Windows mail servers present an irritating problem with osCommerce originated emails.  Sometimes they work, and sometimes you get the following error:

Warning: mail(:onfire:) [function.mail]: SMTP server response: 451 See http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html . in c:/yourpath/email.php on line X

It was generated by qmail, an Internet message transfer agent. Your mailer tried to send an e-mail message to a server running qmail. Qmail threw the error because your mailer sent a bare LF. Mail won’t get through to msn.com and thousands of other systems around the Internet, because your mailer is violating 822bis section 2.3, which specifically prohibits all bare LFs.  

There is a fairly simple fix for this issue that involves a few osCommerce settings, and modifying your php.ini file

Change your Email Settings in the osCommerce Admin :

E-Mail Transport Method: smtp
E-Mail Linefeeds: CRLF
Use MIME HTML When Sending Emails: false
Verify E-Mail Addresses Through DNS: false
Send E-Mails: true

If you are still having an issue, change the following settings in your php.ini

[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
SMTP = maxidvd.com ; for Win32 only

; For Win32 only.
sendmail_from = sales@maxidvd.com ; for Win32 only

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Apparently Google has deemed that everything on the Internet is malware.  We should all now disconnect and go back to mailing letters and phone calls.  I noticed this this morning and after a frustrating few minutes having to copy and paste search result URLs to get where I wanted to go, I tried an experiment.  I searched for the disney.com site.  Yup, that’s right, the House of Mouse might just hack into your computer and steal your credit card.  Something is wrong in their QA department if something like this got through.

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I ran across the Gucci web site today while reviewing some sites using the Prototype JavaScript framework, and was amazed at how unusable the interface of the site was.  Initially, I went to the Men’s runway collection page and was greeted with the screen below.

Click for larger image

Keep in mind this screenshot was taken on a 22″ widescreen monitor with 1680×1050 resolution.  The gallery obviously goes off the right side of the page (far off, if you look at the slider at the bottom of the shot).  So, where do we click to move further right?  It’s those very light, very little arrow heads to the left and right of each image.  Makes sense, right?  IMHO, a slider or two much, much larger arrows, and surround the gallery in a div that stays within the active window.   A slideshow would be perfect here as well.  So, after you figure out where to click, you click on the little arrows, and the page moves further right.  So then you see this:

Click for larger image

So, now the left side menu has slid off the left side of the page, so you can’t navigate back anywhere without sliding all the way back left, which would be a pain if you are at the midway point, given that the arrows only move you back one image at a time.  Or you could use the browser slider at the bottom, but is it really necessary to have a page this wide when it could be done much more elegantly and stay within the active window.

Speaking of wide pages, check out this page.  This screenshot was taken across two widescreen monitors, and this is still not the entire page.  All this, just to display three watches.

 
Click for larger image

It’s puzzling to me how a large company like Gucci could spend untold amounts of money, and end up with something this difficult and non-intuitive. 

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Wordtracker allows you to enter relevant keywords and then drill down through related keywords. You then add your selected keywords to a cart , and Wordtracker provides you with a competitive analysis of those keywords across all the major search engines (MSN is the only search engine offered in the free trial version).  The analysis gives you the number of times the word or phrase appears in the Wordtracker databsae of over 300 million words, the amount of traffic you would expect to receive in 24 hours if you were on page one of the search results, and the number of competing entries for that keyword in the search engine.  They also provide their own metric, called the KEI, or Keyword Effectiveness Index, which is basically, the number of appearances for the word, divided by the competing entries.  The higher the number, the easier it will be to rank for the keyword.   It’s a great way to find long-tail, easy to rank for, terms for your site that, in the aggregate, can provide as much traffic as a major term that is hard to compete for.  There is also a free trial available.

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If you use Google Analytics for your tracking traffic on your osCommerce site, using the eCommerce tracking can be useful to be able to compare revenue from different sources, evaluate your Adwords spend, and more. The only catch is that you have to put the code on the checkout_success page, and you don’t have access to the order data on that page. The workaround for that is to record the subtotal in a session variable on the checkout_process page, and then reference them in the checkout_success page (making sure to unregister the session variable at the end of the checkout_success page).

• On the checkout_process page, find this code:
  
tep_db_perform(TABLE_ORDERS, $sql_data_array);
$insert_id = tep_db_insert_id();

  and add:

  
$oid = $insert_id;
tep_session_register('oid');


  after it

• On the checkout_process page, find this code:
  // load the after_process function from the payment modules $payment_modules->after_process();

  then add:

  for ($i=0, $n=sizeof($order_totals); $i<$n; $i++) {
if ($order_totals[$i]['code'] == 'ot_subtotal') {
$sale_total = $order_totals[$i]['value'];
tep_session_register('sale_total');
}
}

  right before it.

• On the checkout_success page, add this code right above the closing </body> tag:
  <form style="display: none" name="utmform">
  
  <textarea id=”utmtrans”>
  UTM:T|<?php echo $oid; ?>|store| <?php echo $sale_total; ?>|0|0||| </textarea>
  </form>

  <?php
tep_session_unregister(’oid’);
tep_session_unregister(’sale_total’);
?>


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Genesis Internet Solutions is proud to announce the completion and launch of the new site for the Abilene, TX Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS) group. The site is Joomla based with a custom template designed by Genesis. The site’s primary goal is to act a as a platform for the group to both attract new members, and to faciliate communications between existing members.

