Brian's progress on Specialty Gamer

I added a little

(You can unsubscribe from the list at any time) (You can unsubscribe from the list at any time)

below the

banner with the thought that it might be good to emphasize that people who sign up for the mailing list can always unsubscribe at any time.  I know some people may be worried that by adding their name to a list - less professional websites won't have anyway to easily unsubscribe from the list if they want without emailing the list source directly.

I've been added to lists - some are people I personally met - where its obviously more amateur so there is no unsubscribe list.  If I want to unsubscribe, then I have to reply directly and ask to unsubscribe which is way more hassle than should be necessary.

Since starting Specialty Gamer, new people signing up to the list has been slow... so I really have to work on how I can have more people sign up.  If they don't sign up for alerts, they won't know when the website is updated - and my thought is if they don't know... then they probably won't come back.

Updated my Movable Type install (finally) from the beta to the latest stable commercial release.  Movable Type Commercial version 4.21-en with: Professional Pack 1.2.  Let's hope it fixes some of the "bugs" that seemed to show up.  Such as the mysterious core.XXXX dumps that were killing my web space.  And the strange error messages regarding my Authors category that would show up on occasion when I try to publish or post.

I have been putting this off due to the troubleshooting that always seems to be necessary for any upgrade, but sometime by the end of next week I will upgrade the Movable Type installation (Features and ProgLog sections) to Movable Type Pro 4.21.  Currently, the MT install is a Beta version and its not quite working perfectly - hopefully the upgrade to the retail release will remedy that.

Also thought up some new ideas to spruce up the site, make things maybe a little more interesting and personal to regular visitors.  (yeah all three of you guys!)

I've made a lot of changes to things in the past few days - hopefully the transition is smooth and unnoticable to everyone else.

Just a few days ago, my webhost provider, Acornhost, made a change to the server upgrading to Suexec so the scgi-bin directory no longer works for scripts.  I don't exactly understand what that is all about and why that was necessary, but anyways I moved my entire Movable Type installation from my personal domain, www.thebrianpages.com to the www.specialtygamer.com cgi-bin folder. 

With the move, I needed to republish just about all the pages with journal entries, and update all file paths to the new ones under www.specialtygamer.com.  Everything would appear to be in place, however if something I forgot, then you'll just get the old 404.  If by chance someone reads this (ha ha), maybe you can post a comment if you come across any dead links and I'll fix it ASAP.

In addition to that I upgraded the MT install from 4.12 to 4.2RC4, which yes is a beta version.  The new MT install does seem to have a lot of new feature enhancements to make navigation around the backend more thrifty with more links and information on each individual page.  Also I hear there is a lot of performance enhancements to make MT load faster with Memcache.  I don't quite understand what Memcache is or does, but I'm trying it out.

I heard these things from Byrne Reese, the Product Manager of Movable Type, whom I met at OSCON this last week and spoke in detail with him personally for a little while on things.  He's a very nice guy and obviously cares very much about the product, the user experience, and the direction of progress in technology in general.

Well well, I know its a long time coming to post an update.  I mostly just post on my Talk Boards as its much faster to do so.

So, today I updated my Newsletter Signup form to emphasize the free bumper sticker with signups by adding "and get a FREE bumper sticker!!!" right above the signup in heading letters so people can see it at a glance.  Also clarified the optional address form a bit.  Added some cellpadding so the words aren't scrunched in the box.  Set the font sizes so everything fits correctly.

Also, added the Newsletter Signup form code to the footer of my Talk Boards.  The Talk Boards are becoming one of the main areas of traffic since I opened that section - so it makes sense to add the signup form to that portion.  Previously, I added a link to the signup in my sig - but really it makes more sense to have that all on the same page.

Some occasional comment spam has been creeping in time to time.  I installed TypePad's new AntiSpam plugin which will hopefully cut down on the spam even more.  Also, installed Copy! plugin to copy MT templates.

I am back from Jet City Retro.  Fun time.

Thought of plenty of good ideas for Specialty Gamer and etc.  One of them was to add game collection tips section to the talk boards.  Basically the idea being for people share their tips on keeping their collection in the best shape possible.  With areas such as cleaning, repairing, buying, researching, maintaining and storing.

