DavidTan.org

Paypal IPN eCommerce Payment Transaction Integration Notes

David — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:33:05 +0000

1. You need either a business or premier account to use IPN. (sourceforge)

2. Enable Auto Return (in Paypal > Profile > My Seller Tools > Website Preferences > Auto Reply > On) to redirect users back to your site after making a payment.

The paypal return parameter overrides the Paypal account/profile auto return url. If you are running multiple websites on a single magento instance, you can use a single Paypal account with auto return on. Just place whatever return url you want in the Paypal account, it will be overridden by the return parameter (source: magento wiki).
NOTE: If you have turned on Auto Return and have chosen to turn on PayPal Account Optional for new users, a new user will not be automatically directed back to your website, but will be given the option to return. (source: paypal)

Paypal return parameter example

Paypal IPN Notification URL

Paypal Profile > My Selling Tools > IPN Settings > Fill Notificaition URL and enable receive IPN message

Even though you have not enabled receiving IPN messages in your Profile or you have reset your preference by turning off IPN messages, PayPal still sends IPN messages to the notification URL you specify for a specific payment. (source: paypal)

Paypal notification url parameter for a specific payment example

IPN Variable References

These variables are useful for your IPN listener (IPN notification URL script, in my example http://www.davidtan.org/ipn.php) to gather info such as transaction id and test if the transaction is completed etc. These details can be saved into database and used to check if someone has actually made a legit payment. (source: Paypal)

IPN Examples from Paypal

1. PaypalTech
2. Simple PHP example

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Paypal IPN eCommerce Payment Transaction Integration Notes

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RSS To Feedburner To Twitter & Google Reader: Disable W3 Total Cache (W3TC) Feed Caching

David — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:31:58 +0000

The setup
When a new article is written, wordpress will update the blog RSS and this feed always contains the latest contents of your blog. For this blog, that’s davidtan.org/feeds.

Some people uses feedburner to publish and track where their feeds are viewed, clicked and consumed. Plus, there’s also a setting in feedburner that will sync new posts to your twitter account as well (ex. @davidtanth). You can also subscribe to your blog’s feed in Google Reader to keep track of your own blogs.

Thus, the conventional setup/workflow would be as such:

Blog RSS -> Feedburner -> Twitter
Blog RSS -> Feedburner -> Google Reader

However…

Add in a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache and that flow changes a little.

Blog RSS -> W3TC -> Feedburner -> Twitter
Blog RSS -> W3TC -> Feedburner -> Google Reader

Now, W3TC is a brilliant plugin. But the problem is it caches your feed too. And as a result, feedburner will always be looking at a cached copy of your blog’s feed even if you have posted something new at your blog.

The solution

To disable the feed cache in W3 Total Cache, you can use the following steps:
1. Login to WordPress Dashboard. Click the “Performance” option on the left in the WordPress bar.

2. From the W3 Total Cache options page, click the “Page Cache” link.

3. In the “General“ section, uncheck the “Cache feeds: site, categories, tags, comments” checkbox.

4. Click the “Save all settings” button.

How To Test That It Works

1. Write a new post and publish it. Go to your feedburner link (ex. feeds.feedburner.com/davidtan) and find your latest post.

2. Add your feedburner feed in Google Reader, you should find the latest posts in the reading list.

3. If you’ve added twitter in feedburner and tell it to sync latest posts to your twitter account, you should see a new tweet in your timeline.

Ending
Guess why I’m writing this post? To share and to test what I preached above works.

Update
Perfect, it works!

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RSS To Feedburner To Twitter & Google Reader: Disable W3 Total Cache (W3TC) Feed Caching

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Clear All Google Chrome Cache & Browsing History

David — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:19:09 +0000

Here’s how you can clear Google Chrome’s browser cache and all the history of which websites/pages that you’ve previously visited. Long story short, use the keyboard shortcut key CTRL+SHIFT+DEL to get the following:

The instruction are really straightforward. Check the settings which applies to you and press clear browsing data.

Done!

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Clear All Google Chrome Cache & Browsing History

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Best Apple iPad Accessories

David — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:54:32 +0000

I have an iPad and i love it. Here I present you with a list of some of the most useful iPad accessories that I’ve found.

iPad Case + Keyboard

Turn your iPad into a laptop with a Kensington Keyboard Case (iPad 2 | iPad 1), a protector for your tablet that also works as a wireless keyboard and stand.

Backup Battery

You don’t want your iPad to run out of power when you’re enjoying your movies, writing a document or doing a presentation with your iPad. The tiny Sanyo eneloop Mobile Booster KBC-L2 gives you more than four hours’ worth of backup which you can use to power the iPad and a range of other portable devices.

Mobile Wireless Storage

The Seagate GoFlex Satellite portable hard drive holds 500 gigabytes of business and personal files and runs for five hours on an internal battery. Built-in Wi-Fi lets you stream files wirelessly to as many as three iPads.

VGA Adapter

The Apple VGA Adapter makes it possible to display everything you can see on your iPad screen on a projector, monitor or flat-panel TV.

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Best Apple iPad Accessories

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How Not To Write A SEO Proposal

David — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:00:08 +0000

I’m getting lots of spam mails and spam comments lately selling me SEO services promising that I’ll rank at page 1 for my keywords, get more traffic and make more money. Although it’s true that ranking on page 1 in google will get more traffic to my sites, I didn’t like the way I was approached by these SEO marketers. Where did they get my email? Am I interested in the first place? Why should I trust them? Do they even know what I do and write about in this blog?

