Kevin Harrison

Entries from June 2008

Tuesday, June 17. 2008

Turning off Firefox's Awesome Bar Posted by Kevin Harrison at 12:48

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Defined tags for this entry: config, firefox

Turning off Firefox's Awesome Bar

If for some reason you don't like the functionality of the address bar, dubbed the "Awesome Bar," you can disable it.

In the address bar, "Awesome Bar", go to about:config and set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true and browser.urlbar.richResults to false.

Once set, close and restart Firefox and the awesome bar functionality will be finished.

Monday, June 16. 2008

Magneto the new open source e-commerce Posted by Kevin Harrison at 12:36

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Defined tags for this entry: e-commerce, magento, open-source

Magneto the new open source e-commerce

Magneto E-Commerce seems to be a new kid on the block. It looks like they are trying to compete with some big ecommerce guys like osCommerce or perhaps Zen Cart.

To be perfectly honest, I have never played with either e-commerce solution for more than a few minutes since I never needed to. I work with closed source software known as Actinic. I know Actinic inside and out. I know most of its flaws, I know most of its bugs and I know most of its workarounds.

So unfortunately, I'm kind of comparing apples to oranges with Actinic and Magneto, but at least they are both fruits.

A few weeks ago I tired the administrative back end to Magneto. I liked how everything was web based. Magneto basically had similar features to Actinic regarding the content tree with product sections and brochure pages. It was refreshing to see something new to be honest.

The one thing that stood out for me with Magneto was their one page checkout. Actinic lumbers along with its 4 separate page checkout.

Unfortunately though, unless you have very simple demands for your online store, I don't think Magneto will do the trick for you.

Actinic has the edge on time developed. Actinic has been around since the mid 90's and it has been constantly been developed. Actinic has many more payment service providers and they handle shipping and handling much better especially since UPS is integrated in Actinic.

If I had the choice between free and the cost route, I would have to lay out the few hundred dollars to pay for the Actinic license. Although, I am not counting Magneto out just yet. After all, the Magneto e-commerce software is practically brand new, it is still in its beta cycle. I expect if they get the developers that they need, they can make something worth wild.

Monday, June 16. 2008

AdSense tax write offs Posted by Kevin Harrison at 11:52

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Defined tags for this entry: adsense, google, taxes

AdSense tax write offs

Tax season is just around the corner and for many people Google adsense is a very popular income strategy.

Here is a list of ideas that you can use to help offset your income for tax write offs.

Domain name

Most people who use adsense have their own domain name. This is a necessary expenditure for your website.

Website Hosting

Who is your website host? Calculate your yearly hosting costs and this should take a nice bite out of your taxable income.

Did your website go crazy more then one month or billing cycle? Did you have to pay for extras such as bandwidth overages or high CPU utilization? Many hosts charge extra when you use more then your fair share of server resources. Keep these in mind for preparing your taxes.

Cost of equipment

How much money was invested in the past year on physical items for your adsense website? Did you purchase a camera to produce images for the website? Did you have to make upgrades or repairs to your computer during the year? Any of these costs can help you significantly for tax write offs for adsense.

Cost of content

How did you acquire the content for your website? Did you pay someone to write articles? Do you have employees writing online brochures? All of these are excellent write offs as well for your adsense earnings.

Cost of traffic

Do you use Google adwords, yahoo search marketing or any other PPC? If you spent any money to drive visitors to your adsense site, this can also be deducted from your taxable earnings.

These are just a few ideas to help out a website that has earned a nice sum of money with adsense. If you have another idea for write offs for your earnings, please leave a comment.

Monday, June 16. 2008

Simple mod_perl test to see if its ... Posted by Kevin Harrison at 10:26

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Defined tags for this entry: perl, programming

Simple mod_perl test to see if its running on the server

How to test mod_perl

Below is a simple test to see if mod_perl is loaded and running on a server.

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Content-type: text/plain";

print "Allo user.";

if(exists $ENV{MOD_PERL}) {
print "We're running under mod_perl.";
} else {
print "We're NOT running under mod_perl.";
}

If mod_perl is active, you will see "We're running under mod_perl."

If mod_perl is not active, you will see "We're NOT running under mod_perl."

Pretty self explanatory actually.