Get rid of duplicate product URLS.

Thankfully Mike Smullin has already taken care of this with his easy tweak. Visit Mike’s post about this here. This requires one small modification to Magneto core, so hopefully someone will write an extension to take care of this without having to edit the core. Otherwise you will want to make sure you take care to make sure this isn’t overwritten during upgrades. In case the link above isn’t working, the modification is explained below.

Navigate to:
/app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/Collection.php

Locate:
->where('category_id=? OR category_id is NULL', $this->_urlRewriteCategory)

Change it to:
//->where('category_id=? OR category_id is NULL', $this->_urlRewriteCategory)

Make good use of robots directives to hide pages that will leak your pagerank.

There is a free extension from Yoast that will make this process very easy! You can view the extension here. Detailed instructions for using the extension (along with some other seo suggestions) can be found at the yoast website.

The Yoast extension will eliminate the indexing of pages that cause problems with search engines, while still allowing access to the good links on those pages.

I will add more as I find them, but these two resources will go a long way in getting your Magento installation ready to take advantage of good organic search results.

There are two options to fix this:

1) The easy fix is to place the following code in your header, just after the ‘title’ tag:
<meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” content=“IE=EmulateIE7″ />

You’ll find it here:
app/design/frontend/default(your interface)/default(your theme)/template/page/html/head.phtml

2) The best fix is to add some code to your css so that you aren’t making a global change away from IE8, which is going to become the standard whether you like it or not.  Open your iestyles.css file and add the following code:
.pager a:hover { zoom:1; }

You’ll find it here:
/skin/frontend/default/(yourtheme)/css/iestyles.css

Once you’ve made the change, refresh your cache (magento and your browser), and you should have the problem fixed.

What a great concert in Fairfield Connecticut!  This was my 4th Roches show, and they never cease to amaze me.   They did a good mix of songs, old and new, and Suzzy’s daughter Lucy opened the show with songs from her two albums.  I was amazed at how good Lucy was with the crowd, given her relative short time touring.  She had the crowd with every story, and every song. 

After the show we were able to talk with all of the Roche family, including ‘mom’ Roche who took a picture for us!

What a great band with great musical heritage…

Long live the Roches!

The site is xhtml, php, and mysql based.  Currently there are over 8,000 TrueType fonts available for download, all free of charge.   I will start working on the search engines and traffic building next. 

Checkout the website at free fonts web

As of this blog post there were almost 57K downloads at the windows gadget gallery.

Download the gadget:

• techradar.com included the unsigned band web gadget in a roundup of 12  vista gadgets [ visit ]
• buildagadget.com listing for the unsigned band web gadget [ visit ]
• Windows live listing for the unsigned band web gadget [ visit ]
• Our widgipedia.com listing [ visit ]

Screenshots:

Download the widget below:
 

Also included in the zip is a little utility for displaying the md5 hash id in numerical order.  This can be handy when trying to figure out which db a specific blog is in.

Hope this helps someone!

Listen to The Roches performing “Hammond Song” below.

Her unique vocals and lyrics are such a refreshing reprieve from all the garbage on the radio these days.  Imagine a mad scientist and english teacher writing songs together for harp.  Her music is difficult to define, and definately an acquired taste.

EasyPHP setup:

1. Install EasyPHP
2. Modify the http.conf file to match your current server settings
3. If you use mod_rewrite on our web server, enable the module in the http.conf file
4. Move your site backup into the www folder inside EasyPHP
5. Modify the php.ini file to match your current server settings
6. Start phpmyadmin via the EasyPHP admin panel
7. Add a mysql user with the same name, password, and permissions as your web server mysql
8. Import your DB backup
9. Restart EasyPHP

Setting up your local WPMU

1. Change the configuration file to use 127.0.0.1 as your db host instead of localhost
2. Using phpmyadmin change the URL for blog 1 to 127.0.0.1

If you use multi-db (from wpmu premium website)

1. Change all of your localhosts in the db config file to 127.0.0.1
2. Find the db with blog 1 in it, and change the URL for blog 1 to 127.0.0.1

If you use sub-domains on your web server, you will not be able to test them locally, only blog 1 will work.  The problem is ( test.127.0.0.1) isn’t a good url.

Hope this helps someone.