Brian's progress on Specialty Gamer

Did lots of bits of little things today.  I added address fields to the Newsletter Signup form, since I need people's addresses for mailing out stuff to them anyways.  I should have already had that set up than have to ask them again to email me their addresses.

And being that I'm asking for people's addresses, I set up a Privacy Policy page.  Any time a website collects any kind of personal information, even emails, a responsible one will have a Privacy Policy in place.

Other changes:

• Added Privacy Policy and About links to the Copyright sidebar box
• Took off the About link from the menubar
• Updated link in About page, took off outdated Newsletter Signup form at the bottom
• Submitted the website feeds to Google
• Added Google, Yahoo!, and FeedBurner to list of ping servers when publishing new pages to the logs
• Changed log pages from .html to .php
• Added polls sidebar

Didn't really get a whole lot of stuff done today.  I packed up the free gifts to the nine people on the list I have addresses for. 

Also, added an order page for people to go to get Specialty Gamer stickers.  Instead of straight selling 2 for $1 shipped, I now am offering to send a free sticker if a person sends me a SASE.  If someone wants more than one sticker, then they can pay the 2 for $1.  Earlier, I'd made a custom PayPal Buy Now page for ordering as well as a Payment Confirmation on the website here.

Other changes:

• Removed Deal of the Day box for the magazine subscriptions.  It was Game Informer one day, Nintendo Power the next.  But that's all that's listed for game magazines right now.  Today's Deal of the Day is for Body & Soul, so felt it would look out of place with that banner still there.  I may place links to specific titles later on.
• Added link to get stickers on the sidebar.
• Moved Authors Archives links box from near bottom to the top.
• Finished up some other fixes that I'd started the day before.

I've dealt a lot on Craigslist, Ebay, trade forums and etc... so I come across people that aren't always the easiest to deal with.  But I mostly give people the benefit of the doubt so rarely get bothered by tough to deal with, or temperamental people or deals gone bad.

Oh, but today I talked with a seller that hurt me so bad, I feel like she thinks I wronged her or something.

I use an aggregator to pick up whenever various items are listed, so Saturn came up on Craigslist and I emailed minutes after posting saying I wanted to buy.  This was Saturday afternoon, at 1:30 PM.  I get the first reply back that evening at 8:30 PM and she said she could meet me tomorrow at 11:30 AM.  As I happened to be online and available, I replied right back and asked if she was available I could pick it up right now.  She asked where I was, (turns out she is about 30 miles away, at least) and then said that tomorrow on her lunch break would work better.  Sounds good to me.

A bit of side story:  Earlier that day, I returned a car battery that had a bad cell.  At the store, the manager tested the new battery and said it could use a little recharge to get to full power.  So, when I got it home I hooked it up to my charger to recharge overnight and I'd put in the battery next morning.

The next morning, the weather is really bad, cold and raining in big drops... and as my car is just outside by the curb, makes it more of a hassle to screw on a battery in those conditions.  But I get it on, but notice from my watch that I'm running a little late so I pull over to a pay phone to let her know. 

I just said I was running late and didn't mention at first that I had to put in the new battery that morning, as really there's no reason to bring it up.  She asks me if I'd be able to get there within ten minutes, and I say I probably will need at least twenty minutes.  She starts to sound upset saying that she had set this time for me, had been waiting for five minutes [why bring up waiting just five minutes?] and saying, "I thought you were serious", "You should have allocated your time better", I tell her I am serious and that I had to replace a car battery this morning.  (I offered to buy the stuff right then the first time she emailed back, remember?)  I say that at least I gave her a courtesy call (from experience, most people on Craigslist don't even do that) and that I could meet her later today.  Then she says that she set aside this time to meet, doesn't know how the rest of the day is going to go and she may get back to me tomorrow.  Then, continuing with her guilt trip saying, "this is my lunch break and I set aside this time for you", "you were the first person to email so I gave you first shot", "I have seven other people lined up and willing to meet at anytime, anywhere I request", and "I think this opportunity may have passed you by".

I get back home and two hours after I called, she emails:

"GOOD LUCK ON YOUR QUEST. SOLD TODAY."

