your image and an alternative state and it will output the combined image with the background position values. Nice.

Find the path of exim log files …

exim -bP log_file_path

Just setup a PHP/MySQL development server on my Vista-based laptop.

Here is a good rundown of setting up a VAMP (Vista, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server from Devshed:
Creating a VAMP

The other thing to know, which this article skipped, is that you should run your text editor as administrator when editing the config files. If you don’t do this you won’t be editing the correct file (only your Users version of it which isn’t actually used by the system).

Here is a example of how to use the Find command to find PHP files changed in a servers home directory in the last day …

find /home -mtime -1 -name *.php

Pretty easy to modify this to give a different time period, search a different path, or find different kinds of files.

Fresh off my news reader, from Bryan Eisenberg of FutureNow, is a great collection of links and resources for setting up and making the most of Google Analytics.

The Missing Google Analytics Manual

Bryan is probably the most influential expert on Conversion Rate Marketing.

A great resource.

Just came across a couple of great PHP-related articles.

50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools

It is a great list of PHP tools including: Debugging tools, Testing and Optimization Tools, Documentation Tools, Security Tools, Image Manipulation and Graphs, PHP Code Beautifiers, Version-Control Systems, PHP Online Tools and Resources, PHP Development Frameworks, IDEs and Editors, Firefox Add-Ons, and a bunch of useful useful extensions, utilities and classes.

10 Principles of the PHP Masters

Definitely worth a read for anyone doing PHP development regardless of the level. Here is the list

1. Use PHP Only When You Need it - Rasmus Lerdorf
2. Use Many Tables With PHP and MYSQL for Scalability - Matt Mullenweg
3. Never, ever trust your users - Dave Child
4. Invest in PHP Caching - Ben Balbo
5. Speed up PHP Development with an IDE, Templates and Snippets - Chad Kieffer
6. Make Better Use of PHP’s Filter Functions - Joey Sochacki
7. Use a PHP Framework - Josh Sharp
8. Don’t use a PHP Framework - Rasmus Lerdorf
9. Use Batch Processing - Jack D. Herrington
10. Turn on Error Reporting Immediately - David Cummings

I especially liked the discussion of 7 and 8.

Read this ebook from Sitepoint in full: The Principles Of Beautiful Web Design

This covers layout and composition, color, texture, typography, and imagery in web design.

I recently had to migrate blog posts in a Nucleus CMS-based blog to a Wordpress blog. Nothing against Nucleus which served a purpose for a long time and is still a really powerful piece of software. The migration is more to do with my experience working with Wordpres now than the quality of Nucleus. Anyway … I did a quick hunt for ways to migrate, which included some random code that referenced old versions of Nucleus and WP. I didn’t even bother with this. There is a much faster way.

The easy (and fast) solution proved to be modifying the Nucleus RSS feed so that it exports all the blog posts in full. These can then be imported into Wordpress.

Steps in brief (this might be different depending on your Nucleus version):

1. Edit the skin for xmlrss2 in Nucleus. Find this (or similar) <%blog(xmlrss2,10)%> and change it to <%blog(xmlrss2,1000)%> where the second number is larger than the number of posts in your blog.
2. Edit the template for xmlrss2 in Nucleus. It will probably look something like this:

   <item><title><%syndicate_title%></title>
    <link><%blogurl%>index.php?itemid=<%itemid%></link>
   <description><%syndicate_description%></description>
    <category><%category%></category>
    <pubDate><%date(rfc822)%></pubDate>
   </item>

   Change it to:

   <item>
    <title><%syndicate_title%></title>
    <link><%blogurl%>index.php?itemid=<%itemid%></link>
   <content:encoded><![CDATA[<%body%>
   ]]></content:encoded>
    <category><%category%></category>
    <pubDate><%date(rfc822)%></pubDate>
   </item>

3. Open the Nucleus RSS feed in a browser (it should be really long and include the content of all your blog posts). Save the source (nucleusexport.xml for example).
4. Reset the changes to the Nucleus templates and skins above so your feed is back to normal.
5. Import the RSS feed into your Wordpress site (this used to be under the Manage tab, it is under Tools now).

Note: this won’t migrate comments and maybe other stuff that is important to you. This is purely the post content.