Archive for February, 2007


WHMCS revisited

Filed Under: Good Experience, Hosting, Software, Web Design by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 13, 2007

I wrote earlier about purchasing WHMCS for my hosting reseller site. Well, I finished my integration, my hosting site launched on Sunday and I thought I would share my final thoughts about this first experience with WHMCS.

Nothing’s changed – I still love it. I learned that there about 30 template files that have to be edited for CSS to make it fit in nicely with the rest of the site, but the edits are easy and in most cases it’s very obvious what needs to be done.

I’m pretty happy with the way the whole thing turned out except for the icons that came with the package – I think they look a little cartoonish for my site and I plan to replace them at some point when I find something I like better. My WHMCS section is under Support on the top menu bar.

The control panel for running this thing is easy to understand. We ran about six test orders through the system looking for bugs and errors and I think we found most of them. I still won’t be too surprised if someone runs across something when they try to sign up, but for the most part it’s done.

I’m really happy with WHMCS and will purchase it in a few days when the trial license runs out. On second thought maybe I should go do that right now in case I forget…

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PHP image rotation script

Filed Under: Cool Tools, Web Design by Debbie — 4 Comments
February 13, 2007

Last week I went hunting for a little script that would rotate an image and a caption with every screen refresh. Should be a simple task, no?

I found many JavaScript ones, all different. I’m not a JavaScript expert and I like implementing code that I can get my head around – not many of the ones I found fit that bill. Plus, knowing that some visitors may have JavaScript turned off I thought better of it.

I looked for PHP scripts – I didn’t find as many, but I think I really lucked out when I discovered this tiny little PHP rotation script from Sue Crocker.

I love this. You just put it where you want to show the images and bang, it runs. No problems, no confusion. You put the images and accompanying captions into a text file separated by NEXT statements like this one. Within this text file, you can assign a CSS class to the captions so that they’ll show up in an absolutely positioned space and not directly under the image, as you can see in this page in progress. It’s the Featured Flower at the bottom that’s running the script – refresh the page to see it in action.

And it works beautifully. This is one of the most elegant and simple solutions I’ve found in a while.

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Part of that weaselly 90%

Filed Under: SEO by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 13, 2007

I just read this very long and very thoughtfully written post by Danny Sullivan regarding Jason Calcanis’ recent rant against the SEO industry (or rather 90% of it). This is a worthwhile read.

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“Ready for Anything” book notes

Filed Under: Productivity by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 7, 2007

I got a new book over the weekend and have just started reading… It’s Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life by David Allen, the productivity expert that wrote Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

This particular book is split into 52 very short chapters. I’m going to try to read one every day or so and share here what I find. I bought this book because I can’t stand having a ton of unfinished tasks floating around; I thought this might help me get more of a handle on things when I’m busy and not be so concerned about not doing all of them at once.

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WHMCS and hosting resellers

Filed Under: Cool Tools, Hosting, Productivity, Software, Web Design by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 5, 2007

I’m a newish reseller for a certain hosting company that offers WHM AutoPilot as a free automated services center for hosts. This program is pretty cool – basically it’s a tool that exists on your site and lets people sign up for hosting and other services automatically. They sign up for what they want, pay, their account is set up and they get billed for it periodically all without the reseller’s input.

The control panel for WHMAP is pretty well done, it makes sense and is easy to get synchronized with the data you’ve entered in WHM (the hosting manager that integrates with cPanel). However, I found that integrating it into my site proved harder than first thought. My host is not using the latest version of WHMAP, but I’m not sure if that’s a factor here or not…

You create a header and footer template that matches the rest of your site and WHMAP feeds its data into the central area of the page, however you’ve defined that in a div or a (shudder) table cell. That went fine – it popped in nicely.

However, the problems started when I wasn’t happy with the way lines of text ran together. There are many spacing and formatting issues right out of the box, and applying CSS styles to some of these was just agonizing for me.

I probably spent a good 5-6 hours playing with just the first step of the order process and still wasn’t even close to making it pretty on the page. I knew that WHMAP has a big brother named WHM Complete Solution. I knew it wasn’t free, but I’d heard from other resellers that it was much easier to deal with.

I told my husband of my coding woes and asked him what he thought about me buying WHMCS rather than continuing to struggle with WHMAP. He shook his head and told me ‘go get it.’ Why waste so much time, he said, when I could probably be cruising along with the better product?

I downloaded the 15-day trial of WHMCS and had the thing loaded and running in about an hour. I’m not quite done with the integration, but it certainly was a heck of a lot easier than WHMAP and looks 100% better. I’m really happy with it, and the price tag ($166 I think if you buy a copy outright) is in my opinion extremely reasonable. It makes my hosting site look pretty professional, IMHO, and I hope to have it up and running by this weekend.

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