What's up with that??  When I just called, she said her lunch break was the only available time she had that day and wasn't sure if she'd have any time until tomorrow.  I said I could have gotten it any time today.  Also the first email she sent that was in all caps, totally passive aggressive.  When a person (unless they are a sales person) says "good luck", that's just a social way of secretly saying, "Fuck You".  And "GOOD LUCK ON YOUR QUEST."  (???)  What the hell is that "your quest" business supposed to mean? 

I actually really did feel bad after the call and being late - at first.  Even though I don't normally need to replace a car battery in the rain, I could have woken up maybe thirty minutes earlier.  I could of...  I could of...  I could of...  But then, when I saw her secretively worded email a couple hours later, I just thought, man what a BITCH.

I've been in not exactly the greatest mood for past week or so, anyways...

I'm not so happy w/ phplist, my current mailing list manager software.  I used it only because it was already set up thru Fantastico in my web server control panel.  It works well enough, however the only thing I don't like is that I can't figure out how to view all the entry fields on one screen.  I set up custom entry fields for addresses, since I'd like to do some mailings.  As of now, it seems I can only view those fields by clicking on each user at a time.  I don't have a whole lot of subscribers right now, so its not such a big deal.  But if eventually I have fifty or more users, then it can be a hassle.

(Huh, fully stupid update....)

Ok, how funny that I decided to look up phplist's doc pages and I discover I can download the list of all users into a spreadsheet file with whatever sorting columns I wish.  Ok, that's basically EXACTLY what I was looking for.  Guess I just wasted a bunch of time looking up new programs, including installing dadamail, which isn't as fully featured as phplist.  Well, I got it figured out so now I don't have to worry about that anymore.

Phplist is great!

I'm looking up various E-commerce systems and if you look it up "e-commerce" on Google, the # of softwares that come up is mind boggling.  And for me, since I never done it before, I wonder - Do I set up a system/shopping cart first, then the merchant account (credit card acceptance)?  Or do I set up the merchant account first and set up the system/shopping cart to work with the card?  So much to think about, and I'm unsure what to do first.

At the minimum, I know at least that to start I'm looking at open source.  Commercial e-commerce can get spendy.  And of course, I would like PHP/XHTML and MySQL database for 2.0 web standards and also to work on my web host.

One I've seen so far that looks really slick is Magento.  Only downside is that it is only in beta release so far, as it just came out September, 2007, so I am unsure when a retail version would be out.  But so far, its at the top of my short list.

Otherwise, there is these that at least fit my minimum req's:

Shortcut to Open Source CMS: http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php

I just updated the log-in screen so it has the theme and logo of Specialty Gamer.  The weblog is Movable Type and I'd never bothered to change it from the default log-in screen (with Movable Type logos and everything...) that you get with the system, because up until I had authors, I was the only person seeing the log-in screens, so I didn't feel like I had to change it.

The web editor screen for people to write pages totally sucks.  Yes, I know it and its generally that is a consensus opinion (among users of MT4.01, the version I use).  So I am looking to upgrade to full featured editor like FCKeditor.  Something so you can create pages thru my webpage as easy as writing a Word document.  Oh, but it is SO complicated for me to figure out how to code it in.  I have FCKeditor installed (I think?) but just not quite sure how to link it all together.

And, I've decided on Magento as my E-commerce solution.  Out of all the open source E-commerce softwares, I thought theirs looked to be the most professional looking and feature rich.

Just completed installing Magento as my marketplace.  I don't know how to design or configure it yet, but I'm just happy to have it up and working.  I started the install process last night.

As I was going thru the install process, it asked me for my SSL server, which I don't have as of now.  So I just entered the regular http address and it worked fine.  But made me start to look up SSL certificates and how to go about getting one.  I don't exactly know the difference between them - I realise that many of them are expensive to buy.  The company with the biggest share of the SSL market is Verisign.  I don't yet know if there is particularly any advantages or disadvantages to going with a cheaper or more expensive option, as there seems to be a lot of options.  Also, there is even a free SSL certificate provider, Startcom. 

I still haven't yet set up my merchant account thru my bank, so I suppose I should talk to them first and see what may be necessary.  I was thinking, some merchant companies may just have their own secure 3rd party gateways that I could have the marketplace link to when someone wants to pay with a credit card, etc.  I figure that is less coding I'd have to do if its set up that way.  Also, I wouldn't have to worry about keeping credit card #'s on my own website.

