If you manage more than one web site, don’t forget that you can make great savings by “adopting” your additional domains as “child accounts” from your parent account. (By “parent account” we just mean your primary, main account. So if you are a web designer that would be the account of your own web site).

Our new improved discount rates for all our “buddy” applications are as follows:

• 2-4 subscriptions: 15% discount
• 5-9 subscriptions: 30% discount
• 10 plus subscriptions: 40% discount

Web-form-buddy’s popular file upload option now comes with a built-in customizable progress bar. This displays real-time stats to your customer as they wait for their files to upload. Updating every second or two, it shows:

• A horizontal bar representing the progress of the file upload.
• The size of the selected file.
• The percentage completed.
• The estimated time remaining.

We think this is a cool feature that will impress your customers!

To configure the color and style settings for your progress bar, log in to Web-form-buddy and go to “global options” >> “color & style settings” >> “upload progress bar“.

Technically this feature has proved to be quite a challenge. It has involved working with Javascript and CSS in the browser, and Perl and Apache on the server. A true “Ajax” application!

Web-store-buddy provides three methods for calculating shipping charges:

• A charge “per item” method
• Charge bands based on the value of the order
• Percentage charge bands based on the value of the order

In addition, with the charge-per-item method, you have been able to add a handling charge, and set a minimum and a maximum limit for the order delivery charge. But up until now these options have not been available for the other two calculation methods.

Now these additional options are available for the other two calculation methods as well!

Today we have added electronic funds transfer as a new payment method for both Web-form-buddy payment forms and the Web-store-buddy shopping cart.

The idea is that you can enter your bank account details on your control panel, and then if you enable this payment method your customer will be provided with bank transfer instructions. If you accept payments from abroad, there is an option to provide the special instructions that the bank may require for those (such as SWIFT code number or IBAN number).

One slight problem with electronic funds transfers is that unless your customer provides a unique reference number with the transaction, you may find it difficult to figure out who a payment is from. To prevent that from happening Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy advise your customer to quote the unique transaction reference with the payment.

Favicons are those small images that appear in the browser’s address bar and in browser bookmarks entries. Hopefully you can see our own “small green tree” icon right now in your browser’s address bar!

There are different ways to add favicons to your web site, but after a bit of research and a bit of trial and error, we think we have hit on the best method.

With this method your favicons will also work consistently with your Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy script URLs.

Favicons were introduced by Microsoft some years ago, and for a while browser support for them was very patchy. In theory that situation has improved. Certainly you can now enjoy the benefits of favicons for your web site without it driving you completely crazy. But although there is supposed to be a proper World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard now for favicons, in practice we reckon you’re better off ignoring that for the time being.  Hey, Microsoft are involved, what do you expect!

The problem began when Microsoft decided that favicons should be in their own format. Not *.PNG, *.GIF, *.JPG or anything sensible like that. Instead we got *.ICO – the format for icons in Windows.

Originally the idea was that you placed such a graphic (called “favicon.ico“) in your web site’s root folder (i.e. where your home page resides). And if you inspect your server’s access logs you will see that browsers are regularly putting in requests for that file. This old method DOES work at least (and in most browsers), but it is not at all flexible:

• You have to name it “favicon.ico“
• It must reside in your document root folder
• You cannot have more than one favicon for your site
• Worst of all! – this method won’t work with your Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy URLs.

So as the web moved on, folks started to ask searching questions such as “Hey, shouldn’t this be part of the HTML standard?“. And “Shouldn’t we be able to use non-Microsoft file types?“. And “Why can’t I specify this graphic in my web page HTML? That way I get to manage the graphic in the normal way – and maybe I can use different favicons on different pages!“. On top of that, millions and millions of webmasters said “We’d also like a method that works with Web-form-buddy and Web-store-buddy too!” (Well maybe we exaggerate a little).

Enter the standards fairy – the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) . All these wishes have now been granted, and we have  a new method available (supported by all browsers) whereby you add a link to your favicon in the <head> area of your web page. The W3C ’s draft proposal as to how you should do this is here: http://www.w3.org/2005/10/howto-favicon

But here’s the BAD news: If you follow their recommendation, your favicons will not work in Internet Explorer! This is for two reasons:

1) Internet Explorer will only work with *.ICO files. So whereas the folks at W3C say you can do this:

<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/some-folder/some-image.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/gif" href="/some-folder/some-image.gif">
<link rel="icon" type="image/jpeg" href="/some-folder/some-image.jpg">

Instead you’re going to need this:

<link rel="icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" href="/some-folder/some-image.ico">

2) But even THAT doesn’t work in Internet Explorer! You need to change “icon” to “shortcut icon“:

<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" href="/some-folder/some-image.ico">

Or if you’re working with XHTML, it’s this:

<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" href="/some-folder/some-image.ico" />

And now, finally you have something that will work in all browsers!

(By the way, we’ve seen some folks suggesting for the “type” attribute that you should use “image/ico“, “image/icon“, “text/ico“, “application/ico” and “image/x-icon“, instead of type=”image/vnd.microsoft.icon“. This is a mistake though. The official mime type is “image/vnd.microsoft.icon“).

So how best to create and edit ICO files?

Favicons are 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64 pixel square images. With the free @icon sushi you can open  BMP/PNG/PSD/EXE/DLL/ICL files and convert them into ICO files.

A listing of ICO editing software is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_icon_software

We have just added support for drop-down menu fields with Web-form-buddy payment forms.

The idea behind payment forms is that you assign a price on your Web-form-buddy control panel to specific fields in your form.

In the case of text fields the purchaser can enter a quantity in the field and Web-form-buddy will multiply the price you have set for that field by the quantity entered.

