Google Custom Search is really, finally coming to an end in just a few days. If you’re looking for an alternative, may I recommend AddSearch, which seems to do do everything GCS did, with a few nice bells and whistles added on. It starts at $30 a month, with annual discounts, so it’s cheaper than many of the alternatives, but still affordable for a smaller site.
Check this website out if you need to view or convert DWG or DXF files: View DWG.
I noticed that these flame tip light bulbs are a DOUBLE skeumorph.
Obviously the shape of the glass outer container is supposed to bring to mind fire from a candle or gas light.
But this is also an LED bulb whose light elements are arranged to bring to mind an old fashioned incandescent bulb.
Business-to-business purchases are a huge part of the economy, but the way they’re typically implemented just doesn’t line up with how e-commerce is conducted.
The traditional purchasing process goes like this:
Compare this to a typical e-commerce purchase:
There’s a lot fewer steps here. It turns out, though that the traditional purchasing process has certain advantages. By having all purchases go through a purchasing department, it’s much easier to keep track of expenses. And by negotiating payment terms, the customer can take their time paying: a great help to a business’s cash flow.
Also, it turns out, many large purchasing departments simply don’t have access to a credit card or PayPal to pay for stuff. They can pay via PO and that’s it.
As a small business owner, I like the purchasing power of companies that have a traditional purchasing process, but don’t like dealing with waiting for them to pay, sending reminders when payments are due, and handling physical checks.
So what can be done to smooth out this process? How about a payment processor that deals strictly in purchase orders! The first half of the purchasing process would be the faster e-commerce model: the customer finds the widgets on the vendor website and adds them to the shopping cart. But when it comes time to pay, they can simply use their PO number.
Sending reminder emails, collecting the money, assessing late fees, and so on would all be handled by a third party. This would be the “Stripe for Purchase Orders“. Let’s call them SFPO for short.
SFPO could offer an API, much like Stripe, PayPal, etc. that would ensure that the customer is approved for purchase orders. The API would do typical payment processor stuff, like providing a form, registering a sale, and so on.
SFPO could also provide other valuable associated services, like running credit checks on companies who want to pay via PO.
You could cobble all of this together yourself, but if you’re a small shop, why would you want to spend time chasing after customers to pay, when you could be building your business?
This is potentially a HUGE business as it touches many of the high dollar business to business transactions. If you build this, please let me know.
I started looking at my Google Webmaster Search Console to research a small drop in traffic from organic search results. Using it was painful to figure out what was going on. I suspect this is on purpose: Google doesn’t want people gaming their results (unless they want to pay for ads, of course). That’s why there are so many companies out there that offer SEO services.
Here’s the type of info I’m looking for that Search Console doesn’t offer, at least not directly:
Anyway, it turns out that Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools) has an API that lets you access data. So some enterprising individual should be able to make this happen. If something like this exists, let me know. If it doesn’t exist, somebody please create it!
I’m in the middle of upgrading a bunch of stuff on the website to the latest versions. The website is Joomla based, because at the time I created it, Joomla looked like the best option for integrating a CMS with a shopping cart. Of course, nowadays I’d probably use something WordPress based, as it seems to be improving much faster and has a larger community than Joomla.
Of course, as part of that process, I have to do a bunch of testing. It amazes me that there seems to be very little use of staging environments for common CMS and shopping cart platforms. The attitude seems to be: “install the software or update on your production server, then go back to a backup if there’s a problem.”
(Also, much of the Joomla/Opencart documentation suggests uploading by FTP. I’m not sure if people are really still using File Transfer Protocol in this day and age, or if the meaning has drifted (like GIF), and people really upload stuff to their server over an encrypted channel, the sensible way.)
Some Joomla extensions I use and can recommend:
Recommended Mijoshop/Opencart extensions:
I’ve got a few others that I’m evaluating to help regain some of the functionality lost in the upgrade process.
I just bought an HP M506dh printer after spotting it on Slickdeals. It normally retails for $1300+, but this was only $300 with free shipping from MacMall. Plus HP is offering $150-$200 tradeins. Since my old Brother laser had leaked toner all over the inside (cheap aftermarket cartridges), this was a no-brainer for me. It was speculated on the Slickdeals thread that this HP model is some sort of government surplus.
It’s really nice compared to my old Brother laser, in a lot of small ways. The setup was simple, and made good use of the LCD display and input buttons. There’s little guide icons and instructions for all the adjustments like on the upper paper feeder and the paper tray. All the adjustable tabs are in light blue, making the adjustments easy to find.
The upper paper feeder can hold a good amount of paper in reserve; I’m using that just for shipping labels, and keep plain paper in the lower tray. The feeder can be used as a tray; the printer seems to be happy grabbing the top page off of a stack, again, unlike the Brother where the feeder was one sheet at a time only.
The lower tray holds more than a ream of paper. There’s a paper level indicator on the outside of the tray. My Linux desktop recognized it right away on the network. It prints on both sides of the page, which should save on paper.
My favorite part is that the removable pieces like the paper tray and toner cartridge slide in easily, unlike with the Brother, which had to be slammed in place and required a few tries to get it right every time. Though everything slides in and out smoothly, I still feel like you get a positive lock when sliding things in.
Sadly, these are no longer in stock.
