Web Programming Answers

Replace column substring SQL Server columns

Caroline — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 05:17:29 +0000

Replace all instances of FINDTHIS with REPLACEWITHTHIS in columns COLUMN1 and COLUMN2 of table TABLE where those substrings are in fact found

update TABLE set
COLUMN1=REPLACE(COLUMN1,’FINDTHIS’,'REPLACEWITHTHIS’),
COLUMN2=REPLACE(COLUMN2,’FINDTHIS’,'REPLACEWITHTHIS’)
from TABLE
where
COLUMN1 like ‘%SUBSTRINGPIECE%’ or COLUMN2 like ‘%SUBSTRINGPIECE%’

Cool Duplicate Joomla Menu Trick

Caroline — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 02:34:12 +0000

Apply the same menu to the home page and the inner pages, but have the appearance change from home to inner:

Create the content
Create the menu (mainmenu)
In modules, assign the menu to the pages it should appear (everything but Home)
Copy the mainmenu module to mainmenu_home
In its module properties assign it to the Home navigation items
Put the 4 letters “home” in Menu Class Suffix and Module Class Suffix
In templates/xyz/template_css.css, modify these items for the inner page menu mainmenu:

a.mainlevel
a.mainlevel:link
a.mainlevel:visited
a.mainlevel:hover
ul#mainlevel-nav
ul#mainlevel-nav li
ul#mainlevel-nav li a
u#mainlevel-nav lia a:hover

8. copy all of the above items, add the 4 letters “home” after each instance of the string “mainlevel”
9. modify mainlevelhome css elements for the home page menu decoration

You now have one menu, two modules and two css sets.

Zen Cart UPS XML does not work with zones

Caroline — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 08:59:47 +0000

You’re here because you want to run UPS XML for Zen Cart with zones. It configures ok if you have no zones set, but as soon as you add a zone it displays the “unconfigured” yellow icon.

The admin and the catalog both use the same code to determine if a UPS rate exists. The problem is, the admin doesn’t care about where that zone is, but the shipping checkout wants it to match the recipient’s zone. So by definition the admin can never be configured because it never matches an empty “order” zone, there’s no concept of an order on the admin end but the admin will not mark the UPS xml as “configured” until it matches this ghost zone.

It might configure ok in your store, but only if it’s set to “no zone,” which means it’ll show up for any destination whether you want it to or not. As soon as you try to add a zone it refuses to configure.

The fact is that whole paragraph of code was off, I wonder if people are using this module successfully. There’s NO WAY you could ever have configured it to do zones!

Change includes/modules/shipping/upsxml.php (upsxml.php,v 1.1.4 2004/12/19) right after the curl code setup to the following:

if (($this->enabled == true) && ((int)MODULE_SHIPPING_UPSXML_RATES_ZONE > 0)) {
$this->enabled=false;
if (empty($order->delivery['country']['id'])) {
$admin=true; }else{$admin=false;
}
/*
$check = $db->Execute(”select zone_id from ” . TABLE_ZONES_TO_GEO_ZONES . ” where geo_zone_id = ‘” . MODULE_SHIPPING_UPSXML_RATES_ZONE . “‘ and zone_country_id = ‘” . $order->delivery['country']['id'] . “‘ order by zone_id”);
*/
if ($admin) {
$sql = “select zone_id from ” . TABLE_ZONES_TO_GEO_ZONES . ” where geo_zone_id = ‘” . MODULE_SHIPPING_UPSXML_RATES_ZONE.”‘”;
} else {
$sql = “select zone_id from ” . TABLE_ZONES_TO_GEO_ZONES . ” where zone_id=’”. $order->delivery['zone_id'] . “‘ and geo_zone_id = ‘” . MODULE_SHIPPING_UPSXML_RATES_ZONE . “‘”;
}

$check = $db->Execute($sql);
if (!$check->EOF) {
$this->enabled = true;
}
}

Programmatically determine Joomla homepage

Caroline — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:01:21 +0000

If both mod_rewrite and 301’s are out in full force the home page is not going to be identifiable by a Server query_string containing “frontpage.” To determine if the current code is on the home page:

$s = filter_var($_REQUEST['QUERY_STRING'], FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS);
if (empty($s)) {

//you’re on the home page

}

WAMP PHP 5 curl trick

Caroline — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 08:51:01 +0000

WAMP 5 does not activate curl via the php settings/extensions options. After that menu is checked open php.ini and uncomment extension=php_curl.dll, then restart WAMP services.

VirtueMart Authorize.net Code Changes

Caroline — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 01:38:23 +0000

VirtueMart does not automate Authorize.net test mode. It doesn’t read classes/payment/ps_authorize.cfg.php AN_TEST_REQUEST to see if it should send test mode to Authorize.Net. A quick fix, alter

FILE CHANGE classes/ps_checkout.php lines 24, 159, 484
line 24:
define (TESTMODE,true);

Lines 159, 484, call validate with TESTMODE rather than hard-coded “false.”
159:
if ( !$this->validate_payment_method( $d, TESTMODE )) {
484:
if (!$this->validate_payment_method($d, TESTMODE)) { //Change false to true to Let the user play with the VISA Testnumber

Animal Shelter Marketing Letter

Caroline — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 05:26:30 +0000

More info for animal shelters needing web sites or web marketing……..

