February 25th, 2010
Google Base Products (Froogle)
Recently, I tried to use current Froogle Feeds in Tradingeye (both v5 & v6) to products into Google Product listing service (http://www.google.co.uk/products). However, there is still a little buggy and limitation of this feed as it exports all products under text format.
I noticed a fact not all of your products are added to Google Base Products. Besides, product short description is being treated as product description, so if a product does not have short description then it would not be added to Google Base at all !
Okay, we have created a new script to export all product d
etail into a RSS feed (XML file format) with the following attributes:
- Product Title
- Price
- Department name (New)
- Product ID (using Sku code + ID)
- Image URL
- Product URL
- Product condition
The script can be used for all Tradingeye and UK2 ecommerce users.
How to use it:
- Download the zip file
- Replace your froogle.php file in scheduler/froogle.php with the on in .zip file
- Open up the new froogle.php and read the instruction
Download:
Commercial supports: please get in touch with Quay Creative at info@quaycreative.com.
Froogle Feed - Google Based Products (4)
Categories: PHP, Tradingeye & UK2 Ecommerce, Web development |
No Comments
November 17th, 2009
Today small task for an ecommerce website is to look for all possible external images from supplier and download to our own server. We have thought of using @fopen() a common php function to open a file. However, there is more to find out.
< ?php
if (@fclose(@fopen("http://www.domain.com/image.jpg", "r"))) {
echo "External image exists";
} else {
echo "External image does not exist";
} ?>However, we soon realised that using fopen() does not work properly if the external website handle 404 page well, which mean if the image does not exist their server will redirect audience to an “notfound” page or to “imagenotfound.jpg”.
To resolve this problem, you can simply use GetImageSize() function from GD library.
< ?php
if (@GetImageSize("http://www.domain.com/image.jpg")) {
<code>echo "External image exists";
} else {
echo "External image does not exist";
} ?>
Categories: PHP, Web development |
Tags: external image, fopen, GD, GetImageSize | No Comments
August 7th, 2009
Do you want your own website? Of course you do. Whether you have a growing business, are trying to establish a brand or just want to have a presence on the Web, a quality website is essential. To the uninitiated, though, building your own website may seem just as daunting as building a house. It doesn’t have to be, though. Here are some tips on how to start a website.
How to Start a Website: Get a Domain Name
You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but first impressions mean a lot. The first experience most people will have with your website is hearing your domain name. Try to choose a domain name that is distinctive, easy to remember and easy to spell. You should also try to think of a domain name that clearly says what you do. WeSellHinges.com is a good domain name for a hinge-selling company. SwingingAids.com is not. Once you’ve chosen your domain name, you’ll need to register it. GoDaddy is probably the most popular domain name registrar today, but ICANN, NetworkSolutions and others are also available. 
How to Start a Website: Hosting
Once you have settled on a domain name, you’ll need someone to do your web hosting. You have some choices when it comes to web hosting, so you don’t want to make this decision lightly. Whichever company you go with, you’ll probably want to start with a shared hosting plan. These plans only cost a few dollars a month because you share room on a server with others. There is no overlap between the sites. The other entities on the server you share space with do not have access to your site. As you get more advanced, you may want a plan that gives you more control of the server.
How to Start a Website: Design
You can get a professional to design your site or you can design it yourself. There are a number of programs, such as DreamWeaver, that you can use to create websites. When creating your website, try to think about appearance, functionality and ease of use. It is best when people want to come to your website and stay there. The design is where you start to make that all happen.
Do you want your own website? Of course you do. Whether you have a growing business, are trying to establish a brand or just want to have a presence on the Web, a quality website is essential. To the uninitiated, though, building your own website may seem just as daunting as building a house. It doesn’t have to be, though. Here are some tips on how to start a website.
How to Start a Website: Get a Domain Name
You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but first impressions mean a lot. The first experience most people will have with your website is hearing your domain name. Try to choose a domain name that is distinctive, easy to remember and easy to spell. You should also try to think of a domain name that clearly says what you do. WeSellHinges.com is a good domain name for a hinge-selling company. SwingingAids.com is not. Once you’ve chosen your domain name, you’ll need to register it. GoDaddy is probably the most popular domain name registrar today, but ICANN, NetworkSolutions and others are also available.
How to Start a Website: Hosting
Once you have settled on a domain name, you’ll need someone to do your web hosting. You have some choices when it comes to web hosting, so you don’t want to make this decision lightly. Whichever company you go with, you’ll probably want to start with a shared hosting plan. These plans only cost a few dollars a month because you share room on a server with others. There is no overlap between the sites. The other entities on the server you share space with do not have access to your site. As you get more advanced, you may want a plan that gives you more control of the server.
