I came across an annoying problem when adding some “Widerrufsbelehrung” text (Right of Withdrawal) text to the end of the New Order sales email in Magento. This is required text to comply with German E-commerce regulations, but the problem is that Magento can’t parse the special characters in this text.

I came across a simple but effective online tool for converting special characters to Unicode, at http://pinyin.info/tools/converter/chars2uninumbers.html. Simply copy and paste your completed HTML (containing your special characters) and you can easily convert it to Unicode for pasting back into your locale files.

Hope that helps some poor web developer who is up all night trying to get Magento emails to work.

The Value of attribute “url_path” must be unique bug popped up again after adding more products to a Magento Ecommerce store.

I was “happily” going about my business creating configurable and their associated simple products when out of the blue I started getting this error. It was after the 50th product that Magento wouldn’t let me save any further. This particular Magento store is running version 1.3.2.4, and it didn’t matter what values I entered into the URL Key or SKU field, it still gave the error. I also tried refreshing the cache, including Catalog Rewrites, but to no avail.

As a workaround, I ran the following SQL (this can be through phpMyAdmin or whatever SQL client you are comfortable with):

UPDATE eav_attribute SET is_unique = 0 WHERE attribute_code = ‘url_path’

This can of course be reversed when this version is next upgraded and the bug is fixed. Just run:

UPDATE eav_attribute SET is_unique = 1 WHERE attribute_code = ‘url_path’

New FTC (Federal Trade Commission) rules come into effect on 1 December 2009 governing advertising disclosures that affect bloggers, affiliates, publishers and anyone that benefits from endorsing a product online. The FTC can investigate and impose fines of up to $11,000. While this has certainly got many affiliates and online marketers up in arms, in my opinion it is a step in the right direction.

So how to you protect yourself and ensure that you are FTC compliant? For most of us, moving forward with FTC compliance is not really that difficult. The difficulty lies in updating any existing websites that you may have.

• If you are endorsing a product, ensure that you are a bona fide user of that product (i.e you have actually used the product, whether bought or supplied for review). If you haven’t used the product, make it clear to your readers.

• Make it clear too that you are an affiliate, and that you will benefit from your recommendations (for example, disclose that you get paid a commission on every sale made on the site that you are referring them to). Do this clearly and conspicuously – don’t try and conceal your connection! In my opinion, the user doesn’t actually care and in fact will trust you more if you disclose this to them.

• If you’re displaying a banner ad, there’s no need to disclose this as it should be obvious to the user.
• Don’t use testimonials, unless you can actually prove that they are real. If results aren’t typical, you won’t get away with putting “results not typical, your results may vary” as the disclaimer – you have to actually say “typical results are …” and give an exact figure that you can actually prove! Problem testimonials are those that contain:
  • any time frame based statements, such as “lose 10 pounds in 30 days”
  • any statements that can vary between individuals

  If you’re simply using testimonials that say that your customers like your product and are happy with their purchase then sure, no problem. If the product is good enough, and you’re adding enough value before the sale, you shouldn’t need testimonials anyway.

• As suggested by Mark Ling, if linking to an affiliate product, put your disclaimer directly after the link. For example:

Click Here for the Best Solution

The above link is a sponsored advertisement for **product**. The owner of this website is not a bona fide user of the product being recommended.

So how do you show a disclaimer for a medium such as Facebook or Twitter, where posts are limited to 140 chars or less? Tut, tut – you shouldn’t really be direct linking to an affiliate product through a social network anyway, but that’s besides the point. Keep an eye on this website for an interesting and innovative approach: http://cmp.ly. It’s in beta stage, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves, but this simple approach may be the answer.

More Links:

The FTC’s official memo (see the PDFs in their right sidebar)
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

The Wall St. Journal’s summary of the issues
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125475547130664753.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop

Google wave is an exciting new Google application that allows various participants to communicate and collaborate online in real-time (in fact, as the user types). You can collaborate using videos, photos, rich text, maps, robots and more.

I love the way that you can chat with someone from another language, and Google Wave will translate  this in real time on the other users’ chat screen.

Here’s an overview, in under 8 minutes:

Better still, here’s a really creative overview in under 3 minutes (created by EpipheoStudios.com):

So how do you get to use Google Wave? It’s currently in a limited preview release, like GMAIL when it was first launched, so the only way is to get an invite. There are three main ways to get an invite:

1. Fill out the Google Wave for Individuals signup form
2. If you are a Google Apps administrator and you are interested in using it on your domain, fill out the Google Wave for Google Apps request form
3. If you know someone that already has an invite (such as friends, family or colleagues), ask them for an invite

If you have 80 minutes of spare time, see the long version of the video (Google Wave Developer Preview and Google I/O 2009).