… I’ve been building/rebuilding web sites for animal rescue groups. It’s my way of giving as I don’t deal with the shelter that well. I do two basic things: 1) build the site, 2) market the organization on the web.

The web sites I build are usually built on free software called Joomla. Instead of upload stories or changing HTML directly you would login to the administrator and publish your stories from there. If I do help out we don’t have to use that system, but I do recommend it because 1) multiple people can update the site; 2) you can easily grab email addresses from people interested in your org; 3) we can often add new features really fast. For instance I can add an online store in an hour or two; it uses a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor so you don’t need to know any html — really a whole lot more.

Here are all the add ons to the base product:
http://extensions.joomla.org/

The main issue, though, is marketing. I assume that you want your web site to be found when someone types in
nh shelter
dogs for adoption
Or the like.
The business of making that happen is called SEO or search engine optimization. SEO used to be mechanical and very easy to do. Now the mechanical part is just the pre-requisite to the real work of web marketing. It’s very labor intensive (takes a lot of time, though the tasks themselves are not that hard).

Successful SEO is mostly about writing, writing, writing. There are tons of ways to get the word out about your web site, some of them really help you in the search engines, some less so.

I’ll help with either of these, my standing offer is here

A few things you might want to know about me:

I’m a low stress person, I don’t want to be a CARRIER either!

I’m just here to help, if this causes problems in the org don’t ever feel like you owe me anything, it’s your organization

Really good SEO skills are marketable. If you want training to market arnne it’s a great opportunity to learn for the doggies and then use it in your career.

I’m available when you need me, please don’t stress on my account.

Best,
Caroline

Joomla 1.5.0 Beta Installation: Two Tricks

Caroline — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 05:25:28 +0000

Joomla 1.5.0 Beta Installation: Two Tricks

1. Do NOT enter FTP information during the installation. Whatever bad falls out of that will be dealt with later. Or, enter it but if you’re site’s slowed to nothing you’ll have to find the “off” switch

2. During database creation just go and create the database and assign a user to it first, then fill in the info on the database installation settings page. It’ll save you the hassle of finding out that you can’t programmatically create a database.

Did I say two? Here’s a third.

Get the Joomla 1.5 beta here

But then upgrade from the Joomla 1.5 nightly build here

Before debugging anything always get the latest build.

The domain name for local listings

Caroline — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 19:52:44 +0000

Should I Name My domain 111aaaMyBusiness.com? My employer added “a” before the domain name. Is this good for high rankings?

When your employer added the “a” to the internet name they used the alphabetical rule of phone book directories. One service people will use to find your site is the phone book, and the phone book lists entries alphabetically. By this logic the best name is 1aaaYourNameHere.com.

Phone Book Directories
If the phone book directories were the only source of qualified site traffic you would do well to compete for aaa- and aardvark- prefixed names. The local online directories do have some of the market. Verizon Super Pages gives customers a choice to sort listings alphabetically. Its default listing, though, is not alphabetical. The initial sort is “Standard,” i.e., the most relevant according to MSN’s algorithm.

The customer has to scroll to the bottom and choose “A-Z” to see an alphabetical listing. She can also choose “Distance” (from the customer-entered-location), which to me is the most logical sort for a list of kitchen designers.

Yahoo Local sorts by “Top Results,” listing those results that have keywords and other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) web site features closest to the terms the customer input.

Search Engines
Super Pages and Yahoo Local are just a small potential source of your qualified web site traffic. The Big 3 search engines will drive most of the real kitchen buyers to your site. Optimizing – and marketing – your site for the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines, while keeping the local directories in mind, will cover 99.9% of your web site traffic universe planning. Since the local directories are showing the listing results in the same order as the search engines (most “relevant” first), the first letter of the domain name is not an important factor in getting good results. Neither the local directories nor the search engines display the listing results in alphabetical order by default.

Hyphenating the Domain Name
So now the question is: What is a good domain name? Some evidence exists that hyphenating a domain name yields greater results because there’s no question about the individual words. For instance, new-hampshire-kitchen-design.com might be better than newhampshirekitchendesign.com. The hyphens are harder for humans to remember (we expect the “all one word” type of domain name).

Search engines do examine the domain name and do give it some weight. They also examine the web site’s content, title and headline tags, incoming links from other sites and quite a bit more. The domain name’s keywords can affect search engine ranking, but if those domain name keywords carried a lot of weight sites like IBM.com would be penalized for not mentioning “computer” in the name.

So we can conclude that domain names do not need to be alphabetical or contain keywords of your business in order to achieve a higher ranking. Companies that sell domains often advocate keyword-seo-friendly domain names. Search engine expert Quadszilla (despite the anonymity truly a savvy SEO) advocates using keyword-hyphenated-domain-names for better search engine result pages. Yet his domain – seoblackhat.com – is not hyphenated. SEO guru Rand Fishkin gives the keyword-domain-name (with or without hyphens) a 1/5^th of 1/3^rd weighting, i.e., keywords in the domain are one of five factors that in total make up 30% importance in Google ranking.

So the keywords in the domain name have some weight, and the value of a hyphenated keyword domain is debatable.

