Archive for category technology
Streamlining e-commerce
Posted by Randy in Internet, Internet Money, technology on March 2, 2010
E-commerce has been around for a while now. Ever since the early day of the internet, people have been making purchases online. It has become much better over the years, no doubt. At the same time, it has become a very complicated beast.
I recently started a class on e-commerce. We are actually in our first week of class still, but one of the first discussions has centered around a diagram that lays out the steps involved in a typical e-commerce setting. Looking at it has led me to realize that e-commerce is much more complicated than it should be.
I have a prediction for the next decade or so. There are some forms of e-commerce which have already emerged as forerunners of a new type of system. People don't want to go through a 12 step process to make a purchase online. We make purchases online because they are convenient. I would much rather go shop, when I'm trying to decide what I want to buy. However, if I know what I want to buy, I would much rather purchase it online.
Online purchases are more convenient, offer more selection, and are less expensive due to the more globally competitive marketplace. It's not as timely in regard to actually receiving the product. One has to wait for the product to arrive through shipping. Today, shipping has been streamlined to the point where it's almost not a good argument. I would much rather wait for a product to ship to me than fight the crowds at the stores.
Think about a trip to your local Wal-mart. They have fifty checkout lanes but only five are open. They could handle a massive amount of people, yet you almost certainly have to wait in line every time. This is, of course, unless you are like me and only go at 3am. At 3am there is only one lane open, lane 17 next to the cigarettes.
The point is, no matter how many customers there are in the store through the day, there are always lines at ever cash register. These lines keep people in the stores. It makes them spend more. The longer you are in Wal-mart. The longer they have to convince you to buy something else. They do this, not through pushy salespeople, but through subtle subliminal advertising techniques that deal with your senses of sight, smell, and hearing. They've found that the best way to get someone to spend more money, is to make them stay in the store longer, and at the end of the visit, they put you in tight quarters with many "must-have" items. They also put things like candy and tabloids there for you to grab while you wait.
This technique is being tested within e-commerce itself. Let's dig into this more and discuss how people make money online.
Making money online is dependent upon one thing...Traffic. Traffic is THE major factor in making money online. If one has traffic, the rest is pretty easy actually. Some people will tell you that you have to have targeted traffic or a certain type of traffic, but that is non-sense. The only real requirement is TRAFFIC. With traffic, you can find a simple way to make money.
That's what these sites are thinking when they make the checkout process so difficult, and this theory probably holds a lot of weight. It most likely does create more income for the sites. If they customers spend more time browsing your site, they are more likely to buy more stuff. Here's one thing to consider though. How annoyed with your site does the average customer become after a given amount of time.
Apple has done one thing completely right over the past decade. Some people think that Apple is great because it made such a great media device when it created the iPod. You may feel that the iPhone is simply the best phone ever made. All of these are mere opinion. All of these are things you would hear fanboys of Apple spout.
I disagree that the iPod is not an amazing product in the personal media device category. It's merely a mediocre product. The really amazing product in this situation is the iTunes store. Now, along with the AppStore and the BookStore, Apple has created a digital marketplace that is superb. These stores don't offer the typical e-commerce atmosphere. They make the buying process a one-click process. THIS is why the iTunes and AppStore is better than most others. They meld their hardware products such as the iPod, iPhone, iMac, Macbook, and Mac Mini to their stores of digital products.
Their version of e-commerce takes a 12 step process and turns it into a three step process. Those steps are browse, buy, and use. They have found that the faster a users gets through the buy step, the faster they can get back to the browse step.
In the future, we will see a lot more marketplaces like this. Others have already appeared, such as the Playstation Network.
This is the new way to sell things on the web.
Resetting WordPress Passwords Manually
Posted by Randy in Open Source, SQL, Web Development, technology on January 10, 2010
I've had to do this for my wife and her mom both, so I thought I would share this with anyone who needs to reset a WordPress password. I personally love WordPress. You can build any type of site with it, not just a blog. If you have created a WordPress site but haven't visited the admin dashboard in a while, you may have forgotten your password. I thought that WordPress would email you a lost password, but maybe they didn't put in their correct email address. It could have also been the installation script they used through cPanel. Whichever the case, they couldn't get into their dashboard and they needed their passwords sent to them.
There's a very easy way to reset that password through SQL. Whether you are using phpmyadmin or some other SQL client to access your databases, you'll want to use the following SQL statement to reset your password:
UPDATE wp_users SET user_pass=md5('password1') WHERE ID=1;
You can change password1 to whatever you want. I'm amazed that WordPress passwords aren't stored with more encryption than a simple MD5 hash. It's secure enough, don't get me wrong. I'm just surprised that the WordPress developers didn't opt for more.
Oh well, I hope that helps someone in a pinch.
Another look at Google Chrome
Posted by Randy in Applications, Internet, Open Source, technology on December 13, 2009
I've never published a "first look at Google Chrome", but I have been excited about it before. By Google Chrome, I'm referring to Google's webkit-based browser, not the Chrome OS.
When it was announced that Google was releasing it's own browser, I wasn't extremely excited. Then once it was available, I downloaded it to see how well it performed. I was amazed. The javascript executing was blazing fast. I'd never seen a web application respond so well. So, I suddenly became very excited about it and wanted to adopt it as my main browser.
This was soon shot down by the fact that I rely too heavily on certain extensions in Firefox, namely Gmail Notifier, Firebug, ForecastFox, and Adblock Plus. So, I had to keep using Firefox and hoped that one day Firefox would be able to handle javascript as good as Chrome.