Check out the Talk Boards

I realize I've been neglecting to post on my Progress Journal here.  I have been working past few weeks on the Talk Boards, which I think are just about ready to open.  I need to adjust all the links and add a new graphic to the home page to show its open and no longer "in progress".  Not in the mood to make the graphics now, but will tommorrow.

For anyone interested in seeing it early, here is the link - www.specialtygamer.com/talk/

I never particularly cared for the term "archives" which is used by default in my MT installation.  So I changed the name of the [section name] Archives to [section name] Full Index.  And from [section name] Index to [section name] Home.  I also cleaned up category archive names and just removed the Archives wording from categories entirely.  And for authors, changed it to [author's name]'s Page.  Sounds more personal to me.

Also, removed an extra colon (:) that was in some page titles, and also fixed spacing in some page titles.

Checking out the selection of open source forums, it was between phpBB, DeluxeBB, and SimpleMachinesForum.  I went with Simple Machines forum basically by process of elimination - and I liked the format of SMF.

Added portion to say that I swap banners with other websites on the Links page.  Also added a new, 2nd banner to choose from.  Looks like this.

Did another clean install of Magento to the 1.0 production release, just released today! 

Its been sort of a while since I last posted in the Business Progress Journal, as I have done many various things and sometimes too lazy to record everything.

I won't list all the small fixes, as many of them are minor.  Only notable fix I can recall is that I added forum code banner link to the Links page.

As far as the Privacy Policy goes, I updated it today because my mom was telling me about how she visited the website and was concerned with cookies being saved by Google.  That is just Google Analytics which I use to help me collect statistics of visitors such as:  the browser being used, the country of the user, the referring link/search engine used to get to the site (if any), length of visit, how many pages visited, how many new or return visitors.  No personally identifiable information is collected, so if you visit, there is no way I have any way (even if I wanted) to know that you personally visited any site or page on a given day.  The information collected is used simply to keep track of how many unique visitors there are to the website.  Used to tell if my website is getting more or less traffic on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.  Also the information is used so I can know which browsers, setups are being used so I can make the website accessible across all platforms - and with seeing what links and search engines are being used, helps me to keep track of my marketing campaigns to see what is working and what is not working.

I was noticing that my webpages often take longer than I'd like to load with the graphics, so I needed to find a good way to cut down on graphic file size.  I found a great program called Ignite that seriously cut the file sizes on all my files typically by more than half.  A set of GIF's that I had were just under 25 Kb, with some tweaking, I got it to under 10 Kb.  Very nice!  Some other graphics at 4 Kb's each, were cut to about 350 bytes!  Individually, a few Kb's isn't a big deal, but it does make a difference added up with all the graphics that make up a web page.

I went thru and optimized every single logo and website graphic, drastically cutting down on file size and load time.  Also, I finally eliminated the Javascript logo fade effect - instead making it a GIF file, and then optimizing that file.  These two GIF's you see below, I actually used a hefty JavaScript script to get it to do that fade effect.  The script itself was like a page in length, so it took up a ton of source code space - it was a such a bother to have to keep having to scroll past it at the top whenever editing my page code.

Also corrected various bits of bad written code cosmetics - such as removing capitalization, self closing and closing various tags that weren't closed, etc.

I did a lot to the start page, and the rest to the border and "fade" graphics.  Also did some bits to the Email Newsletter graphics.

Upgraded my Magento software to the latest version again.  Unsure how to set up my merchant account however, so left a message with my merchant services guy at the bank. 

Elsewhere, I'm checking out the Microsoft Small Business Summit, a free four day online (no actual location) expo with various teleconferences online.  Its Monday thru Thursday this week, so I was ready at 9 AM, the start time.  I log in and at 9:20, twenty minutes after the stated start time I see nothing.  I use Mozilla FireFox, so think maybe the Small Business Summit only works on Internet Explorer, being that its sponsored by Microsoft (ridiculous if so, since I believe most people have switched to FireFox by now than use Internet Explorer).  So I open the website with IE, and I do get a little video player that wouldn't show up correctly in FireFox, but still no video feed or anything. 