Keywords in Domain Names
One place that domain keywords do make a difference is when the keywords the user enters are an exact match to your domain. Type in a dream kitchen to see what I mean. But I checked Google and Yahoo keyword tools for nh kitchen designer, and they report that no one is searching for exactly that phrase. So the domain nhkitchendesigner.com will not be of much use in obtaining higher search engine results.

Branding Your Domain Name
Last we have the issue of branding. Do you search for books at books.com or amazon.com? The use of descriptive phrases in your company name or domain becomes irrelevant in the face of good branding. Good branding raises positive awareness of your business in the hearts and minds of your public. When you create an image of your business as the resource for your target market the name of that business is part of the image. Prior to the success of Amazon.com, the word “Amazon” did not create an association to buying books. So if you will use excellent branding techniques for your business and your web site the business name will fuse with your popularity, but it will not create your popularity.

What Works on Google
Fishkin summarizes good Google search engine marketing. Yahoo and MSN are pretty easy by comparison. But Google drives as much traffic as Yahoo and MSN combined, so it can’t be ignored. The Google methods are, in essence, good branding. So if you want good search engine results in Google you will have to make your web site an authority site that has great content and that other, highly qualified sites link to. The name of your company / domain name becomes so small in this mix that the answer boils down to this:
- name your company and your domain according to what works in the offline world
- identify your target market
- write both offline and online magazine articles
- write a very focused blog
- answer very focused questions on forums
- employ the mechanical methods of SEO on your web site

Conclusion
In the end, your name will not drive traffic because of the name. It will drive traffic because your business and your name fuse to represent the logical place to go for the best answers to the problems you solve.

QuickBooks Authority Error

Caroline — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 06:34:32 +0000

You already are logged in as Admin or Power User running QuickBooks 2005 when you get: “Windows XP and Windows 2000 users must have power users or administrator group rights in order to run quickbooks.”

Intuit’s Registry Fix:

ftp://ftp.quicken.com/pub/quickbooks/2005/RACLFix/QB2005_RACLFix_Rel.exe

Visual Studio 2005 Unable to attach. The binding handle is invalid.

Caroline — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 05:23:50 +0000

Debug fails in Visual Studio 2005 with “Unable to attach. The binding handle is invalid.”

One fix is: turn on Terminal Services.

Restoring SQL bak for data backed up on a different machine

Caroline — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 09:56:48 +0000

”the physical file name” “may be incorrect”RESTORE DATABASE DBName
FROM DISK = ‘C:\mypath\backedUpDb.bak’
WITH
MOVE ‘backedUpDb_dat’ TO ‘C:\mypath\DBName.mdf’,
MOVE ‘backedUpDb_log’ TO ‘C:\mypath\DBName.ldf’
GO

Where
DBName is the name the db will have on your local machine
backedUpDb.bak is the backup with the wrong physical path
backedUpDb_dat and backedUpDb_log are described below
mdf and ldf are the names and locations you want DBName to have after restoration

Get backedUpDb_dat from:
SQL Enterprise or Management Studio
Databases
Restore Database
To Database [DBName]
From Device: [click ...]
Backup Media
File
Add
Browse to backedUpDb.bak
OK
Select Restore checkbox
Options
The Original Filename is you backedUpDb_dat and backedUpDb_logOptions

.htaccess mod_rewrite to eliminate non-www domain and index.php

Caroline — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 23:11:15 +0000

#Redirect any bogartcomputing.com request to http://www.bogartcomputing.com
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bogartcomputing\.com
rewriterule (.*) http://www.bogartcomputing.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#Redirect any index.php request to /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.php /$1 [R=301,L]
#redirect any home/ request to /
RewriteRule ^(.*)home/ /$1 [R=301,L]

Joomla You are not authorized to view this resource - com_frontpage

Caroline — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:11:46 +0000

The Joomla You Are Not Authorized to View This Resource error has many causes. You will not find this one in any standard Joomla forum.

I added a titletag column to the jos_content table. I used it in components/com_content/content.php to set a custom title tag per content item.

$query = “SELECT a.id, a.title, a.title_alias, a.titletag, a.introtext, a.sectionid, a.state, a.catid, a.created, a.created_by, a.created_by_alias, a.modified, a.modified_by,” . “n a.checked_out, a.checked_out_time, a.publish_up, a.publish_down, a.images, a.urls, a.ordering, a.metakey, a.metadesc, a.access, a.hits,” . “n CHAR_LENGTH( a.fulltext ) AS readmore, u.name AS author, u.usertype, s.name AS section, cc.name AS category, g.name AS groups” . $voting['select'] . “n FROM #__content AS a” . “n INNER JOIN #__content_frontpage AS f ON f.content_id = a.id” . “n INNER JOIN #__categories AS cc ON cc.id = a.catid” . “n INNER JOIN #__sections AS s ON s.id = a.sectionid” . “n LEFT JOIN #__users AS u ON u.id = a.created_by” . “n LEFT JOIN #__groups AS g ON a.access = g.id” . $voting['join'] . $where . “n ORDER BY $order_pri $order_sec” ;

$database->setQuery( $query, $limitstart, $limit );

$rows = $database->loadObjectList();

// Dynamic Page Title

// ctb 9/26/06 added meta key words to title

$titletag=$rows[0]->titletag;

if (strlen($titletag)< =0) {$titletag=$rows[0]->metakey;

} $mainframe->SetPageTitle( $menu->name .” ” . $rows[0]->titletag);

Then I copied content.php to a site that did not have the $titletag hack. The result was a home page (com_frontpage) that displayed “You are not authorized to view this item” for each of the home page items.

