Friday, November 07, 2008

Paypal Integration

I recently have been setting up an ecommerce site from the ground up. One of the task at hand was to incorporate Paypal as a method to the checkout process. Paypal offers many ways to do this. From APIs that process the credit cards on your site to passing off variables over, to simply adding a buy now button on each product.

I opted for a middle of the road option at first, which they label _cart. HEre is the code:


This option allows you to gather your products in your shopping cart and send each item to be listed individually on one invoice in the Paypal site. The problem is that this option does not allow the developer to submit discount or coupons.

This posed a major challenge as the site I was building makes use of coupons and other special promotions such as free shipping based on benchmarked dollars spent.

The solution, set the cmd hidden field to _xclick and pass all the items in one description field. It's not as pretty or user friendly as the previous solution, but you then only have to pass Paypal a total amount which includes all discounts, tax, shipping charges all in one line.



The bottom line is that as you are developing Web sites you will be thrown several curves. You will encounter a multitude of problems. The best thing to do is to go at it, do some research and thing of simple solutions. Don't get wrap up on the problem, the best solutions are simple, effective, and best of all easy to code.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Digg This Del.icio.us Slashdot

posted by Death is Forever at 12:27 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

Monday, July 14, 2008

You are ready for an update

I recently read an entry on Eric Shanfelt's blog entitled "Publish Web First, Print Second" which further reinforced my accounts from a previous entry Instant Information entry. I have discussed this topic to death, which by the way is endless, in the past couple of month. I have discussed it with colleagues, friends, and just about anyone I know who is interested or willing to hear it.

Yet, little change has taken place. We all continue, day in day out, to use the Web site as a landfill. A place to dump all information, whether relevant or otherwise, and continue to save the best for print. I have also noticed that this is the case for most sites for which I visit and receive a magazine.

It dawned on my this evening that perhaps is not our sites or our processes that need an upgrade, but ourselves. We are at cross roads, a place where digital media is changing the way we obtained our information. We are at the point where most jobs are going digital, yet change hasn't taken place. People still walk into their desks and the only digital they see is their email. I'm referring to the mail clerk all the way up the food chain to the CEO.

I can assure you that less snail mail is receive every day than digital mail. We have completely revamped our immediate communication avenues, but have yet to see that we no longer wake up and go outside to pick up the paper. We instead turn to Google news, MSNBC.com, CNN.com, ESPN.com or some other .com avenue to be feed our daily dose of information.

Then why is it that most publishers insist in saving the best content for print? Because the senior level editors fear for their jobs, they fear that the pimpled face twenty something is going to come in and replace them.

My mother always told me and re-enforce two important things that I carry with me to this day:

1. Go into any career you want, just make sure you work to be the best in your field.
2. Always associate with smarter people, they will teach you new things and take you to the next level.

I used to think my mother was crazy, but what 12 year old wants to listen to their parents, let alone pay attention to any advice they might have to give.

The bottom line is that if you give the new generation a chance for expressing their ideas, and you surround yourself with the best and the brightest, you will rise in your career as you will have the best team working for you. If you insist in keeping them in the dark basement and cultivate them as mushrooms, they will grow to resent you and you will miss out in sharing ideas and growing your company to the next level. Ever noticed the Windows Update icon that pops up near the bottom right corner of your PC? A little box typically pops up notifying you of yet another update/upgrade to your current flavor of Windows. Don't you wish you came equipped with such an enhancement. Time to update!

Labels: , , , , , ,

Digg This Del.icio.us Slashdot

posted by Death is Forever at 11:30 PM 2 Comments Links to this post

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Embed fonts on your Web site

Recently, I have been thinking about design and the nature to code safely on the Web. As designers we typically choose to use Web friendly fonts like Verdana, Times New Roman, Arial, and Trebuchet MS.

Designers, however should not let browsers inabilities to carry a vast array of fonts interfere with their designs. Michaelangelo would not have sacrifice the roof of the Sistine Chapel due to lack of a smaller brush, so why is it that Web designers so often sacrifice bandwidth and turn to background images or heavy downloads to convey their message; not to mention the lack of search engine friendliness involved in presenting picures and images instead of text.

I sought out a clear answer on how to embed fonts on a site without the need to sacrife speed or SEO. Back in the late 90's both Netscape and Internet Explorer were fighting grounds for the title of browser reign supreme as such both came out with unusual plugins and font rendering programs, however this was but a mere patch and band aid on the problem as fonts were translated to images solving only the small side of the equation. I don't blame them as SEO wasn't a hot topic in those days and Google was but a silly word some guys thought of to represent their brand.

In today's Web, where Search Engines are the hot club were your name must be on the list, it is crucial to create SE's friendly sites. to do so, the @font-face construct must be utilize.

