Author Archives: bill

Interesting Story About Identity Theft

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I found this one via Reddit today and found it quite fascinating. Karen Lodrick, a native of San Francisco, was a victim of identity theft and had been trying to get herself out of the mess for nearly six months. A regular visit to Starbucks, where she ordered a Latte, saw a familiar light-brown suede coat from a security camera photo she had seen at her bank identifying the person who had stolen identity as not being herself. After a call to 911, a lengthy chase, and finally the police finding her in a Walgreens parking garage, she was caught. I have to give Karen credit for taking advantage of the situation and chasing her down so she could get her life back. Makes you think twice about throwing those credit card applications away in the trash before shredding them or ripping them up.

Why I’ll Never Buy Computer Hardware From ZipZoomfly.com Again

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Typically you can find pretty good deals on computer hardware online. Usually I check Newegg and ZipZoomfly for what I’m looking for and figure out where the best deal is. This time around, I decided I’d just try ZipZoomfly out since I found what I was looking for at a reasonable price. Both items were marked as in stock and for twenty dollars for overnight shipping and I’d have my new hardware the next day. Yay! When the package arrived, I wasn’t happy. Only one item had arrived.

I call their customer service to ask what is going on. I was told after being put on hold that the second item was no longer in stock. So I ask why I wasn’t notified. She didn’t know. Needing the replacement now, I asked what they were going to do to get me the part. She didn’t offer anything and just said they didn’t have it. So I started to get a little more irate about the whole thing saying I had a hardware failure and this was the replacement I was expecting for my overnight delivery cost. She puts me on hold for 5 minutes then comes back to say there going to swap it out for the next model up. I check the specs, tell her I’m happy with that, and she puts the order through telling me it’ll be put in immediately and I’ll have it the next day (today).

Today rolls around. No email with an order number or tracking number. I call them again. A new rep checks on my order (putting me on hold again for 5 minutes) then tells me they didn’t put the order in due to a “technical” issue and that it was really being put in today. I ask why I wasn’t notified of this and she said she didn’t know. So I tell her I think this is pretty lousy customer service and all she has to say is I’m sorry. I had to basically tell her I wanted a phone call when the order went through so I could have a tracking number. I wasn’t calling them back.

Customer service is all about the customer. Zipzoomfly doesn’t seem to realize that or really care. That’s why I’ll take my business to Newegg or another e-tailer in the future.

Paypal Sandbox & Web Payments Pro

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We’re integrating Paypal’s Web Payments Pro into a new e-commerce site we’re building. To test, we set up our Paypal Sandbox account and began the process of setting up the Web Payments Pro account that we’d need. Interestingly, when I got to the part when it asked for a social security number, it wouldn’t validate the number. Also, there was no business owner address displayed there, which I believe was the cause of the issue. After about an hour and change on the phone trying to talk to the right technical person at Paypal, I was finally told that I could put in a fake social security number, as long as it began with ‘111’. Wow, awesome. Off and running. Now wouldn’t that be useful information in the development docs or maybe even on the site?

E-Commerce Marketing, Conversion Rates, & SEO Tidbits

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Ever since we launched YumDrop, we’ve been trying to find a way to not only get more eyeballs, but to increase conversions. Our site is really slick and from what we can tell, very usable. But the conversions still aren’t there. We’ve known for a while that the issue is marketing, or a lack thereof. Because of that, I decided to do some quick research tonight (yeah, never stop working…go figure) and found some really good articles. Hopefully you find them as insightful (and in other was reaffirming things already working well) as I did.

Another blog I found while searching for e-commerce conversion rate was by Rick Whittington. The first post of his I read was here. But when reading through the latest posts of his from the last few months, I found a bunch of other useful stuff, including some of the links above.