PositionPilot.com Domain For Sale

Caroline — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 09:33:29 +0000

PositionPilot.com Domain For Sale

$7,850

Adding multiple domains to cpanel using addon and redirection

Caroline — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 04:50:50 +0000

Question: how to use cpanel to host multiple web sites, each of which has multiple domans associated with it.

Example:

Assumptions: Name server setup points all of these domains to the name server where site1domain1.com etc. are hosted; site1domain1.com has content in /home/site1domain1/public_html; site1domain1 is “main” cpanel site, a Mother Site.

site1domain1.com has web content for site1domain1.com
site1domain2.com has pointer to site1domain1.com

site2domain1.com
site2domain2.com has pointer to site2domain1.com

/home/site1domain/public_html: site 1 domain 1’s content
/home/site1domain/public_html/site1domain2: site 1 domain 2 is pointer to site 1 domain 1
/home/site1domain/public_html/site2domain1: site 2 domain 1’s content
/home/site1domain/public_html/site2domain2: site 2 domain 2 is pointer to site 2 domain 1

Answer:

site1domain1.com is the host cpanel’s “main” site. It has a public_html directory under which its web code resides. Make sure none of the following directory names exist under public_html:

/home/site1domain1/public_html:
site1domain2
site2domain1
site2domain2

Task #1:
Make site1domain2.com point to site1domain1.com

Go to Addon Domains. Enter
site1domain2.com
site1domain2
a password here
Click Add Domain

This action creates the physical directory /home/site1domain1/public_html/site1domain2

New Domain Name:
Username/directory/subdomain Name:
Password:

Point site1domain2.com to site1domain1.com
Go to Addon Domains.
At Redirect Domain to URL select site1domain2.com
Click Setup Redirect
Enter http://site1domain1.com/
Click Save

In browser go to site1domain1.com, it should show content in public_html
In browser go to site1domain2.com, it should redirect to site1domain1.com

Task #2:
Make site2domain2.com point to site2domain1.com

This is different than task #1 because there we were redirect the main hosting site’s domain. Here we are creating an add-on domain, redirecting it from the main site to the site2domain1 content, and then creating a pointer URL that redirects to site2domain1 as well.

Summary of tasks:
Create site2domain1 add on domain, redirect it so it displays site2domain1 content, create site2domain2 add on domain, redirect it so it lands at site2domain1.com

Create physical directory /home/site1domain1/public_html/site2domain1
Go to Addon Domains. Enter
site2domain1.com
site2domain1
a password here
Click Add Domain

Create physical directory /home/site1domain/public_html/site2domain2
Go to AddOn Domains. Enter
site2domain2.com
site2domain
a password here
Click Add Domain

Go to AddOn Domains
At Redirect Domain to URL select site2domain1.com
Click Setup Redirect
Enter http://site1domain1.com/site2domain1.com
Click Save
Go to AddOn Domains
At Redirect Domain to URL select site2domain
Enter http://site1domain1.com/site2domain1.com
Click Save

Menu, Module, Menu-Module Connections in VirtueMart

Caroline — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 04:21:10 +0000

How to ensure your module is loaded even if it means creating phantom menu items:

I debugged a VirtueMart site today in which some of the modules were not loading as expected. The problem turned out to be inaccurate menu items. That problem was not evident because the menu items were never actually used. They existed just to support the modules, not as navigation.

Here is a step by step on how to support modules that don’t have navigation menus.

Given a web site section full of static items, the items might have internal content links among themselves with no outer navigation structure. If a module loads those static content items it must do so through a menu item. But within the context of one static piece pointing to another, the content might just use internal links.

The problem arises because all of the other modules on the page know whether to load or not based on an association with a menu item. Those internal static pages didn’t have menu items associated with them. Therefore when the static pages loaded they landed on a blank pages with no other modules present.

To fix this scenario I created a phantom menu that was marked “published” but which loaded into a non-existent module area. The steps to fix the issue are as follows:

In the menu manager, create a new menu (StaticMenu)

Within that menu, create a new Link to Static Content

Choose the static content and give the menu item a name

After saving that menu item you will get the address of that item in the menu item editor, for example:
index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=41&Itemid=

Throughout the static content, whenever you want to refer to that item, use the index.php address just discovered.

Repeat for each static item.

Go to the site modules menu. Ensure that the StaticMenu is published but is assigned to a module area that the template doesn’t use.

VirtueMart Product Details Page SEO Title Tags

Caroline — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:08:50 +0000

In administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop.product_details.php, add the category name to the page title $mainframe->setPageTitle( html_entity_decode( substr($category_name.” “.$product_name, 0, 60 ) ));

VirtueMart Category Page SEO Title Tags

Caroline — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 20:14:26 +0000

In order to set keyword-rich title tags on a VirtueMart category listing page:

In administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop.index_sdm.php (your mileage may vary on file name), add and initialize a $title variable in the top:

$title=”";

After setting the category name, append the category to the title:

$catname = shopMakeHtmlSafe($db->f(”category_name”)); $title .=$catname.”,”;
This presumes your shop.index page calls

$mainframe->setPageTitle($title);

Letter to a client about the awful search engine truth

Caroline — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 06:27:23 +0000

Hey [well respected client name] -

I want to show you something interesting. I have to update my web marketing mantra to say links links links before I say content content content. I know incoming links are important. I know that aged, high quality, authoritative links are better than new, low quality, spammy links. But what I think I’ve been in denial about is that, for right now, links are beating content.

