Google Gears is a browser plugin that extends the functionality of your web browser, allowing for developers to create better performing web applications. Gears is an open source plugin that needs to be installed by the client if they choose to use it. Currently it is available for browsers on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. While they claim that for the Mac it is only available for Safari and Firefox browsers, I would bet that Chrome is either already supported or will be soon. Gears offers three modules, each of which adds a type of functionality to the browser that Gears in installed in that developers can take advantage of. The first, called LocalServer, provides a way to cache a web application on the client's machine for offline brow...

I know that a blog post about DNS, or Domain Name System, records is probably not the sexiest topic out there, but it is one that I think will help developers that are struggling to wrap their heads around what DNS records do. To start with the Domain Name System is what routes requests across the internet, and what allows us to type in pretty domain names to our browsers and have them resolve to the correct server. This is accomplished by DNS records that allow for the translation of a semantic domain name, such as "mydomain.com" into the IP address of the server that needs to receive these requests, such as "12.34.56.98". Obviously the reason for this is pretty evident. Can you imagine how hard it would be to tell you customers to take...

I thought I would take a minute to reflect on how the home page of Practical eCommerce has changed over the years. With some help from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which archives websites as they existed in the past, I was able to take a look at how things had changed. To start with, I think that it is important to understand that we as a company have also had some unique challenges in the last couple of years as a publishing company creating a printed magazine targeted at online business owners. That being said, let's take a look at some of the previous home pages that we have had. The Beginning, Circa 2005 Initially, our website was designed to sell magazine subscriptions. As you can see, our home page in 2005 featured a...

Part 1 - Your Reputation, Domains, and Marketing - by Jeff Stolarcyk Your domain name is the most powerful piece of branding your store has on the Web! A strong, recognizable domain name for your business can bring even more organic traffic to your site. A poor domain name can prevent surfers from ever finding your site. Show the Engines Who You Are! Include keywords or phrases in your domain name to increase high natural search engine rankings. What makes you unique from the competition? What’s important to your industry or exemplifies your approach? Then evaluate your choices. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool is a great, streamlined resource for investigating search volume. If I’m starting a blog about my favorite pretzels, I could t...

I was reminded today of one of my most beloved of annoyances– hacking CSS to make sure that a website displays consistently on each of the major browsers. Though everyone seems to have accepted it and moved on, cross-browser compatibility will ever remain one of the most frustrating things to a web designer. You spend all your time working on the perfect web layout, only to find that it isn't displaying the way that you thought it would for most of the people that view it. In my experience, there are only three major groups of browsers that you need to accommodate. I'm sure that not everyone agrees, but essentially you have your Internet Explorer group, your Firefox group and your Safari group. Why do I group them like this? The reason ...

I read somewhere recently that suggested that with the rise of text messaging there has been a decline in the use of email. I'm not sure if I buy that one, but I do think that text messaging is an often overlooked method of communicating. Websites such as Twitter have shown the value of text messaging, and I think that as mobile phones become more and more advanced, we will see more and more websites integrating with SMS text messaging services. That being said, let's take a look at how we can send text messages to a mobile phone from a Rails application. Enter the SMS_Fu Plugin To start with, we will need to install a plugin that makes sending text messages almost too simple, called SMS_fu, which was created by Brendan Lim. In order t...

Things in the Rails world seem to be moving pretty quickly lately, particularly as Github becomes more and more popular. One of the things that has been happening is that plugins and gems are being updated faster and faster, and in many cases plugins that are not application-specific are becoming gems. Once such example is the acts_as_state_machine plugin, which has recently been turned into the AASM gem. First off, the reason that some plugins are becoming gems, as I mentioned before, is two-fold. The first is that Rails now includes gem dependencies, as I wrote about last time. But what plugins are good candidates for a gem? As I mentioned, if a plugin is not application-specific, it is a good candidate for a gem since it can be used ...

Full Disclosure: I went looking for the best price and got exactly what I was willing to pay for. This is a true story. I changed the names because the lawyers told me to. Further Disclosure When the website claimed to sell a $700 camcorder for $339, I bit and went for it. Color me stupid; color the merchant a crook. I needed another camcorder and so, being an integral part of the ecommerce community, I went shopping online. I found the unit I wanted by working through some very good review sites, such as Reviews.cnet.com/camcorders/, Camcorderinfo.com and Consumerreports.org. Then I Googled the unit, in this case a Canon HG20 Hard Drive CamCorder. I knew the full list price and the going market price, but I thought maybe somebody ...

Now that there is something called gem dependencies in Rails, which refers to the ability to specify what gems a Rails application requires from within that application itself, the line between plugins and gems has gotten a little blurry. For those that are new to Rails or unaware of the new features, let's go through a little bit about what these things are. Rails Plugins Rails plugins are pieces of code that can be added to a Rails application on at the application level, and reside in the vendor/plugins folder of that application. Plugins are simple to install by simply typing: script/plugin install plugin_name from within the root directory or a Rails application. The main feature to plugins is that they install in each applicat...

Just a quick note that if you're thinking about starting a new ecommerce shop, or thinking about moving your current store to Ruby on Rails, you might checkout Spree.

