influenced dot net

Currently when enabling SSL on shopping cart pages in Actinic, Actinic will no longer be able to link up Secpay transactions to orders.

After numerous hours debugging, I figured out what was going wrong.. when SSL is enabled on shopping cart pages, Actinic provides Secpay with HTTPS callbacks - as you’d expect. It also sets a parameter which Secpay needs if the callbacks are HTTPS. However for some reason at this moment in time Secpay won’t use the HTTPS callbacks - the request is never sent to the server

I don’t know why this is happening, I even used the alternative method of informing Secpay that the callback is HTTPS - via the ‘options’ parameter.. no dice

The solution I’m currently using is to modify the ‘OCCSecPayScriptTemplate.pl’ file, inserting a line after the following block of code:

# to enable Diners cards, remove the ‘#’ from the start of the 2 lines below
#$sOptions .= ‘,’ if ($sOptions ne ”);
#$sOptions .= ‘diners=true’;

the line to change the callback URLs back to HTTP is:

$::sCallBackURLAuth =~ s/https/http/;

We’ve had a few customers over the past few months inform us of a ’security warning’ with regard to our e-commerce websites checkout pages (SSL secured). Recently a kind customer sent us a screenshot of the problem and it became immediately apparent what the issue was..

Apple up until the most recent versions of Safari did not bundle the StarfieldTech root certificate with Safari. Therefore if a Safari user visits a GoDaddy SSL secured site (GoDaddy retail StarFieldTech Certificates) then a warning dialog will pop up informing the user that ‘Safari can’t verify the identity of the website “xxx.com”‘.

The easiest solution is to upgrade Safari to the latest version.. and alternative is to install the StarfieldTech root certificate manually by visiting the following URL: StarfieldTech root certificate

People who read this blog (yes, that’s you two over there!) might know that I’m currently working on a health/fitness/bodybuilding website in my spare time

We’ve created a pretty useful exercise encyclopedia full of instructional exercise videos

The only problem is getting it noticed! I don’t really want to pay for a link from a high traffic/high PR website.. I want the SEO to be natural, i.e. site geared for optimal user experience = natural SEO

I stumbled upon an interesting site that helps you to discover great websites on the web that others have visited and rated highly. Yesterday I placed a comment on Coopers Guns via StumbleUpon and since then there’s been a steady stream of traffic from StumbleUpon.. the techy nature of the users of StumbleUpon means little to no ad revenue but I’m more interested in mere eyeballs at the moment

Here’s some Analytics graphs to illustrate the above:

I’ve also purchased a licence for Shaun Inman’s Mint.. I like analytics but Mint gives me a clearer and more concise picture of 0-second statistics

Most visitors to the site use Firefox:

And not many use a resolution below 1024×768 (thankfully!)

I was a bit worried that Adsense wasn’t counting impressions properly as the “page view” count difference between Analytics and Adsense was off by quite a margin. I realised though that quite a lot of savvy/techy web surfers actually use stuff like adblock, etc… that explains the difference!

I’m surprised there isn’t much about this online.. although I admit my search wasn’t very comprehensive

Anyway, for a while now I’ve been a bit annoyed with the TinyMCE editor in WordPress.. for example, when you click the “Insert/edit link” button on the toolbar, a popup window is launched which proceeds to resize itself to be a less than useful width

Apparently according to one of the developers of TinyMCE in this thread, it’s down to Firefox using the status bar width when it shouldn’t

Anyway, the fix is as follows:

Just after the statements below in tiny_mce_popup.js

   // Netscape 7.1 workaround
   if (this.isWindow && tinyMCE.isNS71) {
      window.resizeBy(0, 10);
      return;
   }

Add the following:

   // Gecko workaround
   if (this.isWindow && tinyMCE.isGecko) {
      window.resizeBy(20, 10);
      return;
   }

That seems to work alright and resize the window to a useable width!

Just a quick post to let everyone know that CoopersGuns Health, Fitness & Bodybuilding Exercise Encyclopedia is now complete!

A flash app guides you through picking the muscle group you require exercises for and then links you to a page which contains a list of possible exercises, grouped by category

Once you select an exercise you are taken to a page which describes the exercise and shows you exactly how to perform it with the aid of a video of the exercise (flv flash video technology)

The following seems to work quite well for some AJAXified forms I have (a behaviour.js rule):

'#form_field_id' : function(element){
	element.onkeypress = function(e){
		e = (e)?e:window.event;
		var kc = e.keyCode ? e.keyCode : e.charCode;
		if(kc == 13) {
			do_something();
			return false;
		}
	}
}

We’ve recently added an Exercise Encyclopedia to CoopersGuns (health/fitness website I’m helping to develop)

I decided to use Flash video (flv) for the exercise videos - it seems to work quite well

Please not however that it’s not 100% complete yet as some of the videos are missing the accompanying textual descriptions

I’ve updated most of my WordPress installs to 2.0.3 and there’s a few dodgy bugs which are quite annoying - confimation when editing stuff that shouldn’t be there and also extra backslashes being inserted when editing things

Fortunately Mark Jaquith has produced a plugin which fixes these bugs

I wrote a quick php script to convert my custom db stored blog posts into Wordpress format and insert them into my new database.. it seems to have gone alright, there’s a couple of errors but I’ll fix them over the next few days

Going to have to spend a bit of time creating categories too but that shouldn’t take too long

Oh, also the site template! I think I’ll create something new anyway

I’ve decided to ditch my custom CMS for the time being - unfortunately I haven’t really got the time or inclination to work on developing it right now.

I’ll retroactively add my existing posts to this Wordpress installation as some of them were quite useful!