Google assigns page rank to everything it indexes. 0-10 where 0 is banned or not yet trusted and 10 is god status. Now check this out. This page has a page rank of 4

http://www.umdum.com/dir/46297.php

Even before Loren (page owner) added the princeton link the page had a PR of 4. I’ve got scores of highly relevant content on my site but I let my marketing go for 1.5 years and fell off the map, I only have a PR 3 and this page with no content has a 4.

So this was all coming on me like a sneeze yesterday when I wrote you the note with some good back linking tasks.

I KNOW google will fix this, the whole point is to index authoritative content, not well-respected white space. So content will be king, but I have to admit after discussing this with the site owner as well as a very well respected internet marketer that this is today’s realty, links trump content.

The newer new SEO - Authority Sites

Caroline — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:12:01 +0000

Google owns 60% of the search market and they’re the most academically inclined of the big 3 (Yahoo, MSN and Google). Google’s job is to provide spam-free content results. They know they’re not doing that now.

A good book on the subject is Authority Site Guide by Content Desk. I am impressed with this book but can’t yet endorse their product as I haven’t looked at it yet. I am loving the book. Google’s been publishing quality guidelines for years and this book describes how to build a quality (Authority) site.

It’s on target.I feel validated.

Some of Content Desk’s Authority Site comments I really like:

Choose a niche and subdomain the sub-niches:

smalldogmall.com: small dog stuff
Poodle.smalldogmall.com
Boston-Terrier.smalldogmall.com
Chihuahua.smalldogmall.com

Promote Interaction
Foster visitor comments
Give ability email and print the story

Incorporate a Reverse Ratio Advertising Policy
The more generic topics have less advertising surrounding them; the specific areas within that topic have more ads on the same pages. Monetize after you’ve filled a need. Don’t advertise on the home page.

Derivative blog monkey

Caroline — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 05:58:59 +0000

I always say that when writers write about writing it’s time for me to stop reading. This blog about a blogging tool is worthwhile, though, because it involves shiny things.

Latest addition to Web Programming Answers is the notable plug-in that prints purdy pictures across my fine fine blog template. And when you click one you can save my articles to social networking services and tell the world (or social networking services) what you like about this web site.

And now: shiny things:

IE bug: form tag has depth

Caroline — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:26:47 +0000

Like the the div tag, the form tag can push items down on IE. The only reason the “add to my cart” button image is so far below the top of that table is the presence of a form tag. By pushing the form tag higher on the page the button righted itself.

Affiliate Marketing First Month Wrap-Up

Caroline — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 23:32:42 +0000

I built AnimalImages.biz out of animal posters and books from All Posters and Amazon. The expenses were a few domains and hosting. Cost: $97

Eventually I’ll pay our writer, too. Cost: $150

Seach engine optimization efforts were minimal and included directory submissions. I bought pay per click on Yahoo, where our ads got 12,632 impressions and 41 clicks averaging the 2nd position on Yahoo’s search page. The doorm-room.net Yahoo keywords include “college dorm room checklist,” “dorm room picture,” “dorm room” and “dorm room decorating.” These had the most impressions. Cost: $73.86.

The first change I made was to get off the animal images and onto the dorm room marketing angle. I am now marketing dorm-room.net, college-dorm-room.com and dorm-room-decor.com.

July intake:
All Posters: $3.82
Amazon: $0.00

Painful 301 domain redirect discoveries using Joomla com_sef 404sef

Caroline — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 06:47:33 +0000

Answers the question:
How to redirect domains given tools .htaccess, parked domain redirect and Joomla component 404sef.
If you use Joomla and care at all about search engine rankings you’ll have to use a SEF translation of some kind. I chose 404sef and I’m grateful for what it does. Here’s how to get around something it doesn’t do, which is handling non-primary domains.
It will make Search Enging Friendly links for the current domain, but if you redirect a different domain to the 404Sef’d one the component will cough up a hair ball.

Setup:

Joomla 1.0.10
SEF404 PR1
Siteground.com hosting cpanel with parked domains
Global config: SEF on
SEF404 config: SEF on
webconfs.com search engine friendly redirect checker
.htaccess reflects 3rd party SEO
primary domain http://www.bombshelters.com/
secondary domains that need to redirect in a search engine friendly way to http://www.bombshelters.com/:

biologicalprotection.com
biologicalshelter.com
biologicalshelter.us
biologicalshelters.com
biologicalshelters.us
blastshelters.com
blastshelters.us
bombshelter.us
chemicalprotection.us
combatshelter.com
disastershelter.com
falloutshelter.us
governmentprotection.com
nbcshelter.com
nbcshelter.us
nuclearprotection.us
nuclearshelter.us
nuclearshelters.com
radiusdefense.com
radiusengineering.us
radiusengineeringinternational.com
radiusengineeringintl.com
radiusshelters.com
saferoomprotection.us
shelterengineering.com
shelterprotection.us
sheltersystems.us
survivalshelter.us
survivalshelters.us
undergroundshelter.us
undergroundshelterengineering.com
undergroundshelters.com
undergroundshelters.us
wmdprotection.us
Setup secondary domains to resolve to primary domain

These domains are all registered on network solutions. I changed the primary and secondary name servers on all of them to the siteground name server for bombshelters.com. Then on cpanel for bombshelters.com I used the “parked domains” tool to point each of the domains to bombshelters.com.