Creating intuitive interfaces can be challenging, particularly when it comes to uploading files such as images or attachments. Suppose that we are creating an application that let's someone submit a blog post, to which they can add multiple attachments. A great example of this kind of thing is BaseCamp, which is a project management application. BaseCamp is one of those applications that leaves developers in awe, as they have managed to create extremely intuitive interfaces. Inspired by the way that BaseCamp handles multiple file uploads, I set out to create my own version. Here is what I learned. Objective My objective was to create an interface that would a user to submit a blog post, with the ability to attach multiple files to that...

Selecting a software package to run your new online business can be a daunting task, to say the least. The enormous selection (over 300 at last count on PeC) is enough to discourage even the most gung-ho entrepreneur. In this post, I hope to shed some light on the choices you have and how you can decide which option fits your business. The Big Picture There are 4 (loosely translated of course) main groups of e-commerce software options available to a merchant today. Carts, Hosted, Licensed, and Commercial. Small to medium businesses tend to focus on the middle — makes sense. Carts don't have the professional control and features that you need. Commercial products target large enterprise and are way too expensive for consideration. ...

Company, fall in!!! At ease folks. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em (and if you don’t see any "Don’t Smoke Here" signs) Now, listen up troops. We’ve got a serious situation here, ladies and gentlemen. We have ecommerce entrepreneurs among us who are invisible, wish to remain anonymous or otherwise hide behind their websites. This is not a good thing. In fact it is downright Un-American. I surfed a few of your sites the other day and was dismayed, to say the least, that some of you are still doing your best not to get noticed or have customers get in touch with you without having to hire our pals over in the FBI to find you. I went to that site that sells the recycled gumballs—you know www.alreadychewed.com and went to the Contact Us p...

There is a pretty cool new tool available recently to webmasters that are using Google's Webmaster Tools, which is still in it's experimental stages, but is called Enhanced 404 Pages. What this refers to is an HTTP 404 response, which is also known as a "page not found" error. Everyone has, at one point or another, clicked a link to a web page and gotten a page that says "We're sorry, but the page that you are looking for cannot be found". What Google is trying to do is to help make those pages more useful. I blogged in the past about how we had some minor problems with the search engines after we started re-directing URLs that were not found to a search results page. Behind the scenes, the response that search engines were getting was ...

My last post was about "thinking outside the cart" and innovative shopping cart UIs. In that same vibe, I'd like to point you to http://browsegoods.com/. It's a cool little site using a Google Maps like interface for drilling down to your products. Pretty interesting.

If you’ve ever had a computer crash, you know it can be a devastating experience, both for you personally and for your business. Keeping your data backed up is vital. This month we’ll examine a few of the most popular methods of data backup. Tape Backup Since the early days of computing, magnetic tape has been used as a medium for data storage. Tape drives have come a long way since the early days when cassettes were used in a tape recorder. Entry-level tape backup drives cost around $1,000 and are often installed as internal devices. The Good? Tape backups can hold 60 to 600 to 1,600 Gb depending on the drive and the media used. You should use a tape backup if you plan on running large-scale backups (servers or multiple computers) on...

I just noticed this yesterday, although it may have been around for a few days, but it appears that Google has implemented it's Suggest functionality into the main search bar at their site. Google Suggest has been around for a while now, particularly in various applications that Google offers, and has (in some minds) set the precedence for using Ajax technology in forms. I often see it referred to in explanations of what Ajax is, and how it can make an interface more engaging. For my part, I like this kind of thing. For those that are unfamiliar with "live searches" and such, Google Suggest sends a request to the server as you type into the search bar. The server then returns suggestions for your search based on what Google has determin...

We recently came across an interesting issue with the search engines during our recent launch, which was caused by something that I had never considered about URL redirects. The issue was that when we launched our new site, we removed large sections of our old site which left many of our indexed URLs orphaned. We did the best that we could to map over our old, legacy URLs to relevant sections of our new site, but in many cases there was now apparent place to redirect them to. So our solution was to help people out by re-directing any URL that did not map over to a search results page. Rather than get a boring 404 "page not found" response, we had a 301 "permanent redirect" in place mapping to a search results page showing results on our...

If you've ever had to purchase software, you've probably debated it and then either bitten the bullet or gone without. Software is EXPENSIVE! However, while companies like Microsoft and Adobe have the majority of market share on software, developers are constantly creating free or inexpensive alternatives that you can download for free and avoid dropping thousands of your hard-earned dollars. Star Office is a suite, similar to Microsoft Office that includes integrated word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and presentations. It can also open files from and save files as Word, Excel, Access, and Powerpoint. Thunderbird is an integrated reader for e-mail and newsgroups which does almost all of the things Outlook will do, especially w...

Nobody knows how difficult it can be to keep track of digital assets, such as product images and spec documents, more than online store owners. Depending on the number of products that you sell, and the various channels through which you sell them, you can end up with a multitude of files very quickly. Consider the following example. You are a clothing retailer that sells upwards of 1000 products, each of which is available in 5 different colors. In order to compile your printed catalog, you are already looking at keeping track of 5000 high-resolution product photos. Someone is responsible for making sure that the designers working on the printed catalog have access to these images, and that they are updated to reflect the most recent p...