Implementing subversion, installing Eclipse PHP

I've reinstalled Eclipse with the thought it will be easier to check stuff in and out of subversion when the time comes. I also realised they have quite a decent debugger, once I'd setup mysql to handle the queries from my desktop, it all works great!

Still trying to work out how to make the debugger "ignore" certain errors (Debugger working for version 5.. but writing for version 4).

BFN

ps. Here is how you find your version of redhat:
uname -a
cat /etc/redhat-release -------(laymans)

Many hosting options

Basic hosting

Hosting can either be very simple, or very complex. It really depends on a few basic factors.
Are you expecting a dramatic amount of traffic right away? Or a gradual increase from nothing? What kind of scalability do you expect? If you don't know the answers to these questions, have a look at the traffic for some of your competition to get an idea of what you might expect. Is your site going to be database driven? Or mostly a static site?
The other main consideration would be features. Small sites just starting out will do wonderfully with a cheap shared hosting plan. There are literally thousands of options out there, I suggest going with one of the larger corporations though, less chance of them disappearing (along with your site!).
Larger traffic sites can look at co-lo hosting, getting one or more machines hosted at a facility designed to manage the hardware. Very rarely would I suggest you host your sites in house. Only if you have dedicated sys admins, a proper server environment with full backups for power and connectivity. The last thing you want is for a natural disaster, or accident to turn your site off! While these things can happen at other facilities, they are usually designed to keep running even in event of natural disasters.
For truly massive sites (although I don't think you'd be reading this, as you've got teams of people like me to tell you these things) it's exciting to setup clusters of machines, working with masters and slaves (machines) and distributed environments around the world. Good fun! Sadly not relevant for most of us though.

My personal site, which I have a very simple page with very little design or information I host with GoDaddy.com. My only reasoning for going with them as a host, was that my domain was registered there. Please give it more thought than me! I hate the interface trying to get into my account. I have to click through a half dozen pages of ads assaulting me, dreadful interface trying to guess where my next link will pop up. Truly a painful experience. Luckily most of the time I simply ftp straight to the server, and skip that user interface nightmare. I have setup a bunch of "testing" sites there, where I post sites I'm working on for various projects, since I like to keep my home network truly hidden.

Friends and associates have found success hosting personal sites with 1and1.com, although I've never personally used them, I hear they are good!

Please don't judge me by my home page! Ever heard the adage "The cobblers children have no shoes". That's my site! I spend so much time on sites for clients, and for new ideas etc, I never actually update my own. Please have mercy!

BFN

What the site is for?

Finding out reasons why the web site will exist (Sales, Marketing etc)

What is your website for? Sometimes that’s easy to see, since you sell your products directly to consumers, or you want them to go see your show. At other times it can be much less clear. What if you want them to go to see the show, but you don’t know how you can work out if it was successful or not. How many people went to the site, and as a direct result of the visit, went to the show.

Setting up these goals at the outset, will give you something to gauge your progress.

Sadly I’ve seen some sites which want everything. TPTB want the site to be profitable, while also increasing awareness about products, while also selling products. This can be done, but it must be understood that making a site profitable through advertising will also send users away from your site, and lessen the time they spend learning about your products. It can be counter productive to do both, so be very careful when deciding the best choice, you may be destroying your profits, customer loyalty and trust, to make a small amount selling ads. It could also be the other way around, where you should definitely focus on site advertising, you have very high traffic, and know that users will continue to use your site for buying your products, it would be a waste not to also offer then advertising, thus increasing overall profit without damaging the brand.

What is this site for? Well, so I can practice some of my fledgling writing skills on the unsuspecting web public. Hopefully one day people will leave comments... :D

BFN

Transaction processing, lots to consider

For shop sites, how the transaction will be processed

There is lots of information out there about setting up a shopping cart/store on your site, so I won’t cover those items. I’d like to go over all the _other_ options, and how to get the money from your people!

Some sites, (eg. Amazon.com) have wonderful API’s which allow you as the web developer SO much opportunity to sell stuff. If the things you want to sell are already on Amazon, more’s the better, because not only can you earn money by selling these products, but you can ALSO earn a cut of selling them through Amazon! Neat huh?

There are other store’s which offer similar API’s, as well as some which have affiliate programs worth pursuing. If you don’t have many things to sell, and you’re in the right market segment, then another example is Best Buy. They offer you the ability to earn a small percentage on what people end up buying at their online store, after clicking on a link from you. The only real drawback with them is that there is no API. That means all data about the product, including the link to it, you have to manually find in their tools, and add to your site.

