Galivanting, Gin, and Go Audio.

It’s been a crazy week.

On Friday I went on a Fire 107.6 Party bus, which went through Bournemouth and Poole, stopping at certain pubs on the way in order to get free drinks.  It was an absolutely cracking night, where I got heavily intoxicated (don’t try this at home kids) - I can’t even remember the bus journey, and the people on the bus and in the venues were all a very friendly bunch - special mention going out to Adam for his arse antics on the bus!

Was nice to meet all the people that I keep hearing when I drive to work in the morning, include Dave, Jade, Claire and Sharon etc - I am never drinking again after the stuff you were force feeding us!!  Sophie was a corpse for the subsequent 24 hours of the weekend - however both she and myself did manage to stop our self-pity for one hour at least, during which time we were laughing at the other unfortunates on the X Factor (come on move your body).

Next week I’m seeing rising stars Go Audio at the Joiners which should be a pretty wicked gig.  Not been there since watching Cage the Elephant a few months ago, so I’m looking forward to it very much indeed.  They’re most likely to follow the roots of Scouting For Girls and One Night Only, so all in all its hould be pretty damn good there.

I’m settling in very nicely to our Alum Chine pad at the moment - I’m very happy with the set up, the sea views are beautiful, and I’m going for a run down the sea-front with Timmyboy tonight - nothing like blowing the cobwebs away…

Fitness is key for me at the moment, considering the last couple of matches I have played for Loco have made me realise how much I cannot take playing for this team for granted.. I’ve been crap!  Can’t control the ball, my legs are total abortions, and my technical know-how has gone AWOL.  I just hope I can made a damn quick recovery and start playing like a proper footballer again pretty soon, otherwise I may well be spending more time writing reports of Loco games next season than actually playing in them…

Madness…

Secpay Module for Magento

It has finally arrived, and Bright Light Media is the place to grab the Magento Secpay module.  Secpay, which has recently been acquired by PayPoint, is a large Payment Processing Provider and is used by thousands of companies across the UK to take online payments.

As yet, there have only been modules available for Protx, Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorise.net etc, however Secpay hasn’t been supported.  We have successfully got the module working with the multi-page checkout (as this uses Sec-Card).  We did initially discover a bug whereby after the user had paid, it returned the user to the web site home page and not the receipt page - however this has now been fixed. The problem was that cookie with Session ID was not passed, therefore Magento didn’t identify Secpay as a customer.

We have also completed developing another Secpay module so that it can work with the single page checkout (which means users enter their card details on your site and not Secpay’s).  You need XML RPC to be available on your account for this to be achieveable… thankfully, for Secpay users, it is!

If you’d like to be emailed as soon as both Secpay modules are released (will be by 31st July 2008), please enter your email address in the “Get Updates” box over on the right, and we’ll email you when it is ready

Send MIME/HTML emails with PHP Mailer

Sending bog-standard textual email with PHP is easy, however if you want to send some graphic-rich emails, it can get a bit tricky.  But never fear, I’ve put together a simple guide of how to do just this, and you’ll be up and running sending beautifully scultped emails within minutes.

Firstly you need to download PHP Mailer ZIP file, which is a free open-source script available from Sourceforge.   Once you’ve done this extract the files.  Then create a directory on your web-site, for example www.yourdomain.com/phpmailer/.  In this directory you need to upload the following files from the zip file…

class.phpmailer.php
class.smtp.php
phpmailer.lang-en.php (If you are English!)

Pretty much there now!

On the page that will be sending the email, either a “thank you” page or a receipt page, you need to place the follow PHP code.

