by Michael Johnston on February 27, 2009
The is the second in my series of posts in which I explain how you can use various tools to help automate your social media presence.
Several days ago I discussed how by using Twitter Tools for Wordpress one could automatically post links to Twitter when publishing posts with Wordpress. Of course, Wordpress isn’t the only blogging platform out there, and as a reader pointed out, there are some blogging solutions, such as Blogger, that don’t allow plug-ins at all, making this type of solution impossible.
But if you happen to be using the aforementioned Blogger, or Tumblr, or even Wordpress’ own Wordpress.com, you’re not out of luck. Though plug-in solutions are not available, you still have an RSS feed, and through the use of this feed you can re-purpose your content in some eye-opening and time saving ways. You only need the proper tool to get the job done.
>> Read the full article
by Michael Johnston on February 19, 2009
This post marks the first in a series of posts in which I will explain how you can leverage various tools to automate the process of making your blog the nexus of your social media universe.
An emerging and effective technique for expanding a blog’s readership is through the use of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and many more. The essence of the concept is to create a social media identity on all of these sites which can then be used to post links that point back to the original articles on your site.
The concept is sound and unquestionably beneficial. But the basic problem for the site manager/blogger is that reposting links to content on these sites quickly becomes both tedious and time consuming, which is definitely not how a well run site operates.
Recently I made a conscious decision to begin expanding The Well Run Site’s presence on social media sites. As I contemplated the potential audience, it seemed clear to me that starting with Twitter made the most sense. But my love of automation made me abhor the thought of posting twice: once to Wordpress and then again to Twitter.
>> Read the full article
by Michael Lyman on February 18, 2009
Last night I upgraded my store to the latest version of Magento, version 1.2.1. Things went very smoothly, in part because of a few precautions I’ve begun to take during all Magento updates. First, because it can cause problems during the upgrade, I now redirect all web traffic to a maintenance page while performing the procedure since problems can occur otherwise arise. Another item I’ve made a standard practice during Magento upgrades is to delete the var/sessions and var/cache folders – whether Magento recommends it or not.
HTML Code displayed on Magento Front end
The only post-upgrade problem I encountered was that three custom product attributes would not render properly when viewing product pages. I’d previously created the three attributes in Magento – ASL signs, special features, and preview – to display additional product information about the product to my customers. For example, the Preview attribute is used to provide video or audio previews for some of our DVD or CD products. After the upgrade, instead of rendering the HTML code, as it had always done, Magento was instead displaying them as regular text.
>> Read the full article
by Michael Johnston on February 15, 2009
Since the dawn of the Internet, websites have typically been hosted on either a shared hosting environment, where one machine serves up pages for hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of sites, and dedicated hosting, where the site lives on its own server. A website that lives on a dedicated server owns and controls all the machine resources; in contrast, a site that runs in a shared environment must compete with every other site for cpu, disk, memory and network resources.
Although significantly more expensive than a shared hosting account, a dedicated server obviously offers the greatest amount of flexibility and performance. When properly configured, these servers can really give some pop to site performance, making shared hosting, by comparison, seem anemic, which it often is.
For many site owners, the sole factor behind their hosting decisions is price. The most inexpensive dedicated servers can cost $100/mo to operate, while a shared hosting account is but a fraction of that.
But what if you have a beer budget and champagne performance requirements? Is there middle ground? The answer to that question is a resounding, yes, and it comes in the form of a VPS, which stands for Virtual Private Server. >> Read the full article
by Michael Johnston on February 13, 2009
Sooner or later, every website or service is going to experience an outage of some kind. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a modest blog with a few thousand daily visitors or high-traffic web service with hundreds of thousands of visitors, no site is immune to downtime, whether it be planned or unscheduled.
Of course, when it comes to planned downtime, it’s easy to do the right thing by a) scheduling it to occur when it will cause the least inconvenience to your users and, b) letting your users know in advance that the downtime will occur.
But what about the anomalous outage or slowdown? By definition something like that is both unscheduled and, unfortunately, ordinarily occurs at the worst possible time. How should this be handled?
There’s a right way and a wrong way to handle just about everything, and in this case most of us are familiar with the wrong way: the site goes down or gets sluggish and no explanation or updates are available, leaving the user to wonder if it’s really the site or if, in fact, it could simply be a connection problem.
A great example of the right way to handle things occurred today, when Mailchimp began experiencing a crush of combined traffic from Valentine’s Day and President’s day promotions – by their estimate as much as 80X the volume from last year. Instead of leaving customers in the dark, they have really demonstrated that you can have a problem and not alienate your customers.
>> Read the full article
by Michael Lyman on February 12, 2009
When customers select Proceed to Checkout their cart is emptied
When I began using Magento 9 months ago on our live website, our customer service department occasionally would get emails or phone calls about people having trouble checking out. We spent months trying to determine the cause of this issue without much success.