How to Start a Website: Design
You can get a professional to design your site or you can design it yourself. There are a number of programs, such as DreamWeaver, that you can use to create websites. When creating your website, try to think about appearance, functionality and ease of use. It is best when people want to come to your website and stay there. The design is where you start to make that all happen.
Categories: Web development |
Tags: domain-name, hosting | No Comments
April 10th, 2009
Back in Sep 2008 I created a small plugin for Tradingeye v5 which allows system generate the sitemap.xml and urllist.txt file on the fly.
Few people have contacted and asked for the release of new version, so here you are ;D. This version (v2.00) will includes image urls in the sitemap and fixing a small bug on .htaccess file.
XML Sitemap plugin for tradingeye and uk2 ecommerce is absolutely free, so your feedback is much appreciated!
Previous version (v1.00) with the instruction and description can be found here!
Categories: Tradingeye & UK2 Ecommerce, Web development |
Tags: tradingeye plugin, uk2 ecommerce, uk2 ecommerce plugin | 4 Comments
March 19th, 2009
I am starting a series of posts as an extension to Web Standards and Accessibility. These posts will be dedicated to explaining how to make a habit of progressive enhancement instead of falling back on graceful degradation. It will also give you the tools to pass this on to your coworkers and developers.
Step 1: Text is all you need, assume and start with nothing.
Download Lynx (Mac | PC). Load up your web page and see if you can navigate to your desired information. Does the order of the content look logical? Is anything important missing? Are you seeing text you should not be seeing?
Often this is the first step overlooked by web developers, not because its hard but because it takes extra time. Pressure from management to get projects done can push accessibility low on the priority list. You can learn a great deal by browsing your site from this browser, how easy or difficult it can be. Try it out for at least 20 minutes, see if you get frustrated or not.
Step 2: Building up, SEO included
Semantic code has built in search engine optimization. Naming your html id’s and classes by what they contain instead of their visual position not only benefits developers but also search engines. When a computer knows what content you are describing it can bring it to the attention of someone searching for it. When you use javascript to load content dynamically on the page you can be hiding that content from search engines and in turn from your potential users.
If something is important enough for search engines to pick up it should be in the html file and not loaded afterward. As you can see from the screen shot in step 1 the login form is currently in the HTML although it is only visible by clicking on a link that is activate via javascript. The login form is not something a search engine would care about so it should really be removed from the HTML and loaded into the DOM once the page has loaded with javascript.
Step 3: Technology applied in layers, CSS next
After your site works in a text only browser in a linear fashion without javascript or images start applying some style. Applying the style with CSS will hopefully give you a central location to update the look of your site. One important thing to think of when writing CSS is to be diligent and keep your nesting in a logical order so you or another developer can edit it in the future without wasting time searching through all the inheritance rules.
There are thousands of techniques to writing CSS, I am not going to dictate which one is better than the other, but what I want to convey is thinking about every rule you add and ask yourself if it is necessary. Each added rule adds weight to your page, rendering time and complexity for future development changes. Use HTML tags appropriately, header tags for headers, p tags for paragraphs and so on so search engines know what is on your page and so you don’t have tons of container DIV’s weighing down your page.
Step 4: Images (png’s mainly)
As the design of web pages get more intricate it becomes more beneficial to use alpha transparent images to minimize the number and filesize of images. Older browsers (Netscape and IE6 mainly) do not support these alpha transparent images natively. Although there are techniques to add this functionality, in most cases the extra rendering time and weight is not worth it.
One rule as a web developer/designer that you have to keep in mind is supporting multiple browsers doesn’t mean you have to guarantee the same experience across the board. There is nothing wrong with serving up different images depending on capabilities as long as the users experience is not impaired by the lack of images.
The example above is IE6 on the left and Firefox on the right. As you can see the left image is jagged because it is just a transparent GIF and the smooth image on the right is a PNG with alpha transparency. The switch was done with an <!–[if lt IE 7]> conditional. Same web page but different experience depending on the users browser, adding functionality if it is available.
The Goal
To reach everyone possible. Think of a web page like a building, it has to be accessible by all no matter how it looks. Starting out with the absolute basics and building up keeping accessibility in mind benefits everyone. Your users, designers and developers will thank you. Although these things seem really basic, they are the building blocks to a successful web site.
Next time: Javascript DOM Manipulation, AJAX and Flash
Source from .eduGuru
Categories: Web development |
Tags: accessibility, howto, progressive | No Comments