For anyone wanting an invite, re-tweet this post and/or leave a comment and I’ll send you a personal invitation to Google Wave (I have 5 to give away).

I recently had an issue with disk space over usage with a client’s Magento installation. After some investigation, I discovered that the log tables (log_url, log_url_info, log_visitor and log_visitor_info) in the Magento database were extremely large.

It doesn’t take long for these tables to get quite bloated, to the point where backing up and maintaining the Magento database can be quite time consuming and resource intense. Not to mention the space required. There is little information available on how to deal with these, besides the odd post online instructing users to truncate all the log tables. I definitely DO NOT recommend truncating these tables, as you are likely to run into referential integrity issues with foreign key constraints and a broken storefront.

Magento has provided the ability to configure log cleaning (via Magento Admin > System > Configuration > Advanced > System > Log cleaning), however, by default “Enable log cleaning” is turned off. At first, enabling log cleaning didn’t seem to work, but with some trial and error I eventually got the log cleaning via cron to run for the first time, using the following settings:

Magento Log Cleaning configuration screen shot 1

As you can see in the screen shot, I set the “Save log, days” to 0 days to force it to clear everything and set the time to 04:05 so that I could go to bed … I also had to set the “Generate schedules every” to 5 and “Schedule ahead for” to 5, to force it to run.  Note however that this cron consumes a lot of server resources and will take a long time to actually clear the logs when run for the first time.

When I checked it in the morning, the database was still reporting the same table size (likely due to the index). To fix this, I ran the OPTIMISE TABLE command for each table which cleared them up.

I then set the cron settings back to default and in the log cleaning settings, I set the “Save log, days” to 7.

Magento Log Cleaning configuration screen shot 2

Hopefully this will help others out there wondering how to reduce their Magneto database size.

You may want to know how to change that ugly URL that you got when you first signed up with Facebook into something more like www.facebook.com/yourname. Not only will it be easier for your friends to remember, but it’s important if you’re into personal branding in any way.

Facebook recently introduced some changes to make it easy to do change your username. Simply login (if you aren’t already) and go to your settings page at https://register.facebook.com/editaccount.php.

Once you are on your settings page, click “change” in the section called “Username” and click the “check availability” button. Be aware though, according to Facebook: “Choose your new username carefully. You can only change your username once.”

So don’t do this when you’ve had a few too many drinks!

I came across this video while reading Mack Michael’s “latest updates” blog within the Maverick Money Makers Club. Yep, my secret is out, I am a member. This is a great video by Nick Vujicic – an inspirational video. I know from many of my own life experiences that giving up just isn’t an option.

If you’re interested in joining Maverick Money Makers Club, then follow my affiliate link (but that is not why I wrote this post).

Twitter today suspended a lot of people with legitimate Twitter accounts. It seems that I am not the only one wondering why my account @quentinnel account got suspended. I’m very sure that I haven’t violated any terms, and I certainly don’t spam. The most frustrating part of the process however is the lack of explanation – akin to a Facebook disapproved status for anyone you has done extensive advertisting with Facebook.

According to the Twitter Status blog, a [great] number of accounts were accidentally suspended due to human error. Of course the first thing I did was put in a support ticket to Twitter, but this got automatically updated to a solved status. I do use Tweetlater, which I suspect at this early stage of the process to be the cause. Twitter does state in their update: “One additional note: some the accounts suspended were using the third-party site Tweetlater. However, Tweetlater is not to blame for these suspensions nor is it in violation of our Terms.”

Perhaps it is an experiment to see how many people can live without twitter. Not many I feel! Thanks to Stay N’ Alive for the blog update http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/07/05/twitter-suspending-accounts-in-droves/.

Update: According to the latest blog post on the Tweetlater website, the issue as reported by Twitter was due to a “spam cloud”. My account has been restored, so thanks Twitter.

Google has a new business stimulus offer. Google is giving New Zealand businesses the opportunity to get $75 of free advertising on Google sites. They’ll even provide free campaign setup to get the most out of the credit.

This is a great incentive, and one that I can certainly advise my own clients to sign up for. It is only available to new advertisers (which counts me out unfortunately). For more information, see https://services.google.com/fb/forms/stimulusnz09/.

Welcome to my blog. Here you’ll find posts related to almost all aspects of the Web industry, with some random thoughts thrown in for good measure.