Mac snobbery
I’ve just read an article over at TUAW, reporting on research that says that Mac owners are snobs. Apparently, they are more likely:
- to be perfectionists
- to use notebooks
- to use teeth whitening products
- to drive station wagons
- to pay for downloaded music
- to go to Starbucks
- to care about “green” products and the environment
- to own a hybrid car
- to buy 5 pairs of sneakers in a year
I know that I haven’t achieved my perfectionist status yet, but there are a number of things on there that I hope I never manage. You can keep Starbucks for a start, and don’t come near me with hybrid cars and station wagons. And I expect a pair of trainers (or sneakers if you must) to last at least two years, so I’ll buy five pairs in a decade not a year. As for teeth whitening products… I’m British - we don’t do white teeth!
Personally, I think it’s just jealousy on the part of PC users because they know that a Mac is really what they want.
Shopping carts - the saga grows ever longer
The trials and tribulations we’re having at work with shopping cart software continues to be a pain in the arse. Every time you think you’ve found a solution and that yes, this is the one we’re going to use, something comes along and blows a hole right through your plans.
As I’ve written in previous posts, we’d been looking mainly at Zen Cart which seemed to have all the functionality but had a back-end so horrible that it almost made your eyes bleed. Coupled with this is the fact that a lot of what should be simple settings (like changing the date format) require major hacking around in PHP files. This is not the best solution for an application that is to be used in a commercial environment; time should be spent in more productive areas. But this is what was available to us and so we were (painfully) slowly beginning to get a handle on it and get it set up.
Then whilst browsing a tech support forum a colleague came across a reference to CS Cart; not one we’d heard of before, but they had an online demo that you could check out. Still open source (although not free) CS Cart is so much more user-friendly than Zen Cart. Changing the date format is the click of one option button, the layout is good, everything is sensibly arranged. Downloaded a trial version, loaded it up and within about three hours had got further than we did with Zen Cart in about 24. But then, just as we were thinking that we’d got it all sorted (and were starting to chat up the big boss for the $195 asking price) we discovered that it couldn’t manage VAT in the way that we needed it to.
VAT (sales tax) is a painful subject for shopping cart software, and a lot of them don’t seem able to get a handle on it. Based in the UK, we have to include VAT (which runs at 17.5%) in all of our prices for UK and EC deliveries, but not for deliveries outside the EC. Further, at the checkout we need to be able to show the VAT element of the total price. But while browsing the cart, UK consumers expect to see the full price, not the price without VAT and this is the bit that CS Cart can’t seem to get a handle on. If you set it to display prices with VAT then VAT gets charged for ALL deliveries, no matter where they are going. If you set it so that it shows the correct prices for deliveries outside the EC, then UK and EC consumers will see the pre-VAT price in big letters and the post-VAT price much smaller - until they actually checkout. No combination of settings seemed to rectify the situation.
I then read somewhere that CS Cart was based on X Cart, so I went to see if they had a demo version. Not only do they, but it comes ready set up for UK VAT and does everything absolutely as we’d want it to. But, it’s more expensive and there’s quite a bit of functionality, standard in CS Cart, that is an add-on extra - at quite a bit more money. Considering there’s no budget for this project and we were trying to do it with only free software, we’re now left in a bit of tricky situation - go for the cheaper option which has more functionality but can’t do the VAT 100% properly, or lose some of the functionality in return for being able to do the VAT the way it should be done?
If there’s anyone out there who has any experience using CS Cart or X Cart, I’d appreciate knowing what your opinion is. Is one better than the other, and if so, why? Is X Cart worth the extra money, or do you know a way to get CS Cart to do the VAT?
Going to back to Safari
For several months now I’ve been using Flock as my browser of choice. Built on the Mozilla engine, it is a very good browser - lots of new things (in built Facebook integration, for example) and quite fast. The in-built blog editor has also been a major plus point for it.
But I’ve found that it does like to lock up quite a lot which I don’t like. Every now and again, it just vapour locks itself and I’m left with no option but to Force Quit. Only takes a few moments, but it is annoying.
In addition to this, I’ve not been 100% satisfied with the way it deals with tags when posting blog entries to a Wordpress blog; this may be a limitation of Wordpress rather than Flock, but Ecto has no problems dealing with them properly. And that’s what I’m using for my blog entries at the moment. I overcame my reservations with it and am actually really happy with Ecto as a blogging client.
The final nail in the coffin for Flock (at least at the moment, I may go back to it in the future) is the WebKit version of Safari. Whilst this is development software, it is very fast (by far the fastest browser I’ve used on this machine) and it somehow feels right to be using Safari on an iMac. Even though it’s development software, I’m not having the lock-ups that I’ve been getting with Flock, and I prefer the way it presents drop-down lists and buttons (a small thing, I know, but it’s the small things that you live with on a day-to-day basis and they are important).
If you’re on a Windows system and aren’t already using a Mozilla-based browser (and even if you are), I’d recommend giving Flock a go; it’s the best of the Mozilla browsers and waaayy better than whichever flavour of IE you might be using. If you’re on OS X and you haven’t tried it, give it a go and see if you have the same lock-up issues I did. I’d also recommend you give the WebKit version of Safari a go - so far it does not seem to have any extra features, but it does absolutely fly!