SpeckProducts SeeThru MacBook Pro 17″ Hard Case

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Recently, Kyle, knowing that I’m an anal bastard when it comes to my MacBook, turned me on to a nifty product from SpeckProducts for my beloved 17″ MacBook Pro. It’s called the SeeThru Hard Shell Case. He had just purchased one and said it was great, so I went to their site and ordered one. Its a great little product (although its a little pricey), that easily snaps on to your MacBook Pro and protects it from scratches, spills, etc. There are cut outs for all of the ports and the SuperDrive slot. I was able to install it in less than a minute and now my MacBook is fully protected, which should help it retain a little more of its resell value if and when I decide to sell it and upgrade to a new MacBook.

Where’s Coding Horror?

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Shame on me for not having gone to the site in a couple of weeks due to lack of time. I went to go read up on what Jeff had cooking lately only to find a 404 where I thought I’d find some insightful info. I did some digging around, and only found his other blog over at Veritgo Software but it hasn’t been updated since the start of the year. Does anyone know where Coding Horror has gone?

Update
Looks like its back. Maybe it didn’t go away and the internet was being its flaky self.

The Debugger IS Your Friend!

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I’ve been trying to contribute (when I have time) to the ASP.NET Forums lately. I’ve noticed that a lot of people who are new to ASP.NET don’t seem to know to use the Visual Studio debugger. When you see funky things going on in your code or behavior that you can’t explain, jump into the debugger. It’s saved me major headaches before. That and its good to walk through your code line by line for testing purposes. It makes you analyze each line if cide to make sure its doing what you expect it to do. So, moral of the story, don’t be afraid of your debugger, it’s your friend!

Radiant CMS & Web Services

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As I’ve written about previously, I’m working on a Radiant site with my buddy KB. We want to leverage a newsletter building application and an email sending service that we’ve developed for our other projects in this site. To do so, we needed to consume some web services that are part of another Rails application to do the subscribing and unsubscribing from a mailing list. There doesn’t seem to be much information about consuming web services from a Radiant application, so I thought I’d share what I found here. My discovery was based on a suggestion by Sean Cribbs to look at the Radiant LDAP extension.

So basically I found that you need to create a global tags module. In it you define your ActionWebService API and the tags you’ll use. Here’s a sample:


require 'action_web_service'

module MyTest
   include Radiant::Taggable
   class MyTestApi < ActionWebSerivce::API::Base       api_method :some_method, :expects => [{:foo => :string}]
   end

   tag 'mytest:action' do |tag|
      if request.post?
         # some code to get posted values
         myval = request.paremters['mytestvalue']
         if myval.empty?
            raise "No value."
         end
         mytest = ActionWebService::Client::Soap.new(MyTestApi, "http://someapiurl/", :handler_name => "some_handler"
         mytest.some_method(myval)
      end
   end
end

So that’s it in a nutshell. Wrap your tags and an Api class in the same module. You can call your Api methods from your tag definitions to execute the services you need.

SPF – Sender Policy Framework

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We recently switched to using an in house application for sending our campaign newsletters for one of our websites. It turned out that the new SMTP servers we were using weren’t trusted by email services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. as being valid sources of email messages. In come SPF, the Sender Policy Framework which these services use to determine if mail is coming from trusted domains for the sender. So, we had our hosting provider jack in some TXT DNS records for us that would allow our new SMTP servers to be trusted by SPF.

I figured all would be well and good. Email through these servers wouldn’t end up in a Gmail account’s spam folder. Not so. Apparently Gmail cache’s these records for a certain period of time, which I’m unaware of the length of. A nice post from Chris Linfoot gave me a little more insight into what might be going on. He mentioned in a my reply to his post that Google may indeed have not refreshed the cached record to my TXT SPF answer. Beyond that, Gmail may even consider my messages spam even if the messages pass SPF. Apparently Google doesn’t really use SPF messages to determine what really is spam and what isn’t. Interesting. My guess is they use it somehow in trying to figure out what is spam and what isn’t, but they don’t use it as the general rule of thumb for what should be spam. Its just one of their metrics.