I checked to make sure I have the latest version of Flash installed, so that's not the problem.  I've done teleconferences before, but this is the first issue I've had.  Checking in at the end, there is some video feed on IE, but still not working on FF.  Oh well...  The website itself isn't very clear on where to go and what to do anyways, which is a shame.

Thanks to Josh Parr for alerting me on the IE7 issue.  There was an issue where under IE7, when the mouse was rolled over any of the graphic links at the top, the menubar as well as all the body contents inside the graphic frame would disappear.   The error did not show up under IE6 or any other browser that I tested.

The fix was to turn on backwards compatible mode so IE7 will act like IE5.5, yet all other browser will act to current standards.  That seems to have fixed the problem, although the website does still look wonky compared to on non-IE browsers.

Since I was at it, I put a page thru a HTML validator and it came up with 472 total errors in the page.  Fixing them by hand, I eventually got to a more reasonable 72 total errors per page.  The only errors I can't really fix are in the javascript scripts.  I may find a workaround so I don't need to use as much javascript later.

I was flipping thru my latest issue of Entrepreneur (April, 2008) and found this hilarious (to me) advertisement section for Best Restaurants.  Its an eight page spread with the individual restaurants featured being:  Papa John's, Quiznos, Boston's The Gourmet Pizza, Lenny's Sub Shop, Taco Del Mar, and Hurricane Grill & Wings.  Anyways, I find it deeply hilarious that those restaurants consider themselves to be the best in the industry.  My opinions I should note are based purely as a consumer and not as someone interested in owning a restaurant.

Papa John's first of all, I suppose has the reputation of the commercial with the founder speakers and giving the trademark Tourette's-like head twitches while saying the company's slogan.  "Better Ingredients... (up? twitch) Better Pizza... (right? twitch) Papa John's"  (down? twitch)  The directions of the twitches might possibly vary (?) between each pause commercial to commercial, but basically whenever that part of the commercial comes up, its always funny to imitate that part of it. 

Papa John's pizza itself while possibly having higher quality ingredients doesn't really make it taste better.  In my opinion, they are actually some of the worst pizza I have tasted.  As far as chain pizza goes, Pizza Hut and Papa Murphy are way way better than Papa John's.

Quiznos as a sub sandwich shop I always thought was overrated.  The only thing they really had going for them was that they offered Toasted sandwiches.  In their commercials, they make their gimmick clear with the slogan, "Mmm mmm mmm mmm... Toasty".  But again, having their sandwiches Toasted doesn't in my opinion make them taste better.  Besides that, Subway now also offers to have their sandwiches toasted - and it actually does make them taste better when Subway does it - so now the one thing Quiznos had to make them stand out, they no longer have that anymore.  Honestly, anyone that has the choice between Subway, Quiznos, Blimpie, or any other local sandwich deli, I don't see why anyone would actually choose Quiznos, unless maybe they had a coupon or something just for Quiznos.  As far as sandwich chains go?  Yeah, I think Quiznos has the worst sandwiches.

Taco Del Mar is one of those trendier healthy/neo-Mexican burrito places that markets itself as a progressive, independent thinking company.  My opinion, however, tends to be that they are just another nameless/faceless corporate chains that simply tries to cash in, selling to what they believe is the progressive/hipster market.  Much of opinion on Taco Del Mar is based on them attempting to outpurchase the lease and expand into the space occupied by local independent zine/bookstore and cultural landmark, Reading Frenzy.  If you lived in Portland around the mid-90's and followed indy news, then you knew about the huge hit Taco Del Mar took to their indy/progressive rep [by the locals here] due to the Reading Frenzy lease thing.

But aside from politics, the main thing about Taco Del Mar is that their burritos just aren't very good.  Compared to other non-authentic, healthy fast food burrito places, well Taco Del Mar really is one of the worst.