This worked, and then broken suddenly tonight. It actually probably broke when I installed 404SEF I just didn’t realize it.

Symptoms

I guess I had 404SEF off when I redirected the domains to the bombshelters.com name server because m initial tests worked great. You’d type undergroundshelter.us and the browser would display bombshelters.com content under the undergroundshelter.us address bar. When I tried that tonight I got “this page cannot be displayed.”

The pubic_html errorlog pointed to:

[24-Jul-2006 00:58:57] PHP Warning: strpos() []: Empty delimiter. in /home/bombshel/public_html/components/com_sef/sef404.php on line 83

[23-Jul-2006 23:04:24] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function: sefreltoabs() in /home/bombshel/public_html/components/com_content/content.html.php on line 584

Things that don’t fix the problem

Turning off 404SEF: it fixes the problem but creates the old problem of unfriendly URLs

Ensuring the strpos delimiter (and target) are not empty on sef404.php:

[24-Jul-2006 00:58:57] PHP Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter. in /home/bombshel/public_html/components/com_sef/sef404.php on line 83

bold line below is line 83

if (!empty($pathdata) && (!empty($sefconfig->suffix)))

{
if (strpos($pathdata,$sefconfig->suffix) !== false)
$path_array[$x] = str_replace($sefconfig->suffix,”",$pathdata);
$x++;
}

This is fine as far as it goes, it’s good to test inputs before assuming they have content, but it addresses a symptom, not a problem.

Similar to #2, defining sefRelAbs function against its will

]: Empty delimiter. in /home/bombshel/public_html/components/com_sef/sef404.php on line 83]: Empty delimiter. in /home/bombshel/public_html/components/com_sef/sef404.php on line 83content.html.php:
if (!function_exists(’sefRelToAbs’))
{
function sefRelToAbs($string) {}
}
What does work

In .htaccess rewrite any domain that is not http://www.bombshelters.com/ to be http://www.bombshelters.com/. Works for “bombshelters.com” (without www), “falloutshelter.us,” and etc. secondary domains.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !bombshelters.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bombshelters.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Big thank you to http://enarion.net/web/apache/htaccess/redirect-www-and-no-www/

and webconfs.com search engine friendly redirect checker

404SEF Joomla Directories-as-Filenames

Caroline — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 05:46:10 +0000

Joomla’s 404SEF component can be tricky if you want to use directory names instead of file extensions, aka

http://www.bombshelters.com/Education/Biological-Bioterror-Weapons-Effects

not

http://www.bombshelters.com/Education/Biological-Bioterror-Weapons-Effects.html

First, lowercase is on by default. Second, default file extension of .html hurls your pages into deep space.

To hae both, go to 404 config, set All Lowercase to No, set File Suffix to a blank textbox.

AnimalImage.biz dorm room marketing

Caroline — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 08:20:54 +0000

Affiliate Marketing Experiment
AnimalImage.biz is our first full-blown affiliate-driven ecommerce venture. It is powered by Amazon Associates Program and AllPosters.com Affiliates Program. Today I am adding linkshare.com animal magazines.

Animal Image Target Market: Dorm Room Decor
The site’s marketing target is the young girl going to college. Girls — much more than boys — will express their homesickness and actually try to do something about it. So our marketing strategy validates the girl’s experience and offers inspiring animal posters as a remedy.

Visitor Stats
We launched on July 8 2006. As of yesterday AnimalImage.biz had 34 search terms on Yahoo centered on the “dorm room” theme. To date (July 13) the ads have 3,244 impressions and 13 clicks. Today I updated the marketing copy on 8 ads. I believe some of them must have bee written in my sleep. I also need a lot more copy on the site itself but that is taking some time outside of my control. My web stats indicate that following # of unique visitors starting July 8: 40, 26, 34, 52, 8.

Promotion Activites
I launched the site on v7n.com forums by way of asking for feedback. I used OnlyWire and a few other tools to ping this post: Animal Image .biz (animalimage.biz) launched. I also submitted the site to some free search engine submission services, Yahoo, Google and MSN.

college-dorm-room.com, dorm-room-decor.com, dorm-room.net
The Search Engines are rewarding keyword domains so today I added and 301-forwarded some good college dorm room domains. college-dorm-room.com, dorm-room-decor.com and dorm-room.net are not meant for human consumption, they exist for the search engines.

July 12 2006 AnimalImage Revenue Results
$0.00

Technorati Tags
Affiliate Marketing, AllPosters Affiliate, Amazon Associate, Cat Posters, Dog Posters, Dorm Room, ECommerce, Horse Posters, LinkShare Affiliate Web Marketing, Search Marketing Bogart Computing
Ice Rocket Tags
Affiliate Marketing, AllPosters Affiliate, Amazon Associate, Cat Posters, Dog Posters, Dorm Room, ECommerce, Horse Posters, LinkShare Affiliate, Web Marketing, Search Marketing, Bogart Computing

Affiliate Experiment with LinkShare

Caroline — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 05:45:39 +0000

Today we’re monetizing the blog with LinkShare affiiate links. I chose techie and game links because I assume my audience is techie and game-ie. The LinkShare program is straightforward to join. The interface is similar to commission junction, easier to read.

