Nick Bartlett“Every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.” - Emerson

I was paying MInnesota the sales taxes I collected on my business for 2008.  I’ve always been of the opinion that government websites suck and are notoriously difficult to navigate.  Today I found proof of where they’re at… about ten to twelve years behind the times.  First, I had to use Internet Exploder as somehow they wrote javascript form validation that works in IE and not in Firefox.  Then the kicker - the screenshot below says it all with their “new feature” in red print.

In case I have to spell it out, this is a “forgot password” link and form.

Sold 2/16/2009

1979 F-250 body on a 1976 F-350 chassis with a divorced NP205 transfer case. I’ve had this truck for ten years and it deserves a home
with somebody who has the time and passion for maintaining this truck that I once had.
I have a lot commute and new baby in the family that consumes my time. The truck has a rare engine with even rarer factory exhaust manifolds.
Ford guys will know the value of a 4BBL Cleveland. The truck runs very good, the drive train is very reliable.

What is has

• 351 Cleveland engine with 4BBL heads built to stock spec with around 40,000 mi since rebuild.
• Four wheel drive works great
• New Warn hubs.
• C6 auto transmission built extra heavy duty and has 20K mi on it.
• NP205 divorced transfer case for better drive line angles
• Dual exhaust with H pipe and flowmaster mufflers
• Ground up resto in 1995
• 3 inch body lift and 3 inch suspension lift
• 38.5” gumbo monster tires with plenty of tread left
• Dana 60 rear with heavy duty Dana 44 front with 4:10 gears
• Heavy duty brakes
• Air horn
• Aftermarket aluminum rims
• Aftermarket interior
• Sliding rear window
• Chrome bed trim
• K&N air filter
• New battery in October
• New Dual diaphragm brake booster
• New heater core
• Lots of chrome (bumpers, diff covers, etc)
• New door speakers.  Comes with 10inch truck speakers, but no player.

What it needs:

It’s an old truck and has many little things that need attention. Your welcome to stop by for a test drive; it drives very well. The drive train is stout.

• Roof light is out
• Tailgate latch is tricky
• New side steps needs to be bolted on (comes with truck)
• Drivers exhaust manifold cracked and welded up. No to little leaking. Have new manifold that comes with truck
• Truck has rust in some places on the cab and bed floor.
• Rear brake shoes need tightening
• New tires soon
• New front bumper and passenger fender

Merging changes back into the trunk incorrectly can really screw things up.  Trust me, I found out the hard way.   Below is a checklist of steps to follow.

1.    Update trunk from repository
2.    merge branch from trunk and take care of any conflicts
3.    View localhost and make sure everything looks good
4.    Commit merge changes to branch repository
5.    Merge branch into trunk locally.  Perform a test run first, then merge.
6.    Fix any conflicts
7.    Commit to repository trunk
8.    View development or staging server to verify changes

Below is the interface for TortoiseSVN and sample data for when you “merge two different trees”.  Select the trunk in the first drop down and the branch in the second drop down.  The result of the merge will be stored in the trunk.  Remember to commit your changes afterward.

A friend of mine wants a shopping cart for his downloadable products (images and music).  I’ve worked on oscommerce for a few years now (1 year full time) and know that the code is crap.  Oscommerce is dead, period.  The code is unmaintainable.

Zen-Cart

I know Zencart is based on oscommerce as the database is pretty much the same and it has most of the same interfaces.  Zencart is a cleaned up oscommerce, but let’s face it, to really clean up oscommerce you need to start over from scatch.  Setting up a downloadable product with zencart is a hack in itself.  Here are two tutorials I found showing you how to do it -   http://www.imakewebsites.ca/zen-cart-downloadable-products/ and  http://tutorials.zen-cart.com/index.php?article=71 .  After the customer has made their purchase, here is the download screen they’ll use to access the file. You’ll find the list of available downloads scrunched in the middle of the page below.

Magento

Today was my first experience with Magento.  The installation was more difficult than Zen-cart and the database is 212 tables as compared to 95 for Zen-cart.  I’ll admit my eyes glazed over looking at the database and the code library today.  Everything with Magento is mod rewrite so when you see mysite.com/customer there really isn’t a customer directory in the code.  Magento is like wordpress where you don’t modify the code if you want updates and support.  Magento offers paid support programs and customizations… maybe that’s why they made is so damn confusing.  Magento is cutting edge PHP; it’s built on the Zend Framework.  The interfaces of Magento are modern and don’t look like something that came from back when the internet was born.

How to specify that a product is downloadable and upload the downloadable file.

Customer’s view of downloadable products after making a purchase.

In my opinion, Magento is the clear choice going forward.  Here’s my analagy of comparing Magento to Zencart… it’s like comparing a new car to a twenty year old car.  The new car looks better, has better features, and outperforms the older car in every way.  From a developer’s perspective, when you look under the hood of Magento (at the code and database), you’ll feel overwhelmed and will realize there is a lot to learn.

If you just installed Magento and receive an “Object Not Found” 404 error with ever link you click, it’s because mod_rewrite is not enabled on your server.  Tell your hosting provider to turn it on if you’re on shared hosting.  If you’re using XAMPP, here how to do it .