Boston's The Gourmet Pizza is one of those restaurants that is in the casual dining category.  Ha ha ha, that casual dining category name makes me laugh as its just a marketing invention to classify places like that.  Anyways, the company description text I found to be especially hilarious.  Read this:

...the restaurant chain has distinguished itself by offering patrons the unique opportunity of choosing between two separate restaurant experiences - a family-friendly casual dining room complete with creative artwork and color schemes or a state-of-the-art sports bar, customized with multiple flat-screen televisions, local memorabilia and popular bar fare, all under one roof.  Boston's is rapidly introducing this one-of-a-kind concept...

A family-friendly dining room and a sports bar, all in one place.  A unique and one-of-a-kind concept.  Really, it does sound like a fabulous idea and I can't see why any other restaurant would not want to do that.  Actually, wait a minute... that sounds like almost every casual dining place I know.  Far from one-of-a-kind, I'm pretty sure I can think of at least five places that do the family dining/sports bar combo off the top of my head.  Let's see... Old Chicago, Applebees, Chilis, Hooters, Fridays.  Okay that's five.  Give me some time and I'm sure I could come up with ten.

I've been to Boston's once.  When I went there, they asked me if this was my first time.  Being that it looked like all the other places, I could have said yes pretty much.  Side note:  I've always found it amusing when places ask if its my first time there - that is whe the place has a standard traditional restaurant setup, not like a Mongolian grill or anything.  I always think if I say no, then the server may be like, "oh... well this is called a meen yuuu..."

As far as their food goes, it was okay.  Not terrible, but not good enough that I cared to go there again.  Below average I'd say.  The only local in my area has since closed, so I think I can safely presume that everyone else probably shared that same opinion.

Lenny's Sub Shop and Hurricane Grill & Wings I've never heard of or been to.  But being associated with the other places I have been to, can only guess that likely the food (and maybe the service) is horrible.  Let's hope I'm wrong, but just from seeing who they are advertised with, the other places are pretty much the worst in their category.

Just some small bits here and there.  Noticing that various font sizes were the same so it gave various elements equal focus - when some of those elements should just have background focus, like footer links.  Also with so many links in the Past Features sidebar menu, it made the page very long to scroll down - even if the page itself didn't have that much body content.  So I made the links to past Features into a smaller font size as well.  Additionally, I think it makes them more readable mostly being on a single line.  With the body size font, the titles were long enough that many long titles were wrapping down to second lines making the whole thing just look very messy.

Edited the stylesheet to change these elements

• Made title box font a bit smaller
• Made title box graphic borders thinner and removed bottom border to naturally make the eyes flow down
• Made title box itself shorter
• Made the "Written by..." and comments footer link into smaller than body size font to give less focus than the entry itself
• Moved transition border line above "Written by" to below

Edited these templates to make these changes

• Removed the "Deals" and "Sticker" menuboxes from the sidebar.  I've had just one single magazine order, and zero sticker inquiries - not even for free...
• Added a <span style="font-size:80%"> tag to make the past Features links a smaller size and greatly trim the vertical space
• Changed all references from "Archives" to "Index" as that term makes more sense to me. 
• Removed unnecessary carriage returns
• Added hspace="10" and vspace="10" to the headshots by the article summaries so the summaries are now neatly beside the headshots - rather than below them as before and wasting all that empty space

Setup Google Analytics on the Specialty Gamer domain. 

Various tweaks to the website.

On the dropdown menubar, I added little down arrows to show where certain buttons branch down below.  I just rotated the graphic I was using to do the side branch outs, and then added some lines to the CSS to position the graphic so its right at the bottom edge.

I never knew how to enable Captcha in MT, until I carefully (yeah, that's the key!) read where it mentioned I needed to configure the CaptchaSourceImageBase directive... so after being stuck in thought all this time, I finally went "aha!" and looked to the config directives page and there was the solution as simple as can be - http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/config-directives/captchasourceimagebase.html

On the comment form, I made some changes.

• Removed the "(You may use HTML tags for style)" note.
• Took out HTML tags for comments, except URL's which will autolink
• Removed "Preview" button.
• Added Comment Challenge plugin, requiring commenters to enter in the word "game" to help combat automated spam comments.

