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USPS Rate and Rate V2 APIs to Expire Soon

If you are running an ecommerce store that relies on real-time rate lookups from the U.S. Postal Service then hopefully you are already aware of this looming deadline (March 31, 2012) and have made arrangements to prevent this from crippling your business.

If you are running AspDotNetStorefront (our favorite ecommerce package) AND you rely on USPS as one of your Real Time Shipping lookups, you will need to know that you need to be running v8.0.1.4 or v9.1.1.0 of this fabulous package in order to be safe from this problem.

You’ll be able to confirm the version of your website by looking the left column of the admin control panel: Read more

Definitive guide to rel=”author” and rel=”me” on WordPress?

Joost de Valk of Yoast fame, has written the definitive guide to rel=”author” and rel=”me” integration into WordPress. Or should I say it almost is the definitive guide.

There are few things here that need to be considered:

  • If you are running his WordPress SEO plugin, you need to be sure that under Indexation | Archive section that you have unselected the “Disable the Author Archives” page (which is on by default to the best of my knowledge).
  • Ensure that you have SOMETHING in your author bio box. If not, nothing (image, bio and the all-important link to the Google Profile page) will show on the author’s archive page. It doesn’t have to be much but the default behavior if the Biographical Information in your profile on the WordPress site.

Read more

What’s so big about OSCommerce?

Sure, they have an extremely large 3rd party/open source community behind them but wow, is this software backward in terms of usability and manageability. I’m doing some work on http://www.forcefieldmagnets.com/ and this is like working with WordPress software from 3-5 years ago. Sure as heck doesn’t hold a candle to ASPDNSF. Perhaps I’m just spoiled?

Anyone have any good, positive comments on OSCommerce? Perhaps because the version I’m working on is so old that is why it seems so limited/backwards.

SQL Files Grown Out of Control?

For merchants running AspDotNetStorefront who aren’t regularly running the Monthly Maintenance routines, you might find yourself in a situation similar to one of our clients where the size of the transaction log for their SQL database had grown large enough that their site was shut down because it couldn’t grow any more.

In this case, since we couldn’t access the admin section of the site to run the monthly maintenance, I was able to run the following commands in order to clear the transaction log to the point of the last backup AND then shrink the physical size of the SQL database files. Please note that before running these commands GET A FULL BACKUP OF THE DATABASE. If you can’t do this directly from SQL Management Studio (or similar tool) you should be able to initiate an ad-hoc backup from your hosting company’s control panel.

Read more

Change Starting Order Number in ASPDNSF

From within your storefront’s “Run SQL” option under “Configuration” | “Advanced” (or from within SQL Mangler, I mean Manager, enter the following command:

dbcc checkident(OrderNumbers, reseed, XXXXXX)

Where XXXXXX is the new number you want to use as your seed.

This can come in very handy if you moving from one storefront to another to ensure a continuity of orders.

from: http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/p-1335-changing-the-starting-order-number.aspx