Archive for November 2011

FXR Racing – International E-Commerce Stores Launch!

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
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An exciting announcement today for us, as we are launching FXR Racing’s expansion into the International E-Commerce world. New sites such as FXRRacing.no will be focused in Scandinavian countries at first, with the site in question being FXR’s Norway site. Other sites being launched FXR Racing Sweden and FXR Racing Finland.

What makes these new e-commerce solutions especially exciting is their localization features. Translations of the FXR site into local languages, combined with product prices displayed in local currencies mean that FXR’s global e-commerce expansion will be highly accessible for the consumers it will reach out to.

Keep the Currency Out of Your Templates

Thursday, November 24th, 2011
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I was recently tasked with creating e-commerce sites for countries where dollar signs don’t apply. Symfony’s I18N support was great for translating strings but proved to be inadequate for formatting currency. Having only used our e-commerce software to display currency in either American or Canadian dollars I had to first remove all hard coded dollar signs from our templates and invent a generic way to display currency for different regions.

Symfony’s format_currency() almost gets the job done, so I created a helper which augments its output. There’s nothing fancy here. You can add a currency indicator on either the left or the right of the currency, and if neither a left or right currency indicator are configured, we default to showing a dollar sign.

Book Review: Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton

Monday, November 21st, 2011
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My October read was Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton. This brief design handbook is an excellent addition to any student of typography which boasts itself as “A critical guide for designers, writers, editors, & students”. This quick read, which I read in a couple hours on a flight home from Honolulu, covered many of the same bases my college course on typography covered. More than just a crash course, Thinking With Type delivers the basics, history, and techniques required for effective typesetting. The book is separated into three distinct sections.

Video Blog: Generation Y & Advertising

Thursday, November 17th, 2011
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Here, I speak a little bit about the advertising that a member of Generation Y sees during the average day. Watch below:

Facebook’s Sub-Par Advertising Management Experience

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011
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As The Web Shop’s resident PPC ninja, I get to spend the majority of my Internet-Ad-Management time using Google AdWords’ management interface to create and oversee the advertising I am responsible for on the internet. As such, I feel kind of spoiled: their interface is simple and powerful, and almost negates the need for using a 3rd party campaign-management tool.

..And then there’s Facebook’s Advertising Management interface.

Don’t get me wrong in my intentions of writing this post. I don’t mean to say that advertising on Facebook is a bad thing, quite the contrary actually. Facebook presents a valuable and important opportunity for all

I’m on the Wordstream Blog!

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011
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A bit of shameless self promotion here; a recent interview I did with Wordstream Internet Marketing has been published to their blog. After receiving above average scores in their PPC Grader tool, I was asked to spill the beans a bit on my PPC success, so make sure to take a look! You can see the interview here.

What About Customer Service?

Monday, November 14th, 2011
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With so much of this blog turned over to the benefits of SEO and Marketing I thought it pertinent to mention good old customer service. There is no better way to retain customers long term than provide great customer service. When something goes wrong, and it will, it’s down to customer services to straighten things out.

Through search, your customers can research, locate and buy your products online. Social Media allows them to comment on them or the level of service they received from you as a retailer or service provider. Customer Service strives to provide improved customer experience and after-sales support. Dissatisfied customers won’t hang around, and the merely satisfied are already looking for workarounds, alternatives and substitutes. Unless you can engender commitment and loyalty in your existing customers they could easily be lured away with a competitors offer.

15 places you can use QR codes

Thursday, November 10th, 2011
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First of all a touch of information about QR codes for those that have not been exposed to them:

A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) first designed for the automotive industry. More recently, the system has become popular outside of the industry due to its fast readability and comparatively large storage capacity. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background.

15 places you can put your QR codes

  1. Business Cards
  2. Stickers

A class to take PHP shell scripting to the next level.

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
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Are you familiar with PHP? Do you find Bash shell scripting to be a special form of torture? If you answered yes to the previous questions then you are in for a treat. I’ve written a class to help make shell scripting in PHP much nicer. Here’s the list of features that were important enough to me to bother including in the class:
  • Return Code Checking
  • Parameter Escaping
  • Streamed Output
  • Exceptions
  • Object Oriented
  • Fluent Interface
Let’s get right into some examples. Here’s basic command:
Cmd::create()
  ->setCmd('ls -l')
  ->exec();
Want to allow for a variety of return values?

02d6afdbdaf1b2fd1a22f3317506e90a002

SSL Certificates: then and now

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011
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Remember a few years ago when a basic SSL Certificate cost you $300? It’s different now. You can get them for $10, sometimes even less. A few of my peers consider the whole SSL Certificate authority situation a bit of a racket. We were paying them $300 per year for them to tell your browser that we are who we say we are. You can pay them even more money for them to make a certificate that works for all your subdomains. The last one I setup was in the order of 8 times more expensive for that privilege. On their end, it’s not any more technologically expensive to create you a wildcard certificate, or a normal certificate.