UPDATE:

Ok, the passphrase plugin was giving me issues so I deleted the tag references and disabled the plugin (I think?) so everything should be how it was.  Comments may be giving errors till I troubleshoot tommorrow (its late here and I'm tired) - so if it happens, yes I know about it.

Clean install of the latest Magento e-commerce software.  With the new release, the .htaccess file was already modified with the script to work on a PHP 4 server so I didn't need to edit it like in the past.

Well, this has been an ongoing issue that's really baffled me for months.  Basically since I put up the dropdown menubar.  I've gone thru multiple scripts and etc. thinking maybe my script was broken... Well anyways today I seem to have an "Aha!" moment where I finally figured it out.  It was of course a minor oversight on my part.

All I needed to do was add

z-index:-1

to the pagebody and pagebody-inner sections in my CSS.  

So changed from:

#pagebody
{
position: relative;
width: 100%;
}
/* page body */
#pagebody-inner
{
position: relative;
width: auto;
}

To:

#pagebody
{
position: relative;
width: 100%;
z-index:-1;
}
/* page body */
#pagebody-inner
{
position: relative;
width: auto;
z-index:-1;
}

And so it seems it was a CSS issue in that my webpages are in sectioned, I needed to give the sections overlapped by the dropdowns a z-index of "-1" as IE 6/7 has the quirk of giving other page elements graphical priority over menu drop downs.  Of course, that quirk only shows up in IE 6/7.  Every other web browser has that corrected.  Another reason why I don't like to use IE, all the alternated coding I have to do for it to make my website compatible for IE users.

Update!!  (Nevermind everything I just said...)

Okay, after all that turns out it finally works and looks okay under IE 6/7, but it only gives a blank screen where main body usually is for every other non IE 6/7 browser.  Yet strangely, all the content is still there as I see the mouse turn to the hand when rolling over where I remember the links are, just that's its all white/blank.  So with the above method, looks like I can only get it to work on IE 6/7 that way...

Well, after a full day of messing with things and trying stuff out, it appears that I've finally made a solution.  Over 12 hours that is too and fixing the menubar flyover to work on IE and non-IE is all I've done today! 

My web pages are cut into sections so I can just edit piece by piece when necessary rather than having to do the whole thing each time.  The flyout wouldn't show up right in IE 6/7 as it was crossing over my pagebody section, so... I just moved up the pagebody tags (<div id="pagebody"> and <div id="pagebody-inner" class="pkg"> for me) to start above the menubar and now it works in both IE 6/7 and non-IE browsers.  Because of the change, I did need to adjust one  element by inserting it inside a table cell to give it the correct background color that was supposed to be in the background, but with the tag change is now in the body.

Also with IE 6/7 troubleshooting, noticed two other separate issues that showed up - again of course only in IE 6/7.  I had some screwy tags on one page referencing jpg's in my temp folders on my desktop.  I don't even know how those got there.  And then, I found out that all the pages in the Features section were using the wrong main CSS file.  With changes, somehow that got mixed up and I had 2 CSS's with the same filename.  I didn't even know that was possible!  Of course IE 6/7 was using the alternate CSS that I didn't know about; the non-IE 6/7 browsers using the correct CSS.  So with that issue fixed, now all the fonts and other style elements appear how I intended them to in IE 6/7.

I did all these things yesterday, but didn't post because I was working during the day and too tired at the end of the day.

I updated the look of the Specialty Gamer Newsletter template.  The template is the graphic border and all the stuff that doesn't change each time.  I cleaned up the message body footer by centering it, making a smaller font than the body text.  Also adding a Copyright notice above the links and adding two other links to my Privacy Policy and to the Specialty Gamer homepage. 

From this:

To this:

I also clarified the email footer subscription links to read more clearly in natural language.  I honestly hadn't changed the text in that yet, so the footer being used was the default.  Because the new text was longer than the width of the email body, I had to place the footer in a table so it wraps otherwise it looked funny having the text trail longer than the graphic frame above.  I also made the font smaller than the standard body text.

From this:

To this:

Also for the first time, I embedded the graphics rather than linking them to the graphics on the web.  I also specificed the fonts used in the message using <style> tags.  Previously, the fonts weren't specified so the user's default font was used. 