Here is a simple example courtesy of the css czars at A List Apart:

@font-face {
font-family: "Kimberley";
src: url(http://www.princexml.com/fonts/larabie/ »
kimberle.ttf) format("truetype");
}
h1 { font-family: "Kimberley", sans-serif }

"Those familiar with CSS syntax will recognize the last line. The @font-face construct may not be familiar, however it’s easy to explain: as the “Kimberley” font is requested, the font file is fetched from the specified URL. The syntax is described in the CSS2 specification.

To avoid long lists of @font-face declarations in the style sheet, they can be hidden using @import" like so,

@import url(http://www.princexml.com/fonts/larabie/index.css) all;
h1 { font-family: Goodfish, serif }

The bottom line is that you should not limit yourself or set the bar too low, there is always a way to solve the problem. Problems are easy to come by, but securing an answer is where the intellectual matter comes into play. Don't let the ineptitude of todays' browser interfere with the future, just make sure that you gracefully prepare your site for degredation or for those living in the past. To appreciate the true power behind css, please refer to the Zen Garden project.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Digg This Del.icio.us Slashdot

posted by Death is Forever at 3:29 PM 3 Comments Links to this post

Monday, April 14, 2008

IE6 PNG Transparency Problem

I been working on redisigning a couple of Web site and have come across a very serious problem. I created an image to be place as the background of a div. I then went ahead and included the company logo as a transparant PNG file. Everything was going great. I normally develop in Internet Explorer 7, but make sure to test on all other browsers, Firefox, Netscape, AOL, and Safari.

Turns out during my testing I forgot one, Internet Explorer 6. Well it came to bite me in the butt. When I pulled up the site, the logo was there, but to my surprise it had a grey background instead of the expected transparent background.

After many javascript and conditional comments trials, I decided to incorporate the logo onto the background image. The problem came in that I needed that logo to serve as a hot link to the Web site homepage.

The answer was simple, I created a div inside the div containing the background image and gave it absolute positioning with an onclick command. Here is the code:



The bottom line is that when problems seem complex, the main key is not to panic but to walk away from it for a few minutes and come up with a solution. At first glance, I became quite frustrated, but I turned to work on something else, an hour later, the solution hit me. Hope this helps you as well.

Labels: , , ,

Digg This Del.icio.us Slashdot

posted by Death is Forever at 3:53 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving - it's CMS time

So Thanksgiving came and went, it was a great four days away from work. But here we are getting back to the grind.

I have been setting up a CMS for my company and it's going well. Originally, I wanted to create a custom CMS programmed and built from the ground up. I could not get my boss sold on the idea, mostly because he has been burned in the past with software development, cost, design, and time frames.

I understood where he was coming from and decided to get to work on customizing something that had previously been done. No need to reinvent the wheel, that's what they tell me anyways. Anyhow, turns out that there are a lot of good open source CMS out in cyberspace. Some are better than others, but the choices are pretty clear, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, and Wordpress.

You can't go wrong with any of these, it all boils down to your specific needs, and the level of customization you will need. I used to think that if you wanted it done right you would need to build it yourself.

The bottom line is that these CMS systems are all designed to work with databases. Frankly, once you get the data into a database, it becomes quite easy to manipulate the display. If you are well verse in Web design and Web development, you can get pretty creative on how you parse and display the data, not to mention that they make it a lot easier to perform SEO (search engine optimization) work.

Labels: , , ,

Digg This Del.icio.us Slashdot

posted by Death is Forever at 8:12 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Joomla Day!

I was just visiting the Joomla site and found out that October 13, 2007 i now declared Joomla Day. The event will be held in Google's NYC headquarters.

Joomla! will be presented for the first time in Joomla!Day format for Joomla!Day USA (East) in New York, in October. So if you're a Joomla! devotee, this is an event not to be missed. Inspired by the incredible success of J!Days East Coast and Central, New York looks set to be even more successful.

The event is open to anyone, and will be taking place in the heart of New York City, at Google's East Coast headquarters on Saturday, October 13, 2007 — 9.30am-5pm ET. If you don't know Joomla! then this event is for you. If you do know Joomla! it's for you too! If you want to learn how to launch a website in minutes for a business or other endeavor, this event will provide you with the foundations of how to manage the world's most popular open source content management system.

In case you didn't know, the Web site states that, Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.

Joomla! is led by members of the Core Team who are responsible for the overall Project Management. All working together as a single team, committed to moving Joomla! forward in the true spirit of the Open Source movement.

Joomla is produced by the Core Team whose members come from different backgrounds, a diverse array of disciplines, with varied experiences. The Core Team is has members located in 11 countries throughout the globe.

Labels: , ,

Digg This Del.icio.us Slashdot

posted by Death is Forever at 11:19 AM 1 Comments Links to this post