The beauty of using an API, is that you can have your site do all the work for you!

I’m a massive fan of letting the site do all the work.. that’s what they are for right? An API should let you find out a lot of information about the product you wish to sell, after being given only a little. You can send over the UPC, title, or similar identifier, and have the other site tell you everything about it. From the cost, the link for more information, a buy link, an image of it, reviews, and much more. Using just this information you can enrich the content on your own site, without having to do much at all! Plus it can happen real time, so the information the user is seeing the most current possible.

As much as possible writing small add on’s, applications, or server side scripts to take care of any manual task the better. When a user see’s your content changing, they will come back more often, just to see what’s different! Creating a “clearance” or “news” section to a site, then never updating it, is instant site death. If a user comes to your site twice, and doesn’t see this information change, they won’t come back again because they assume it will never change. You don’t have to make it too hard on yourself, especially if you can make that content truly dynamic. If you spend a day a month just creating news items for the next month, then use a content manager to schedule them to come out every few days, suddenly your site appears relevant and up to date, even if that is the only thing on the site which is changing!

Content Management is important

If you’re not a strong programmer, or don’t have a strong programmer working for you, your best route for a content management system is to just use one off the shelf. There are now tons of really good open source systems out there that can do just about everything. The only drawback with using pre-made over using a custom system, is that you won’t have as much control over the interface, specifically the backend. When I write a custom system, I draw from a basic framework that I have put together over the years, but customize the variables, database tables, and menu’s, so it’s specifically for only that site.
To make things easier for myself though (save time & money) I set all the variables at the top of each page. This way while each page stands alone, if they want to add/edit/remove a field, it can be added quickly and easily.

Security! This is a very important part of your cms. If it’s at all possible, I highly recommend never running this directly on a production server. This makes it harder for disreputable people to find it in the first place, leaving less room for brute force or other attacks.
This being said, if it’s going to be a well known site, you can protect your CMS in two ways, sometimes both. You can use the server (if it’s *nix use .htaccess) so that they can never even get to a login screen. Alternately you can use DB/server side scripting to protect your site. There are positives and drawbacks to both, so this decision should be made at the outset, as to what the security requirements will be.

BFN

YouTube XML uploading

YouTube has created a fairly simple way for users to bulk upload videos. I say "fairly" because you actually need to create an XML file with the appropriate contents. As always, I seem to run into problems in the documentation and examples. I understand what it's like to write a big massive piece of documentation, then get so involved in it, you can't see the obvious errors (it's Appendix E not Appendix D).

I'll give a quick example of one thing that I was a little irritated by (because I knew it was going to break, but I had to guess which way was correct, sadly I picked wrong!):
yt:title, Required. The tag specifies the display title of a TV or movie video. This tag may have the same value as the media:title tag.
Subtag of: movie_metadata tv_metadata.
THEN..
tv_metadata, Required etc.
Subtags: id, show_title, episode, episode_title, season

Umm.. yeah.. so it's a subtag of it, but it's not a subtag of it? So it turns out, it's not! But of course I found that out the hard way (trying it).

I know it sounds like I'm getting on their case, but I assume many people read/use these documents, and has no one ever mentioned these problems?

Anyhoo! Book writing is going.. well.. no where! Sadly. Will have to get back on track next week. Tomorrow I'll post another excerpt, then another one next week!

BFN

All quiet on the ...

Quiet days yesterday and today. So far just thrown up a page with a couple video's for a PR that's going out today. The main site we're working on is supposed to go up shortly, but they have yet to actually choose a domain for it! Oh well.. chicken or the egg, either way they'll have a site.

Tried to help MS out yesterday (front end developer) with a problem related to the video's on the page. There are basically 5. One in the main spot, and one beneath it which load with the page. When the user clicks on one of the movies to see details (which open in smoothbox) both of them need to stop. This is all working OK, the error occurs because each of those movies has also a trailer link, which then brings each of the (up to 3) trailers into replace the on load trailer. For some reason the variable he was passing to detect which of them was playing, so to know which one to stop, then restart once smoothbox was done, just wasn't working!
I made some suggestions about how to pass the variable differently, but I believe it is still not working. Sometimes the simplest things about the most basic interface can get really hard to make work! Like the smoothbox + ajax error, which is still not resolved. There must be someone out there who's got it to work before, I just have to find out who that is?!

BFN