The problem was as follows: A customer would come to the website, place items in their shopping cart, and then click the “proceed to checkout button” from the shopping cart. Rather than take them to the cart, our Magento website would immediately forward them to the home page and empty all the items from their cart. Because we could not find a common variable that was causing the issue we couldn’t determine how to fix it. The problem didn’t seem confined to a single browser or platform.
The Solution
With the help of Magento support we determined that the cause of the problem was the ISP providers. It appears that ISPs like AOL, Comcast, and Shaw.ca use a technique of changing IP addresses that cause security settings in Magento to empty the cart and not allow people to check out.
It turns out the fix is fairly simple. Change the Session Validation settings in the Magento Admin, found under System > Configurations > Web, to ‘no’ on everything except “Validate HTTP_USER_AGENT.” After doing this, go to System > Cache Management and refresh the configuration cache to apply the changes.
By applying these fixes to our site, people who could not place orders were suddenly able to do so. When you consider that, perhaps, one person in ten might actually call to complain, I shudder to think of how many sales might have been lost before we applied the fix.
Changing the Session Validation Settings will solve the problem of not allowing certain customers to checkout on your Magento website
by Michael Johnston on February 11, 2009
One of the most eagerly awaited features in Wordpress 2.7 is its automatic update function. Where Wordpress upgrades have historically been, to say the least, a pain, version 2.7 and beyond promise to erase the memory of that pain with just one click.
This is fantastic – when it works. Today Wordpress 2.7.1 was released and immediately I decided to put the new automatic update feature to the test. Alas, it didn’t work as advertised. After clicking on “Upgrade Automatically,” I encountered a puzzling Connection Information screen that seemed to want FTP credentials. No further documentation on what those credentials should be could be found. After digging around, I discovered the problem was a permission issue: all the Wordpress files and directories need to be owned by the same user id as that of the web server process; in my case, this was Apache. Executing the following Linux command in my Wordpress directory cleared up the problem.
chown -R apache.apache *
After running that command, the automatic update feature worked exactly as advertised. So, if you’re running Wordpress 2.7 and are having problems with automatic updates, checking and correcting the ownership of your Wordpress files might clear up the problem. Bear in mind that you need to be root in order to run the command shown above. If you’re running on a shared web hosting account, chances are that you’ll have to perform the upgrade manually. As always, don’t forget to backup your files and your database before performing the upgrade.
by Michael Lyman on February 6, 2009
The Magento E-commerce platform is fast approaching the one year mark since its initial 1.0 release in March 2008. I’ve been running numerous websites on the platform since August 2008 and have been very pleased with the results. The experience has not been without it’s hiccups and hardships, but overall a positive experience in all aspects: technical support, marketing, and the all important revenue generation.
One of the pluses of Magento is the ability to manage multiple websites and webstores from the same Magento installation. This has proven invaluable to me. I currently operate 4 different webstores from the same Magento installation with great success. I’d like to share how you can use special pricing feature in Magento across multiple websites.
>> Read the full article
by Michael Johnston on February 4, 2009
Today Mailchimp weighed in with another in their series of useful posts on crafting effective online promotional emails. Today’s example illustrates the 10 most common spam filter triggers and is well worth a read.
Some of the advice is commonsense – don’t use ALL CAPS – while other parts are just plain amusing. Did you know that having the phrase, ‘extra inches,’ in your email, even if you sell tape measures, is going to almost guarantee you’ll be flagged as a spammer? I didn’t, but upon reflection it makes sense.
I ran into a similar case myself several years ago at Critical Mention. One of our clients was a pharmaceutical company and they wanted to monitor televsion mentions of popular drugs, including, ahem, Viagra. No matter what I did, I was unable to get those emails delivered until I convinced the client’s IT staff that our servers weren’t spamming them.
by Michael Johnston on February 4, 2009
One of the hallmarks of a well run site is being able to reduce or, preferably, eliminate repetitive tasks. For an active site, one of the most repetitive tasks is customer support via email. Maybe you’ll receive just a few emails each day, but the amount of time you’ll spend answering them manually is really going to add up.
So how best to reduce or eliminate this problem? Fortunately, there is a very simple, very effective solution and it’s called an autoresponder. An autoresponder is an email account that responds to emails sent to it – even customer service inquiries - with a canned reply. Do you find yourself answering the same five questions over and over again via email? Once you’ve anwered the questions in your autoreponse you’ll never have to manually answer them again, freeing you up to do other things or respond to those inquiries which are truly out of the ordinary.
>> Read the full article
by Michael Johnston on February 4, 2009
This morning I logged on to Gmail to discover that the user interface was updated overnight. I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere else and it might be possible that I’ve just gotten to be one of the lucky ones to have the new UI.
The most noticable change is the row of button along the top of the message list. They’ve gone from oval to square, with a nice 3d finish to boot:
The drop-downs for Move to and Labels have undergone a functional makeover as well:
Typing any amount of text in the search box at the top will reveal only those labels containing the text. If you have many, many labels, this is a nice way of narrowing down the list. The same functionality is present in both the Move to and Labels drop-downs.
Update: I see Google now has a blog entry about the change.