Domains
Part of “Going Self-Hosted with Wordpress: A Wolfie Guide” [PDF]
In the first installment of this Guide, I covered getting yourself some hosting for your very own website, but I didn’t really go into depth about domains; since then I’ve had a couple of requests to cover that subject a bit more fully and now seemed like the right time.
What is a domain?
Simply put, it’s an Internet address, like wolfshowl.com. It’s a unique name that identifies a website on the Net. It can be a “friendly” address (words that you can understand) just a group of numbers, like 192.168.0.1.
You may also hear terms like “top-level” and “second-level” when referring to domains; this refers to the extension at the end of the address. For example, wolfshowl.com is a top-level domain, whereas wolfshowl.co.uk would be a second-level domain. As far as I can see, there is no practical difference, except for the snob value of having a top level-domain.
How do I choose a domain?
This can be trickier - all of the good ones are gone! Basically, decide first what domain extension you want; would you prefer the one specifically for your country (so for the UK you’d be looking at .co.uk), do you want a .com, or do you want one of the more academic ones like .org or .info?
Then think about what you want after the www; if you run a company, you’ll probably want to have the company name or perhaps your best-selling product. For bloggers, you might want your name or the name of your blog. Any and all of these are valid options, but remember that you may not be able to have your first choice because someone will have got there first. You have no rights whatsoever to your name as far as domain names are concerned; it’s first come, first served.
Finally, go to who.is and enter what you’d like in the search box. The results page will tell you whether it’s available, who owns it if it’s not and what related domains may still be available.
I’ve decided what I want. How do I buy it?
Here you have loads of choice. There are sites all over the web at which you can register a domain. If you just want to register the name but don’t want any hosting at the moment, do a Google search for “domain registration” and see what comes up; the maximum I would pay would be £8.50 (about $17), which should get you a .com for a year or a .co.uk for two years. There are many sites out there with headline prices much lower than this; just make sure you read the small print.
If you want hosting as well, then I suggest you register your domain name when you sign up for your hosting package. That way, all the paperwork is taken care of in one go. The two companies I mentioned in the previous article (A Small Orange and Hosting-Unlimited) will both do this for you.
Make sure that, whoever registers it for you, it gets registered in your name not theirs. I’ve heard that some of the companies offering rock-bottom registration prices don’t register them in your name but in theirs. That way, it becomes difficult for you to do anything with the name because it is more difficult for you to prove ownership.
Now I’ve got it, what next?
Well, now you need to set up your site. Use the information in the previous articles if you need help on this.
Wordpress.com offer domain mapping. What’s that?
This paid add-on to the free Wordpress.com blogging service lets you buy a domain name and then have it re-direct to your free-hosted blog. That way, you look like you’re self-hosted but you’re not and you remain bound by the Wordpress.com Terms of Service.
The problem with the domain mapping add-on is that it goes the wrong way. Most people will have started with a free-hosted blog and will be looking to move to self-hosted, and so would want to point their free-hosted blog to their brand new site. That way the traffic and readership they’ve worked so hard to build up on the free-hosted site would be re-directed to the self-hosted site, helping it to establish itself and build up traffic, Alexa Rank, Real Rank and Google Page Rank quickly rather than having to start from scratch.
Zen and the art of website construction
You’ll have noticed that there haven’t been many posts recently - this despite me signing up to the Blog365 Challenge - and those that there have been have been moaning about software.
Well, the reason for less posts is that I’m still trying to get a handle on Zen Cart, the shopping cart / database software that we’re currently using to create a new e-commerce website. I’ve already written about the various annoyances that I’ve discovered with it, and I’ve spent quite a large part of this week trying to solve other problems with it.
This is from the Zen Cart website, and was part of the original decision-making process that included it in the shortlist:
Zen Cart™ truly is the art of e-commerce; a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently.
Some “solutions” seem to be complicated programming exercises instead of responding to users’ needs, Zen Cart™ puts the merchants and shoppers requirements first. Similarly, other programs are nearly impossible to install and use without an IT degree, Zen Cart™ can be installed and set-up by anyone with the most basic web site building and computer skills.
I’d take issue with some of that; while Zen is indeed free - you don’t even have to pay to set up payment providers, which you do have to with some other free shopping carts - but there’s no way it’s user-friendly, nor can it be installed and set-up by anyone with basic skills. I’m no programming or web-design genius but I do know my way about - and I’ve been struggling all week to do the simplest things.
For instance, date formats. Zen is a US-centric application, so naturally the date format is wrong: Month, Day, Year instead of the correct Day, Month, Year. Now, I can change from US dollar to UK pound with a couple of clicks of a mouse, but to change the date format I have to go delving into php files and changing code. After I’ve spent ages trying to find out from various FAQ’s, forums and wikis which code I need to change.
Adding postage methods takes yet more coding; as does changing the default weight label from pounds to grams. Why are these basic things so hard to achieve? If I hadn’t had to spend so long sorting out things like this, then I could probably have finished the site by now. And it would seem that it’s not just me - the Zen Cart forums are full of people asking how to do what should be relatively simple things, and getting answers that involve making code changes rather than just clicking an option or two.
Zen Cart is, from a functionality point of view, a good system - especially when you add in that it’s free - but the developers do seem to have missed a trick with the useability level. If you’re looking for a shopping cart system, be aware that it does not live up to its publicity on that score.
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