//Error Reporting Featured here
error_reporting(E_STRICT);

//Set the Time Zone, search PHP Timezone on Google for more info
date_default_timezone_set(”Europe/London”);

//Locate the Mailer file within the directory you just set up
include_once(’/phpmailer/class.phpmailer.php’);
$mail = new PHPMailer();

//Build the email….
$body = “<html>
<body>
<table width=’600′ border=’0′ cellspacing=’5′ cellpadding=’5′>
<tr>
<td>This is my email!</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>”;

//Replace any dodgy characters
$body = eregi_replace(”[\]“,”,$body);

//Send the email!
$mail->IsSendmail();
$mail->From       = “info@yourdomain.com”;
$mail->FromName   = “Your Domain”;
$mail->Subject    = “YourDomain.com - Test Email”;
$mail->AltBody    = “To view the message, please use an HTML compatible email viewer”;
$mail->MsgHTML($body);

$mail->AddAddress(”message@recipient.com”, “James Dean”);

if(!$mail->Send()) {
echo “Message not sent” . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
echo “Message Sent!”;
}

Nothing to it!

Magento Hosting made simple!

If you’ve never heard of Magento now, you most definitely will have later.I’ve blogged about it before, and it will soon become the standard shopping cart software around the world, mainly due to its simple yet incredible features, but also because of the speed and the clean Web 2.0 look and feel of the sites that it produces.

Produced by a company called Varien, Magento is easy to use once it is installed. However, quite unfortunately, it has already got a reputation for being a bit of a nightmare to install. You need to have your server set up just right, with the right versions of PHP, MySQL, Apache - plus you need to have right PHP extensions such as PDO_MYSQL added. For many people who may have webspace from a reseller, or on a managed server, this may well prove difficult.

Even I myself have use a dedicated fully accessible server, and getting it just right is a bloody tricky thing to do. That’s why, if you’re looking for some reliable to host it, you should use Simple Helix. This company have a numer of flexible hosting packages which are amazingly good value, but the best things is that they have a number of packages already pre-installed on the server.

This means if you want to have Magento set up on your webspace, you simply login to their Control Panel and select Magento, and it unzips it and installs the package on your site for you. I would really recommend it, especially even if you’d just like to test Magento.

Get on to SimpleHelix.com and sign up and give it a whirl, because you’ll definitely find Magento so much nicer hosting it here!

Banishing insecurities when shopping on the web

I’ve been busy for the past few months developing ShopperGuard, a new web-site which is an independent web-site verification tool for E-Commerce traders across the globe. Companies can sign up to ShopperGuard, and pay for one or many “ShopperGuard seals”.

A seal is then supplied to the user provided their web-site passes a number of stringent tests, which verifies everything from website security and encryption, the authenticity of postal addresses and telephone numbers - and it ensures the company is fully legitimate in terms of their T’s & C’s, Privacy Policy, Returns Policy, delivery schedule, and correct VAT and Company information.

A ShopperGuard seal benefits both the web surfers, and also the company whose website the seal is on. Firstly IBM-gathered statistics in 2006 showed that “70% of shoppers only use sites that display a security protection seal” - therefore I’d consider it crazy as a business to not get a seal and risk only converting 3 out of every 10 customers.

Indeeed, it’s the difference of conversion rate that sells the ShopperGuard concept, and we’re currently pulling in the final batches data to convey the effctiveness of this logo - as it is most definitely making differences to the sites we’re currently testing. We’ve got a number of clients on board at the moment, and one of the guys at Simply Bar Stools has been giving us estimates of 14-15% improvement since its inception.

So, it’s good for the business - but, decisively, it’s also essential for the customer. Seeing a security seal such as ShopperGuard is reassuring, and it provides peace of mind that they are shopping at a kosher company! With the confidence in our seal, the user will spend less time checking the identity of the company and more time deciding what to buy - which can only be a good thing for both parties.

A simple click of the seal will open a window which shows them the authenticty of the web-site. Plus, it has been designed in such a way that the seal can not be forged easily. We’ve got a number of different logo options to choose from, and as the service comes in at a much cheaper rate than other companies such as Hacker Safe, ISIS and Trust Guard - everything points to our product becoming a huge success. Will let you know more about it when it is live!

In the meantime, any inconsistencies or errors throughout the site would be appreciated, as this baby is going live this year…