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Have you ever wanted to have an ad show up for a specific product category? Maybe you are having a sale on a certain category, or just want to cross sell a related item. Here’s a useful piece of code that will help. It allows you to simply make the banner group for the ad the category ID. Then the banner will only show in that category, plus any subcategories.

Add this to the “nested” section of the index.php page. Positioning is up to you.

<?php
if ($banner = tep_banner_exists('dynamic', $current_category_id)) {
echo tep_display_banner('static', $banner);
}
?>


And in the “products” section of the index.php page. This code will show either a banner for that specific category, or the parent category if there is no specific banner for that category. Again, positioning is up to you.

<?php
if ($banner = tep_banner_exists('dynamic', $current_category_id)) {
echo tep_display_banner('static', $banner);
} else {
$r = tep_db_query("SELECT parent_id FROM categories WHERE categories_id= " . $current_category_id);
$prt = mysql_fetch_array($r);
if ($banner = tep_banner_exists('dynamic', $prt['parent_id'])) {
echo tep_display_banner('static', $banner);
}

}
?>


This code could also be added to the column_left.php or column_right.php files to show the banner in one of the side menus.

Coming soon: A way to show banners for specific search terms customersuse on your site

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For years, Yahoo’s search results have relied on the Yahoo! Directory’s titles and abstracts for organic search results. This prevented site owners from controlling the text that appears for their results, sometimes resulting in rather uninformative and badly targeted text which could impact clickthrough rates on results. With an increasing focus from the SEM community on optimizing organic search result text for better clickthrough and conversions, Yahoo has finally added support for the NODIYR meta tag. Yahoo will now stop using the Yahoo! Directory information for a search result, and will rely more on on-page information.

The Tag Form
Covers all spiders

<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOYDIR”>


or

<meta name="Slurp" content=”NOYDIR”>


What this means for e-commerce site owners

You will now have more control over the text that appears in the Yahoo search results for your site. You should also consider adding the “NOODP” tag, which tells Yahoo not to use the title and abstract from the Open Directory Project. Then of course, work on adding the best descriptive text you can to each of your pages.
More info from Yahoo here

Other Mentions:

Seo Igloo Blog

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Back in January, we integrated a Wordpress blog into one of the sites we manage. The past two months have produced excellent results so far. Traffic is up for the site, and we are achieving good search engine results on the blog posts, sometimes ranking higher for a recent blog post about a product, than the product page itself. We are also achieving more inbound links and increased customer involvement in the site. I have seen SE traffic coming in to a post within 4-5 days of the post.

Tips to keep in mind:

1. Put at least the excerpt of your latest blog post on the home page of the osCommerce cart. It only takes a little code to display. This will help to keep you home page more dynamic, and puts the blog front and center for your customers to find.
2. Make sure to install the Wordpress database tables into the same database as your osCommerce tables. This makes it easy to display the blog posts in the osCommerce pages, and store information in the blog pages.
3. Put your product category list in the side menu of your blog. It makes your products stand out, and should result in more clickthroughs into the store portion of the site (we are currently testing this idea, and will update later with our results)
4. Make the blog look like the rest of the site. Design your osCommerce template with the blog in mind, to make the flow seamless from one to the other.
5. Reach out to relevant communities within your industry. Be generous with your links to other blogs. The link love will come back to you.
6. Utilize services like Technorati and MyBlogLog to build your blog contacts and community. Use the MyBlogLog tracking code, as it provides good information (the free version provides great info, and the paid version even more).
7. Don’t just blog about your company and your products. Give something back by talking about other bloggers, competitors (nicely!), and events in your industry. Come up with innovative articles or free tutorials. We have had good success on gaining links and visits for informative posts that have value for our customers, but don’t promote our products at all.
8. Encourage comments, but make sure to always have comment moderation on. You wouldn’t believe the number of automated spam posts for Viagra, Hydrocodone and host dating that come in each day.
9. Create a Google Sitemap for the blog and submit it. There are a number of Wordpress plugins that will create a sitemap files for you on the fly, and update automatically each time you add or edit a post. Then monitor to make sure your site is being properly crawled and to keep track of keyword queries and inbound links.
10. Add social bookmarking tags to each post (note the ones we have at the bottom of each post on this site). At the minimum, add links for StumbleUpon, Technorati, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and Digg.com. There are a number of good plugins available for that as well, the social bookmarking plugin we use shows all the major social media sites.

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I just have to say that MSNs BCentral is having some major problems lately. I know its a low cost email solution, but could they not at least send out the emails when they are scheduled? For the last week, I have sent four separate emails, and all have been 5-6+ hours late in going out. I emailed BCentral support about it Monday, but they’re “working on it”. Well, it’s Thursday, and I’m sitting here watching an email that should have gone out half an hour ago still sit there. I guess I should start setting the schedule for 6am, then it might be right.

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