Work on sites before the DNS has rolled over (by editing the hosts file)

Posted in Programming, Tricks on September 29th, 2008 by Ryan

Important: This does not work if you are behind a proxy, which includes antivirus firewalls and such.

  • Right click on the hosts file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
  • Go to properties, turn off “read-only
  • Open the file using Notepad or any text editor
  • Add a line to the bottom of the file with the IP and domain
  • When you are done, don’t forget to turn read-only back on again

Ex.

200.200.200.200  thedomain.com

Use the IP of the new server and then the domain you want that IP to resolve to.

Now you can browse to that domain and it will resolve to the new IP even though the DNS hasn’t been updated yet.

Display code in the browser

Posted in Programming on September 23rd, 2008 by Ryan

Use &lt; instead of “<” and &gt; instead of “>”.

Or if you’re pasting code into a WYSIWYG editor, just paste into the design view and not the source view. It should automatically convert the characters for you.

Remove Estimate Shipping and Tax box from Magento checkout

Posted in Programming on September 23rd, 2008 by Ryan

Open the file /app/design/frontend/default/default/layout/checkout.xml

Remember if you are using a different theme the path to that file will be slightly different.

Remove this line:

<block type=”checkout/cart_shipping” name=”checkout.cart.shipping” as=”shipping” template=”checkout/cart/shipping.phtml”/>

Source

Canada Post module for Magento now available

Posted in Programming on September 22nd, 2008 by Ryan

After this module is installed you can request quotes from the Canada Post Sell Online system.

Feature list

  • Storage of sellonline information
  • Easy setup process
  • Easy configuration / setup process
  • Add ability to view number of boxes to ship and contents of each box
  • Orders from backend may use “Free” shipping method

Get it here.

Make your Wordpress site faster (easily)

Posted in Programming, Tips on September 21st, 2008 by Ryan

What:
There’s a feature called “gzip” that’s installed by default on most web servers. Modifying your site to make use of it can really speed up the performance.

How much faster?
Try the quick and easy mod_gzip tester by WhatsMyIP.org. Just enter the URL and it will tell you how much faster it would be.

How to enable it in Wordpress:
It’s easy! Just grab the plugin called Gzippy and install it. Run the gzip tester again to see it in action.

osCommerce PHP4 -> PHP5 Fixes

Posted in Programming, Technical Issues on September 15th, 2008 by Ryan

There are a few problems that come from moving an old install of osCommerce to a new server with PHP5 or just simply upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5. Read more »

Getting “As low as” on Magento unexpectedly?

Posted in Tips on September 12th, 2008 by Ryan

It’s just a caching issue. All you have to do is go to System -> Cache Management and then click the refresh button next to “Layered Navigation Indices“.

Speed up Magento by ~235%

Posted in Tips, Tricks on September 10th, 2008 by Ryan

What:
There’s a feature called “gzip” that’s installed by default on most web servers. Modifying your site to make use of it can really speed up the performance.

How much faster?
Try the quick and easy mod_gzip tester by WhatsMyIP.org. Just enter the URL and it will tell you how much faster it would be.

How to enable it for Magento

One of the drawbacks of Magento is currently its speed if default configuration is used. There are certain ways of making it run faster. The best one is to enable GZip compression by changing .htaccess file a little. You just need to uncomment part of the code. In my case, the speed increase was exactly 235%. Read more »

Put LazzyMonk’s Blog onto the Magento Main Page

Posted in Programming on September 2nd, 2008 by Ryan

On the CMS page that you want to see the blog on, just use the following code:

{{block type=”blog/blog” template=”blog/blog.phtml”}}

Google Web Browser “Chrome” Released

Posted in Tips on September 2nd, 2008 by Ryan

Google’s new web browser “Chrome” was released today. So far I really like it. It’s extremely fast, looks nice and has all the features you would need. It also imports from Firefox perfectly, not just bookmarks either. It does saved passwords, history, etc. as well.