AllScoop

plastroltech

Identify this machine. Please leave a comment with your guess. Maybe I’ll come up with some reward for the person who guesses correctly. Yes, it’s a real tool, it was even used on myself!

Linux and Free BSD, how to zip a folder. This is useful for backups, or moving to a new webhost.

zip -9 -r zipname folder

example: zip -9 -r myfolder.zip examplefoldername

-9 = best compression
-r = recursive

I’ve been building websites for along time, and I’ve encountered about every category of website; blog software, CMS systems, etc… . I mostly prefer to hand code sites. One thing I had never ventured into was e-commerce. So when it came to picking shopping cart software, I didn’t have much to go on. I’d heard about oscommerce, so that is where I started. I quickly concluded that while oscommerce was probably stable and probably secure, it seemed that it had not been updated for years. I also read some stories about how much time and effort needs to be done to customize the product. I had also heard a little bit about ZenCart, so I downloaded and setup a demo store to start testing it out. Everything went well, not many problems, the back-end had a ton of options. It didn’t take too long for me to get it setup the way I wanted. After that I started to look at the SEO of ZenCart, it had nothing built in, but there were add-on modules for it. From this research it seemed the SEO worked well, but not great, and that some people were having to install many SEO modules to get the SEO just right. In my mind I am thinking of the many hours that would be spend trying to make ZenCart just right. Not really what I wanted to do.

Hosted cart solutions? I found some pretty nice SEO hosted cart solutions. All of them had big promises, but also pretty big prices. Setup fee’s and monthly charges add a lot of fixed cost to an online store. One of the reasons for an online store is the low cost, low overhead, all that is what makes online shopping competitive. An online shop has no opportunity for people to come in and touch and personally see merchandise, so it has to win on price. Winning on price usually means little to no overhead. Also if you ever have a problem with the hosted cart, or they go bankrupt, you could be left with nothing.

At this point I am beyond wanted a “free” cart solution. Open source is great, but the security of having a paid staff always watching and patching sounds very nice. So now there are many many paid cart software packages. Seems to be 3 levels. $300 and under, $300-$1000, and then from there it seemed the sky was the limit, from $1000 to $5000, sometimes more even. Now if an e-commerce store really takes off, I’d have no problem paying for a high volume cart solution, but I didn’t want to pay that much just to get started with a small online store (less than 1000 products).

CubeCart was reasonable priced at $189. They appear to have paid developers and support staff. An active helpdesk and bug tracking system going on, all good things. So I download a 30 day trial of the software. CubeCart has an easy to use SEO setting that you can turn on in the backend of the system. SEO seems well thought out, and just about every part of the basic SEO process can be set page by page. The URL’s setup was also good, placing category names and product names right into the URL. Perfect. I did choose to go with Cube cart. All my pages (products) were indexed very well within only a few days. Search engine traffic is already coming in from keywords. Now the 2 drawbacks to CubeCart are that the software is encoded, and requires a license key that checks against CubeCart’s servers. The encoding means most the core system php files cannot be seen or changed. This worries me a little for the reasons I didn’t like a hosted cart. If CubeCart closed their doors, would I be left out in the cold with a cart that would stop working? I hope not… but the benefits and price of the CubeCart software out-weighed these fears. So off we go on an e-commerce adventure.

Do not use siteground web hosting. After talking with a sales rep about their services, I asked about their refund policy. We have a 30 day refund policy, she said. So I then went ahead and signed up with them. I immediately knew their service was bad for a number of reasons, so less then 1 week later I told them I wanted to cancel and wanted my money back. They then try to tell me they are going to keep 1/2 my money! That is a refund policy?! What a bunch of crap this place is, DO NOT GO NEAR siteground.com hosting.

Is this the bank?

Ooops. Looks like YPN let their certificate expire.

“publisher.yahoo.com”

procs
Information about the numbers of processes in various states.

r in run queue

b blocked for resources (i/o, paging, etc.)

w runnable or short sleeper (< 20 secs) but swapped

memory
Information about the usage of virtual and real memory. Virtual

pages (reported in units of 1024 bytes) are considered active if they belong to processes which are running or have run in the last 20 seconds.

avm active virtual pages

fre size of the free list

page
Information about page faults and paging activity. These are averaged each five seconds, and given in units per second.

flt total number of page faults

re page reclaims (simulating reference bits)

pi pages paged in

po pages paged out

fr pages freed per second

sr pages scanned by clock algorithm, per-second

disks
Disk operations per second (this field is system dependent). Typically paging will be split across the available drives. The header of the field is the first two characters of the disk name and the unit number. If more than two disk drives are configured in the system, vmstat displays only the first two drives, unless the user specifies the -n argument to increase the number of drives displayed.

faults
Trap/interrupt rate averages per second over last 5 seconds.

in device interrupts per interval (including clock interrupts)

sy system calls per interval

cs cpu context switch rate (switches/interval)

cpu
Breakdown of percentage usage of CPU time.

us user time for normal and low priority processes

sy system time

id cpu idle