All these changes as far as the look of the Newsletter goes is minor, but the real reason for making them is make a clearer User Policy.  Any time a business sends collects personal information/contacts, a Privacy Policy should be clearly stated somewhere wherever the contacts are collected AND on whatever the thing is being sent to those contacts.  I've already done those things on the website, but had forgotten on my Newsletter emails.  Also, I wanted to clearly specify that Specialty Gamer does not share any emails with any other companies, etc.  Even though that is stated on my Privacy Policy page, I realize not everyone is going to bother to check that to know. 

The most important thing I felt was to clarify that the reason user was recieving the email was because they signed up for Newsletter.  I make the Newsletter double opt-in on purpose.  Double opt-in meaning that after a user enters their email on the website, then then have to confirm that that is indeed their email by confirming it with a link set to the email provided.  The reason is so that a person can't be blindly subscribed by someone just entering in emails that don't belong to them.  In my email list back end, I can see there is some people that have their emails signed up but they have not confirmed.  Even though I have the power to confirm myself, I'm not going to do that.

Aside from the privacy issue, there is also a practical reason for making the Newsletter list double opt-in.  As when a person signs up, when it states that they will be recieving an email with a link to confirm their email, that gives them a chance to look for the email and respond to it.  So if by chance that first email goes into the person's spam/bulk mail filter, they will know that with the first email (presuming they follow the initial directions) and if that is the case, they can put Specialty Gamer's email onto their whitelist so they future emails will for sure reach their inbox.

So anyways with all that said... as I sent out my first Newsletter with all the new changes to the Newsletter in placed, one of the emails to a user on the BellSouth domain was bounced! 

I recieved a

550 Error - Blocked for abuse. 

And as stated,

This is a permanent error.

All that work I did to make my emails more legally clear and this!  Oh the cruel irony!! 

I should mention that this person is actually one of the people I even know, its Captain Insano16, my best friend on the CheapAssGamer boards that I talk to most.  So he was one of the first people to be on the list (so he'd gotten Newsletters from me before) and we've emailed each other personally before too - outside of the Newsletter, with using that same email I use to send out the Newsletters.  I mean, not that it would make it any less worse if the user was someone who I didn't know or tell about Specialty Gamer personally, but I mean of all people to have their domain blacklist me.  Oh the irony gets more cruel!!

Being blacklisted means that I tried later to send a personal email to him (non-Newsletter) and it was immediately bounced as well.  Luckily, he seems to be the only user on the BellSouth domain, so at least I didn't recieve any other bounces.

If you will notice (as I did), that there is a link listed in the header for more information.  http://www.att.net/bls_rbl/  Following the link, there is a page with an explanation of what the error codes mean. 

The sending system exhibited behaviour associated with spammers and was blocked.

Oh... that hurts!  Especially, since I'm not even sure what it was I did to look like a spammer.  I'm not trying to play it innocent or anything, as whatever I did, shirley was unintentional but I wish I could be told what exactly it was I did so I be sure not to do it again.  Seriously, with all the stresses related to having a startup business, worrying about being blacklisted is something I don't want to have to deal with.  I've never been blacklisted before by a domain in my life before this!

I'm not sure what steps are necessary to "mitigate the problems" but I followed the link under the What to do column. http://worldnet.att.net/general-info/bls_info/block_admin.html

I get this scary form:

Of the choices to check under changes made to your configuration, I don't even know what most of them mean.  I am fairly certain my server doesn't have any viruses.  I don't believe I inserted any scripts on my server.  The only user that has access to the mailing list right now is me and I definately have not done anything malicious.  I have the emails sent directly from the specialtygamer.com domain (not from a third party on behalf of specialtygamer.com) and I do own the domain itself, so really I can't see the issue.

The only thing I can think that it might be is that while I was writing the Newsletter email, my dad came home and wanted to go out to dinner that night, so I tried to rush and get the thing finished so we could go out.  So I admit I did sort of a rush job on typing the HTML body code up and if anything some of my code was broken and not aethetically pleasing.  I mean, its nothing that would show up by seeing the email itself, but if a person actually looked at the source code, there was a lot of unnecessary tags - which was there because I just cut and pasted from my own webpages to put the new articles in there.  Normally, I very much dislike messy code like that - even if no one will know about it from viewing the actual page - its just that the more basic and tidy the code it, its much easier to go back and edit and interpret if I need to later on.