In the case of  check boxes, radio buttons – and now drop-down lists too – the total price is calculated taking into account your customer’s choice from these field options.

If you’re interested in a simple, fit-and-forget, powerful, and FREE backup solution for your PC, we can recommend MOZY (When we say “free” – you get 2Gb of free storage, but if you need more storage the pricing is very reasonable).

We discovered MOZY following a bit of a scare we had with an office PC. It was a Monday morning (when else?) and our normally totally reliable but ageing Compaq refused to wake up. “Holy cow – what’s going on!”

Now we did have a backup plan for the PC in place. But it’s at a time like this that you discover how good or bad that plan is.

The trouble is, we have tried many types of backup software for our office PC’s down the years, and we’ve never really been happy with any of them. Backup is one of those problems that if you start to think about it it’s like turning over a stone.

• What do you back up? It seems practically impossible to backup up everything because of speed/storage constraints
• How many backups? Do you simple keep one total backup that you overwrite each time? If so, what if you have some corruption or loss from two weeks ago? If the backup is daily, unless you catch it before the next backup dump, the error will simply be written into your backup data! The solution to this problem is “incremental” or “differential” backup” – but then that makes the first issue of storage space even harder and requires intelligent backup software
• When do you backup?
• Where do you keep the backups?
• How do you know the restore will work when push comes to shove?

I remember on one occasion we needed to restore a backup we had dutifully kept. We had used a built-in Microsoft Windows utility which we had wrongly assumed to be future proof. I forget the Windows versions involved – it may have been 3.1 & 95 – but when it came to restore we found the backup files (from the previous Windows version) were no longer recognized by the new Windows software. The backup disks ended up in the bin (fortunately the setback wasn’t too severe).

In the case of our deceased Compaq PC we found that sure enough some key files had been getting regularly backed up across the LAN on another PC. This was using Acronis Backup (that I can’t say we can recommend). We had set up the routine some months back. How good was it going to be now that we needed to use the backups in anger?

Well what we found was that we did not face a huge problem – the most important data was saved. But all the same it was clear that it was going to take a lot of time and patience to get back to the status quo. Very tedious.
And why was that? Why was the backup so limited? Well, we had found that although Acronis claimed to offer FTP backup to a web server, it never really worked properly. And even across the LAN it was so slow and resource-hungry we had found it only practical to backup the most critical data only. The result was that we felt obliged to take a calculated gamble with the medium-critical data!

Anyhoo, the ending was a happy one. We discovered that the heatsink on the Compaq processor had lifted clear, and as a result the machine was quite sensibly refusing to boot for safety reasons. Once the heatsink was fixed the lovely beast woke up and the data was safe (I say “fixed“, the technology involved a whisky tumbler of cold water sat on top of the processor – a solution only marginally improved since then by a paperweight fixed on top of the heatsink!).

But it was in the course of all this hassle that we stumbled across a link to MOZY – and very good it seems to be too.

MOZY is an Internet backup solution – so you don’t need to worry about disks or backup media. The key features are:

• simple to set up
• Performs backups automatically in the background
• Encrypts all files on your PC before transfer
• Performs incremental backups
• Backs up only blocks that have changed
• Backs up open/locked files

Our experience so far? I guess we’d say “it does exactly what it says on the tin“, and we are very pleased. It seems to be able to work in the background without a fuss. That’s probably because of the capability it has to lock/unlock files. However for this feature to work you may need to change your hard drive from FAT32 to NTFS if you haven’t done so already (in Windows XP that can be done by selecting Control panel >> Administrative Tools >> Computer Management >> Disk Management).

To get a free 2GB Mozy account click here

Up until now, in a situation where you have several forms in one page, Web-form-buddy has asked you to use the “name” attribute of the form tag in order to distinguish one form from another. Like this:

<form name="xyz" method="post" action="your-script-name.cgi">

Well  this will still continue to work with your existing forms. But we have decided from now on to move over to using the form “id” attribute instead. Like this:

<form id="xyz" method="post" action="your-script-name.cgi">

There are two reasons for this:

1) In XHTML the “name” attribute is not supported. In particular we have discovered that the popular web editing tool Wordpress (with which I am writing this!)  makes it hard to use the “name” attribute with a form tag.

2) A nice feature of the ID attribute is that it is designed to provide a unique identity for an HTML element. A really good web authoring tool should make it impossible to create two HTML elements with the same ID attribute. The uniqueness of the ID attribute is why it is used in Javascript to access HTML entities. And that characteristic, of forcing a unique ID,  is exactly what Web-form-buddy is looking for when you have more than one form in a web page.

So we think it suits our purposes just nicely!

We have now completed the integration of  Google Checkout with Web-store-buddy.

The aim of Google Checkout is to try to make it as easy as possible for your customers to purchase from your store using a single user name and password. This fits in neatly with Web-store-buddy as, unlike most other shopping cart systems, Web-store-buddy does not force shoppers to create accounts with yet more user names and passwords.  So if this has the effect of making your shoppers’ experience more comfortable and hassle-free, then it is surely likely to help you increase sales and customer loyalty.

We are pleased to announce that Web-form-buddy now supports Google Checkout as an option for payment forms.

With Google Checkout folks can pay using the credit cards that they have setup in their Google account. Compared to many payment methods, Google Checkout offers the buyer a particularly fast, easy and comfortable payment method.

Signing up to become a Google Checkout merchant is very simple (and free!). Google Checkout will need to post a test transaction into your bank account – and that’s pretty much it:

http://checkout.google.com

Integration has proved to be quite tricky as Google have chosen to do things a little differently to most payment processors (such as PayPal). But now the hard work is all done and it’s working very well!

The next task is to enable Google Checkout for Web-store-buddy, our shopping cart application.