Here are just some examples of so called SEO proposals that I’ve been getting in my inbox and comments. Try to learn from them and see why they didn’t work on a target like myself.

Business Owner – davidtan.org
Were you aware that you are missing out on major online business opportunities because you don’t have a significant presence? According to a recent survey 90% of online business opportunities are created via Google and other major search engines such as Yahoo & Bing.
You will be curious to know that we have identified some major issues with your website, due to which you may be missing out on this business opportunity.
The following are some of the issues:
1) Your Page Rank is 2, which can be improved
2) Your Google Back links are 5, which can be improved
3) Your most important traffic driving keywords are not in top 100
We have also identified some of the positives about your website, they are:
1) Relevant content
2) Universally accepted color combination
3) Your product/Service has huge online business potential
The above are the result of our initial findings and if you are interested in using of SEO experts advice, we can give you a very detailed SEO report of your website (absolutely FREE). Also, let us know the best time to get in touch with you so that we can talk about how we (you and me) working together will have mutual benefits.
We also guarantee that in the first month of our working together you will see positive trends in conversions, so you can just reply to this email showing your consent of working with us and you would have already taken the first step to get more conversions!!
Regards,
Sales Team
Note:
• You can also reply with “REMOVE” in the subject line so that we will permanently delete you from our database.
• This is not a bulk email campaign, we are sending to this email only to selected websites who are part of our online experiment.
• We found your website from online advertisements but did not click the Ad to visit.

I’m sure there are more in my spam filters and wordpress akismet blocked spam so I will add more when I get the chance to do so.

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How Not To Write A SEO Proposal

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Magento Encryption Key Location

David — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:12:52 +0000

You are given an encryption key after Magento is installed successfully. This key is just a text string and stored in a xml file called local.xml in your magento installation folder.

/app/etc/local.xml

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Magento Encryption Key Location

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Perl MP3::Tag Module Software Error Writing of ID3v2.4 is not fully supported (prohibited now via `write_v24′) Solution

David — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:33:11 +0000

While working on a project to read and write mp3 id3 tags using Perl’s MP3 Tag module, I found out that I was getting this error:

Software error:
Writing of ID3v2.4 is not fully supported (prohibited now via `write_v24′).
For help, please send mail to the webmaster, giving this error message and the time and date of the error.

The Solution
After reading the Perl MP3 Tag documentation here, I figured out that MP3s tagged with ID3v2.3 and earlier worked fine with the Perl MP3 Tag module by default.

But to get it to work with MP3s tagged with ID3v2.4, you’ll need to add the following line in your Perl script.

MP3::Tag->config(write_v24 => 1);

Getting Netbeans 7.0.1 To Work With SVN 1.7 Solution

David — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:51:30 +0000

Upgraded to TortoiseSVN 1.7 and found out that Netbeans 7.0.1 doesn’t recognize some of the checked-out source code using TortoiseSVN 1.6. Here’s how you can get Netbeans to work with SVN 1.7.

The error message I was getting in netbeans:

“We strongly recommend to either install a newer Subversion client or downgrade your working copy. Any local changes might corrupt your working copy and some file operations as copying, renaming and deleting will not work correctly.”

The solutions revolve around using the command line switch:

-J-DsvnClientAdapterFactory=commandline

Solution 1:
Create or edit your netbeans execution path:

“C:\Program Files\NetBeans 7.0.1\bin\netbeans.exe” -J-DsvnClientAdapterFactory=commandline

Solution 2:
I prefer this solution since it’s more “universal”.

Add “-J-DsvnClientAdapterFactory=commandline” to “netbeans_default_options” in etc/netbeans.conf

Let’s hope the upcoming Netbeans 7.1 will support SVN 1.7 by default.

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Getting Netbeans 7.0.1 To Work With SVN 1.7 Solution

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Apple IOS 5.0.1 Direct Download Link for iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 2, 1, iPod touch

David — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:38:23 +0000

Updated my iPhone 4 to IOS 5.0.1 through iTunes. Was using 4.3.3. previously and main reason for upgrading was to get the cool notification center on my iPhone. For those who don’t use iTunes, here are the direct download links from Apple (not from Warez or free file sharing sites so you know these are legit working versions).

- iPhone: 4S, 4 GSM, 4 CDMA, 3GS

- iPad: 2 Wi-Fi, 2 GSM, 2 CDMA, Original

- iPod touch: 4th Generation, 3rd Generation

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Apple IOS 5.0.1 Direct Download Link for iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 2, 1, iPod touch

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Adcenter Accredited PPC Professional

David — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:22:47 +0000

I’ve been managing Adcenter PPC campaigns for a while now and getting my skills recognized was the right thing to do. I’ve just taken the Adcenter Accreditation Program test today and here’s the result.

The questions were pretty straightforward and practical so if you’ve been managing PPC campaigns with Adcenter for a while now, this test should be really easy.

All candidates who passed the test will also be listed in Adcenter Membership Directory, so more power to PPC pros who know what they are doing. I will post my profile link once it gets updated in the directory.

If you need someone to help you with Adcenter, I can be contacted here.

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Adcenter Accredited PPC Professional

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