I placed some links on the sidebar and some are over this article. I’ll report back on AdSense vs. LinkShare success.

By the way. Like this blog? Please click a link.

Technorati & Ice Rocket Tags
Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, AllPosters Affiliate, AllPosters Affiliate, Amazon Associate, Amazon Associate, Cat Posters, Cat Posters, Dog Posters, Dog Posters, Dorm Room, Dorm Room, ECommerce, ECommerce, Horse Posters, Horse Posters, LinkShare Affiliate, LinkShare Affiliate, Web Marketing, Web Marketing

Another great, mature open source web tool: eSyndicat

Caroline — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 06:56:31 +0000

eSyndicat is an open source link directory software package. It’s easy to use. Visitors can submit links or you can add them on the back end. It has unlmited categories and subcategories. It allows you to run AdSense, search the links and display new and popular entries. I had no trouble finding a nice, clean template.

Technorati & Ice Rocket Tags
Web Marketing, Web Marketing Reciprocal Linking, Reciprocal Linking, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Directory, Web Directory

Settling on a Blog Theme with AdSense

Caroline — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 07:31:42 +0000

The task today is to decorate the WordPress blog in a theme appropriate for code readers and flexible enough for Adsense Hosting.

After Joomla I’d say WordPress has to be my favorite tool. It works. It doesn’t talk down to me. I don’t have to threaten to hurt its family to make it go.

Finding themes for WordPress is much harder than finding themes for Joomla. My blog posts are full of raw code — PHP, C#, VBScript — so the theme I choose for Bogart’s Answers has to work with dicey content. (When I first created this blog over at Blogger Google made me wait for a human to approve it. Apparently all of that raw C# looked like spam to the filter.)

This theme — Corporate Pro 1.0 by Colleen Chard — has the strength and flexibility to withstand my spamish-looking code rants. This theme is a beautiful combination of color, layout and refinement.

Corporate Press 1.0 Theme

Of the many marketing ideas I’ve learned over at John Scott’s V7n forums is the very good idea of making the AdSense the same font as the theme’s font. I have added 1 link unit and three text units to the theme’s index and sidebar using the colors I found in styles.css. The result is Google AdSense that blends right in.

Technorati & Ice Rocket Tags
Web Marketing, Web Marketing Blog Marketing, Blog Marketing, Blog Monetization, Blog Monetization,

www.animalimage.biz gets magazines, books and animal stories

Caroline — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 09:20:58 +0000

Join us as we experiment with a brand spanking new affiliate marketing site. Today we added dog magazines, dog books and dog stories to our dog posters. The content comes from amazon.com and allposters.com affiliate programs, and our newest writer Castina Watson. Until we figure out exactly how we want to reproduce the results the site is not using a database. The pages are simple table cells that include individual files containing affiliate code.

The Yahoo ad program is setup, were waiting for editorial release. The theme is “decorate your dorm room with animal posters.”

We will be adding internal cross linking to make it easier for the visitor to stick to the site.

Animal Image . biz (animalimage.biz) launched

Caroline — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 07:23:38 +0000

We are proud to announce the launch of animalimage.biz.

Affiliate Ecommerce Site
Animal Image is an experimental affiliate site designed to create revenue for animal-related web sites. Eventually we will integrate what we learn into animalneighborhood.com and our free New Hampshire animal welfare web sites.

Content
Next week we’ll have 25 or 30 articles on the site. Most will discuss the emotional benefits of caring for animals. The rest will discuss how to make the journey to college easier for young girls.

The marketing tie-in is:
Images of cats, dogs, puppies, horses, dolphins etc will comfort the young girl decorating her dorm room and feeling the pangs of home-sickness.

Stay tuned for more on our experiements in affiliate marketing.

Animal Image
Animal Poster
Dog Poster
Cat Poster
Dorm Room
Dorm Room Decor

A Complete Guide to 404SEF with Joomla

Caroline — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 18:50:25 +0000

If you’ve installed 404SEF and gotten it to work you might find that it still seems to mess up sometimes. You assign a module to a page but that page is not always associated with that menu item. The module therefore doesn’t show up.
Actually it’s Joomla that’s jumping all over the place, 404SEF is just going along for the ride.
Let’s go through everything required to make 404SEF work, including when Joomla keeps renaming pages.

Install 404SEF as a component
modify .htaccess as per below
Turn on SEO in Global Configuration
Turn on 404SEF in 404SEF Configuration
If a module shows up sometimes but not others, and it appears that 404SEF is renaming a page every time it’s loaded, make that page static using the Content/Static Content Manager (create new static content and delete old dynamic content).

## Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above.
# Options FollowSymLinks
#
# mod_rewrite in use
RewriteEngine On
# Uncomment following line if your webserver’s URL
# is not directly related to physical file paths.
# Update Your Joomla/MamboDirectory (just / for root)
# RewriteBase /
########## Begin Standard SEF Section
## ALL (RewriteCond) lines in this section are only required if you actually
## have directories named ‘content’ or ‘component’ on your server
## If you do not have directories with these names, comment them out.
#
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional - see notes##
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
#RewriteRule ^(content/|component/) index.php
#
########## End Standard SEF Section
########## Begin 3rd Party or Core SEF Section
#
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional - see notes##
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) index.php
#
########## End 3rd Party or Core SEF Section

ASP.Net TreeView

Caroline Bogart — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:37:00 +0000

My first article on ASPfree.com

500 this page cannot be displayed

Caroline — Sat, 20 May 2006 03:32:00 +0000

Of the many reasons you’ll see this page while running locally, one is forehead-slapping good.

Check the protocol for SSL (htts://)

Jesse Liberty Live

Caroline Bogart — Fri, 12 May 2006 01:14:00 +0000

See best-selling .net author Jesse Liberty, free.

V7N Tech Blog

Caroline — Wed, 10 May 2006 05:58:00 +0000

Proud recipient of the first entry in V7n’s Web Development (Blogs about Web Development) Directory

PayPal donation button inside Master page with form runat server

Caroline — Sun, 07 May 2006 04:04:00 +0000

A master page must have a form tag with a runat=”server” attribute.

A PayPal donation button must be inside a form that posts to “https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr”

You can’t put that as an action on the master page’s form tag because (a) it’s ignored, and (b) if it weren’t ignored you hardly want to state that all of your pages should be posted to paypal.com.

One solution is to post the master-page-derived form to a hidden page. The hidden page does not have a master page. It submits to PayPal.

Donation Page

‹form action=”submit-paypal.aspx” method=”get”›
‹input type=”image”
src=”images/x-click-butcc-donate.gif” mce_src=”images/x-click-butcc-donate.gif”
style=”border:none” name=”submit”
alt=”Make your Thera-Puppy donation with PayPal - it’s fast, free and secure!”›

‹/form›

submit-paypal.aspx
The body tag loads the form. The user never sees this page. They are taken to form’s action location: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr

‹%@ Page Language=”C#” AutoEventWireup=”true” CodeFile=”submit-paypal.aspx.cs” Inherits=”submit_paypal” %›

‹!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”›

‹html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” ›
‹head runat=”server”›
‹title›Untitled Page‹/title›
‹/head›
‹body onLoad=”SubmitForm.submit()”›
‹form name=”SubmitForm” action=”https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr” method=”post”›

‹input type=”hidden” name=”image_url”
value=”http://bogartcomputing.com/therapuppy/images/juggopop.jpg”›

‹input type=”hidden” name=”cmd” value=”_s-xclick”›

‹input type=”hidden” name=”encrypted”
value=”—–BEGIN PKCS7—– [a very long encrypted string from paypal here]==—–END PKCS7—–
“›
‹/form›

‹/body›
‹/html›

Role-based file access and menu security

Caroline Bogart — Thu, 04 May 2006 02:23:00 +0000

Show certain menu items and certain files to members of Administrators role. All else see basic site.

ASP.Net Web Site Administration Tool
Set one user to Administrators
Have another user that is in no role.

web.config, deny all but Administrators access to admin directory:

‹location path=”admin”›
‹system.web›
‹authorization›
‹allow roles=”Administrators” /›
‹deny users=”*”/›
‹/authorization›
‹/system.web›

‹/location›

web.config, system.web, roleManager enabled=”true”
web.config, membership, providers add defaultProvider:
‹siteMap defaultProvider=”AspNetXmlSiteMapProvider” enabled=”true”›
‹providers›
‹remove name=”AspNetXmlSiteMapProvider”/›
‹add name=”AspNetXmlSiteMapProvider” description=”SiteMap provider which reads in .sitemap XML files.” type=”System.Web.XmlSiteMapProvider” securityTrimmingEnabled=”true” siteMapFile=”Web.sitemap”/›
‹/providers›
‹/siteMap›

web.sitemap, add roles attribute to menu items to be masked:

‹siteMapNode url=”admin/admin.aspx” title=”Admin” Description=”Edit Functions” roles=”Administrators” ›
‹siteMapNode url=”admin/shelters_edit.aspx” title=”Shelters” description=”Edit Shelters/Rescues” roles=”Administrators” /›

Remote roles database and smtp setup for “forgot password” control web application failure scenarios

Caroline Bogart — Thu, 04 May 2006 01:07:00 +0000

Which is more helpful:
1. “An error was encountered. Please return to the previous page and try again.”
2. A blank web page.
3. A DNS error while running on localhost

Scenario: setup “forgot password” smtp email for site being built on localhost but whose database is on remote server.

Web application
Click ASP.Net configuration icon
Configure SMTP Email Settings
Reply: DNS error, page cannot be found, or,a blank web page

troubleshooting
1: remove system.net and mailsettings from web.config
2. remove and replace remote database via aspnet_regsql

Photoshop vertical sideways type

Caroline — Tue, 02 May 2006 23:30:00 +0000

*diversion: photoshop/imageready post*

To create vertical and sideways Photoshop type, so that when you use the Type Tool the letters flow upwards and the bottom of each letter is to the right…

Actually I’m using ImageReady.

Rectangle tool, color #39B54A
New layer
Type tool: verdana bold, 10px, #ffffff
Type a couple of normal horizontal characters
Selection tool: select the characters
Edit menu, Transform, 90 CCW