Well the opposite has happened. Chrome now has extensions. I'm a little worried that it will be bloated and start performing slowly like Firefox. Firefox was once a lean mean browser. Now it is a bloated mess. It has started crashing without warming in Windows 7. I was once a Firefox advocate and I still like the browser, but it has been going downhill for the past year or two. Let's hope that Chrome doesn't follow down this path.
Firefox shouldn't even be that bloated. Sure, the extensions probably add to memory usage and Firefox reserves memory if it's available, but should a browser really be using half a gig of RAM? Seriously?
Chrome doesn't use less memory but it sure responds better. Adding extensions doesn't seem to lower performance either. I've added a GMail notifier, Google Wave Notifier, Forecastfox weather, Firebug Lite, and a couple other extensions and there is no noticeable change what-so-ever.
Now that these extensions are available for Chrome, I think it's time for me to take the next step. Chrome will be my main browser as soon as the extensions are available for the Mac and Linux versions. It's already going to be my main browser in Windows.
So, if you took a look at Chrome when it first came out, this may be a good time to look at it again. There are a few added features that may change your mind about it as well.
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Twutils.com
Posted by Randy in Programming, Web Development, technology on October 6, 2009
I've starting a new website and have almost completed development on the first tool. It's a site devoted to Twitter tools. I call it Twutils. The first utility is a spam removing tool called Spit Remover. I've settled on "Spit" as a good name for Twitter Spam. I'm in the process of moving the site to a new host due to DNS issues on the previous host. A few other ideas I have for Twutils are:
1.) Tweet Scheduler
2.) Follower generator
3.) Unfollow those that don't follow you (like Huitter.com's Mutuality.
I'm also planning to keep track of users who are removed with the spit remover. I may use this to show blacklisted spammers. I may generate a list of the most removed spammers, and allow people to remove these people automatically. Or I may just use it to create the biggest spammers list.
How to buy a Mac
Posted by Randy in Apple, Good Deals, Hardware, technology on September 29, 2009
I've bought a few Macs from Apple, recently. I bought a Mac Mini about 1.5 years ago and was very pleased. My company bought a MacBook Pro for me a year ago, so I sold my Mini. I left the company about 6 months ago. I was left without a Mac, so I recently bought a MacBook Pro.
So, that's my history with Macs. I've found that ordering a Mac from Apple is fine and all, but there are a few things that are lacking.
1.) It sometimes takes days before items are shipped. Most of these items are coming from China. The shipping process itself takes too long. People can go to Wal-mart and buy a Dell. They can also order a Dell straight from Dell. Chances are, the product will ship a lot fast than a Mac. Of course, you can buy Macs at your local Best Buy or Apple Store as well. Shipping is not really an issue there. It just happened to seem strange to me that it takes so long to get the product straight from Apple when ordering from their online store.
2.) While Macs themselves aren't overpriced when you step back and look at what you are getting for the money, the upgrades for Macs are ridiculous. They are actually unbelievable to anyone who follows hardware prices at all.
For instance, to upgrade a Mac Pro from the standard 3gb of RAM to 16gb of RAM costs $1850. Someone should tell Apple that RAM has been dirt cheap for at least 5 years. One can buy 16gb of 1066mhz ECC PC8500 RAM from Newegg for around $620, or as noted later in this article, one can get the same Ram for as little as $400. That's 4 chips at 4gb each, exactly what Apple offers.
Some may argue that the quality of the RAM is better from Apple. People please...It's the same stuff. Apple doesn't make their own RAM. They order it from the same RAM manufacturers that companies like Dell and HP order from. The same thing goes for hard drives, video cards, and DVD drives. Each of these are not better just because you ordered them from Apple.
I like MacBook Pros, Mac Minis, and iMacs, but I wouldn't advise anyone getting an Apple upgrade for any of them except for the processor. Even with the processor, I would advise to stick with the standard. If you need to upgrade anything else about your Mac, buy the hardware online. Get the specific type needed and buy from an online retailer.
Here is 4gb of 1066mhz ECC memory for just over $100. Get 4 of those and you have saved around $1400 compared to the Apple upgrade.
So, when buying a Mac, it's best to buy from a source other than Apple's online store, if you like getting your packages in a timely manner. If you must get your Mac straight from Apple, do not purchase upgrades from them. Buy your upgrades the smart way, from someone else.
Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration
Posted by Randy in Apple, Internet, Programming, Web Development, technology on September 24, 2009
If you've seen that error message you've probably happened upon a security feature that your shared web hosting provider has enabled. There are a few work-arounds for this error but most require you to have certain privileges on the server that you probably don't have. Quite frankly, if you are getting these errors you probably don't have the ability to change these settings yourself.
Rather than try to get the provider to change these settings (let's face it, they have this enabled for a reason and surely someone else has already tried to get this changed, right?) one can easily get around this with Curl. In most cases, curl will be enabled on the server. So here is the quick and dirty way to get around it:
Create a PHP file and name it anything you want. For the sake of this article we'll refer to it as curl_functions.php. In this file put the following functions:
<?php
function setupMyCurl() {
$myCurl = curl_init();
$temp = curl_setopt($myCurl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
return($myCurl);
}
define("myCurl", setupMyCurl());
function curl_get_contents($url) {
$temp = curl_setopt(myCurl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
return(curl_exec(myCurl));
}
?>
Include or require this file. Then, all you have to do is use the curl_get_contents($url) in your code to pull in the xml to a string. Then use the simplexml_load_string() instead of simplexml_load_file(). This will give you the same results but works around the url fopen feature. If you don't have curl enabled on your host, GET ANOTHER HOST. 
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