For what its worth, I went out to Mike's Drive In with my dad and had a mushroom swiss burger with fries and a orange creamsicle milkshake.  It was okay.

I been meaning to fix the Newsletter Signup portion of the page where its practically invisible down at the bottom.  Hopefully these changes today will make it clearer to spot and also a "call out" banner link in the middle of the header will make more people notice that I do actually have a Newsletter.

• I made some new graphics also that are tighter in height so to conserve webpage length. 
• Made Footer into a Universal template
• Made Header into a Universal template
• Changed a couple file names (RSS and CSS files) in the Features to work with the Universal template
• Changed bottom graphics at Newsletter Signup
• Adding call out banner link to Newsletter Signup in middle of header
• Moved Heading down into page body right at top of page border
• Removed "Newsletter Signup" link button from the menubar

Reading the latest issue of Target Marketing, I read an article by Lou Mastria noting Consumer Notices to be placed wherever a business does their marketing - such as website, emails, direct mailing....  I have all the noted areas mentioned to be placed in a website already in place, but I'd forgotten to place the Privacy Policy in my email Newsletters.  So, I added the PP link to the email templates. 

Decided to add the Author Login link on the webpage.  Placed it under Features/Authors/Author Login. 

At first, I was thinking I didn't want the link to be actually on the website, but now I realise its helpful for it be somewhere.  But if someone is not an author, they won't be able to get in anyways since you need a username and password to log in.  Also, I updated the Author How To page with that info.  I might put a link to that page on the website as well.  I'll think about it, we'll see.

Updated 2 MT plugins to work with MT4.1.

User Profiles to 1.6

and Template Installer to 1.2

Just installed em.  Will mess around with the new features of User Profiles later.

The website is on a hosted server, meaning I am paying for a limited amount webspace.  So I can't have people uploading 1 MB+ picture files and etc., as that really unnecessary for the internet.  (Sorry, Dant!) 

When I see other users upload files too big, I've just been downloading them, resizing them, then re-uploading them.  But I found out that a upload limit can be set by placing a directive to the MT config.  So I added this script: 

CGIMaxUpload 200000

Which sets the image upload to 200 KB.  Really, anything over 100 KB for regular images is more than enough for webpages.  All current assets are less than 100 KB, or have been resized by me to less than that - but the limit is set to 200 KB just in case.

For those that may actually check the ProgLog to see what I'm doing, you may have noticed I haven't posted in here for a while.  Its because I've started my own more focused business journal on my personal website.  Its mainly just a checklist of things I've done and need to do, so I haven't put any links to it.  And certain things, like numbers, its often easier to know that not just anyone can read about all my business.

So anyways, I'm currently in the progress of setting up my merchant account.  That is, to accept credit cards thru the website.  I'm talking with the e-commerce guy of my bank to make sure that what they have will work with the e-commerce software I want to use - Magento.  If it doesn't work, then I'll have to find a different software to use.

For now, I've just upgraded my Magento install to a more current release.  As Magento is still currently in Beta stage, they recommend doing a clean install as upgrades are said to not be fully implemented yet.

The install page is here:  http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/magento-installation-guide

And another important page with info on installing on a PHP4 server (which applies to me currently):  http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/installing-magento-on-a-php4-server

So as of right now, I have eleven zombie spam comments on Specialty Gamer so far for the current day.  (yes, 11!!)  Three of them got thru my filters, so all that I've put up isn't working yet.  So I have added additional IP and domain blog spam blacklist services to my lists of those.  Added are bsb.empty.us, opm.blitzed.org to IP blacklist lists and multi.surbl.org, bsb.empty.us  to domain blacklist lists.  Plus I continue to update the keyword blacklist as new words show up in spam, typically unlikely to be used by a real visitor commenting on Specialty Gamer.

So far, no legit comments have been caught by the filters in place.