I run a number of other mini blogs out there which aggregate data from one or multiple sources. I could never get WP-o-Matic or WP Robot to run cron jobs correctly in cPanel. No matter what I did I always got the error: No such file or directory.

A simple fix to this error is adding the code ” wget -O /dev/null ” before the URL of your cron job when typing it into cPanel.

With just the URL cPanel does not know which program to use.  In this case ‘wget’ is the program. Since the URL actually returns no output (for the user or for wget), wget wants to write an empty file to your hosting home directory. The ‘ -O /dev/null ‘ option tells wget to write that file to ‘nowhere’ so you don’t get a bunch of empty files cluttering up your home directory and using up inodes.

Happy Automated Blogging!

Just found this great clip of me on Fox 18 way back in 2006. I was interviewed by Morgan Fogarty on the subject of File Sharing Security. Talk about a throw back! I had turned 21 a few months before this. Check out that long spiked hair(it still looks the same, but shorter!)

Magento’s out of the box WYSIWYG editor annoying adds a line break after each time you press enter or return. I found this to be very frustrating when I was creating descriptions and even more annoying when I was copy and pasting descriptions. No other eCommerce platform or WYSIWYG system I’ve worked for did this odd extra spacing. In the end its quite an easy fix:

Open File: /app/design/frontend/default/-YOURTEMPLATE-/template/catalog/product/view/description.phtml

Locate this code:

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<?php echo $this->helper(’catalog/output’)->productAttribute($this->getProduct(), nl2br($this->getProduct()->getDescription()), ‘description’) ?>

Replace it with this code:

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<?php echo $this->helper(’catalog/output’)->productAttribute($this->getProduct(), $this->getProduct()->getDescription(), ‘description’) ?>

The code which causes this extra spacing is nl2br(). So if you need to adjust it in future versions or other fields just find the nl2br() call.

Following my Twitter stream I saw a tweet by @Shopify that said one of their stores have customers texting in questions. This struck me as a bit odd at first, but after reading it’s implementation I find it quite genius.

The company name is Baby Melons. You can see right up top on their customer service page they have a number ready for your text question. Here is the best part about it:  you could have this setup for free and implementation is just signing up for a Google Voice number. Post the number on your website. Then receive and reply to text messages in the same way you do emails.

This is something that as a customer I would do just to try. If the experience was good I would be even more likely to purchase from the company. On the business side a customer service rep can only handle one phone call at a time. In theory now the rep could now handle multiple clients at a time with more time to respond.

Benefits: Save labor expenses, give better responses, show off a new side of technology to customers.
Negatives: Some customers may not understand how to text.

I’m always looking for more  innovative ways to close sales or communicate with customers. Do you have any? Comment below.

Direct link to the original blog article: http://blog.shopify.com/2010/5/5/let-them-text-us-for-customer-service

Out of the box Magento looks great, but it can be a little large for people with smaller resolution. Analytics has taught me that majority of users are stuck on 1024X768. Sadly this resolution is tiny and really limits how wide your website can be – unless your working with something fluid, but your probably not. One of the biggest issues I saw in Magento’s large styled product page is the Product Options Box. In Magento’s demo you can see two options:

Large Product Options Box:

Better Formated Box

The first image is what comes out of the box with Magento. So how can you get the Product Options Box smaller and better formated? It’s an easy edit:

Open File: /app/design/frontend/default/-YOURTEMPLATE-/template/catalog/product/view.phtml

Locate this code:

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</div>
        <div class="clear"></div>
        <?php if ($_product->isSaleable() && $this->hasOptions()):?>
            <?php echo $this->getChildChildHtml('container2', '', true, true) ?>
        <?php endif;?>
    </form>

Replace it with this code:

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<?php if ($_product->isSaleable() && $this->hasOptions()):?>
            <?php echo $this->getChildChildHtml('container2', '', true, true) ?>
        <?php endif;?>
        </div>
        <div class="clear"></div>
    </form>

Now you have a better optimized product options box! Users with smaller resolutions will be more likely to see Add to Cart which in turn should help out your conversation rate. Of course you should always A/B Test any changes!

Here is one problem that was a simple Magento fix, but took me hours to understand. Of course many of my products require bullet points – it’s like a standard on eCommerce products. When I imported or even manually inserted them into my Magento website it would never display correctly. I searched the forums, google, and even asked a few people. There was no easy answer. I gave up and came back the next day. I luckily stumbled on this quick and simple fix in the Magento wiki:

Add this code to the bottom of your boxes.css: (/skin/frontend/default/-YOURTHEME)/css)

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.product-specs ul li { list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px; }
.short-description ul li { list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px; }
.product-specs ol li { list-style-type: decimal; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px; }
.short-description ol li { list-style-type: decimal; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px; }<a href="http://www.robbiehodge.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/bullets.jpg"><img src="http://www.robbiehodge.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/bullets.jpg" alt="" title="bullets" width="127" height="71" class="alignright size-full wp-image-156" /></a>
.description ul li { list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px;}
.description ol li { list-style-type: decimal; list-style-position: outside; margin-left: 20px;}

Now open up view.phtml (app/design/frontend/default/-YOURTHEME-/template/catalog/product/view.phtml)

Find this code:

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<div class="short-description"><?php echo nl2br($_product->getShortDescription()) ?></div>

Replace with:

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<div class="short-description"><?php echo $_product->getShortDescription() ?></div>

Do the same for description field and now you have bullets and ordered lists..

Hopefully one day this will be fixed/patched in. I really enjoy the wysiwyg editor, but sometimes it just causes more problems then its worth.