As I was looking for something, I found a different thing related to the other thing I was looking for.  Looks that my Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) come up with some errors and a lot of warnings, when I enter my pages thru the W3C CSS Validation Service.  I've just started to learn CSS a few months ago, plus CSS's are very complex, so of course I'll make some mistakes.

Hopefully, getting all the errors corrected will fix the quirks showing up in IE6/7.  Looks like there is lots of alternate coding that needs to be done, basically just so things will look/act correctly in IE.

I went and created some various game related polls to the poll sidebar.  My first poll to ask people what browser they use/prefer turns out wasn't necessary, as my poll program tells me various info like the browser used by the voter anyways.  For those worried about privacy, don't worry...  I can't tell any personally identifiable info about people who vote. 

Also, added reply links to comments feature.  Now people can reply to individual comments like a real talk board!

Yesterday, I picked up the Valkyrie Profile strategy guide from Ebay.  Nice!  (I don't already have the guide so its not for sale, but thanks for asking.  Wink wink.) 

Also, other changes/fixes:

• Set dropdown Features categories to list alphabetically descending in menubar.
• Changed page titles of entries to "Specialty Gamer : [entry title]", from just "Specialty Gamer: [category]".  Makes more sense on each page, plus makes it more effective for search engines to have specific titles for each page.
• Changed "Editorials" category name to "Discussion/Editorials".  Reason for change is so I can post topics for people to comment on - like, "What game are you playing now?"

Update Jan 27:  Solution found, see here:  http://www.specialtygamer.com/proglog/2008/01/movable-type-41-is-installed/

I was sick with cold/flu-like symptoms, and also it had been absurdly cold here in Portland.  For those reasons, I didn't get much work done for the past week or so.  Since then, Movable Type finally came out with the retail release of MT4.1.  I kept trying to upgrade from the Beta versions of MT4.1 without success, so I wanted to see if this would work better for me. 

At the start, unfortunately... no.  I got some kind of upgrade error saying something about a Job records table. 

I tried to search the Job records thing and couldn't get any info on it.  My thought is that maybe I need to make some changes to my MT file system before upgrading.  Such as removing obsolete plugins and files left over from MT3.3.

File cleaning:

• Deleted EnhancedEntryEditing files
• Deleted Plugin Network files
• Deleted Multiblog files
• Deleted Smilies files
• Deleted StyleCatcher files
• Deleted Textile plugin
• Deleted Author plugin
• Deleted Markdown plugin set files

Now to copy the MT4.1 files again and upgrade.  Crap... I get the error again. 

Ok that did NOTHING...  Guess I'll try a clean install into a new directory [named "MT4"] next and see if that does me any better.  Crap... I get that error AGAIN!

Okay, well guess I'll just delete the whole new directory install... seeing as that was totally unnecessary.

The biggest news here of late is that I finally got MT4.1 properly upgraded and installed.  If you've been me for the past month or so, then you'd know I've been having frustrations trying to upgrade from MT4.01 to MT4.1 because of a persistent Job records error that kept popping up and killing my upgrade process.  See past posts on Dec. 17 and  Jan. 26 for references.

I finally just posted on Movable Type's forum and thanks to OtherNiceMan, I found out that the Job records error corresponded to a MySQL error in that the table had duplicate entries.  Turns out, the table is used by a new feature to MT4, the Publishing Queue, which I don't use - so I figured it would be safe to empty the table with the duplicate entries.  Which I did, and then the install went thru correctly!!  See the thread I started for the issue and the resolution. 

The most exciting (to me) upgrade is that the web edit box now has a very cool WYSIWYG entry editor with full WordPad/Email-like toolbars.  I have the power to add/delete elements in the toolbar if I want, so I took out stuff I thought was unnecessary.  But look!  There is now a Smilies icon to add smilies!  Hooray!

As I get new authors, I'm already tired of telling each one individually how to do stuff like login, edit their profile and write/edit an entry.  So I made up a webpage telling of how to do all that stuff.  I probably should have made up a page like that to begin with, but I didn't think of it before and I'm just going along.  There is, however, good reason for me to make that page now as even though I have some existing authors, I've recently updated my weblog and there are now some changes, such as an upgraded Entry edit box.  With this page, I can now explain the new features in one place to everybody.

Also, I made an easier to remember page that redirects to the SpGa author login.