Well, I’d signed up to take the CompTIA A+ exam at the end of November but things got very out of control business-wise (one got busier, and the other got sold) so I haven’t done a lot in terms of getting ready. I’ll have to postpone until early next year…

I bought a book with a CD containing a few tests, but the book is literally like 1200 pages. It’s a bit intimidating, although it’s well written and very thorough. I can probably use it as the be-all and end-all of PC troubleshooting guides.

However, I’ll probably buy a uCertify prepkit to facilitate my studying rather than try to slog through this tome. I used uCertify’s kits for taking the first two CIW exams and passed with much higher than needed scores. These were reasonably priced, compared to what I paid for the book, and I like the interactive structure a lot more than just reading.

Although there were a couple of spelling errors in the two kits I bought (and a few programmer’s notes that hadn’t gotten removed), that wasn’t that big of a deal. One thing I liked was the tracking page that kept track over how well you were doing - it would show you when you were getting closer to obtaining that passing grade.

The best thing about the kit was the number of tests. The two I bought came with 5 and 8 built-in tests, respectively, but the cool feature was the ‘create test’ function that lets you pull together any number of questions from the entire pool of questions for all topics on the test. So, you can create a customized test based only on the things you need to improve. And the review sections show wrong answers and explanations for every test you take.

Plus, they were 100% guaranteed. If I failed (which of course I didn’t) they’d refund my money. I couldn’t ask for more than that. So I suspect I’ll be buying another one of uCertify’s kits in the very near future.

Came across this bit of humor this morning - How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot Using Any Programming Language. The CSS one is my favorite…

I love bookstores. We only have one large one in my town, but I could spend hours looking around with a cold frapaccino in hand. And do, on a regular basis.

One of my pet peeves is people who walk around the bookstore blathering on their cell phones. IMHO, bookstores are like libraries - they are places for people to think, read, and entertain their curiosity. Loud conversations aren’t appropriate. I don’t have them myself because I think it’s very rude.

Today I read a bit from a NYT article about Borders bookstores, and what they’re planning to do to some (all?) of their stores. I like Borders because it, like Barnes & Noble, has a nice selection of movies and music as well as books. But this is just not cool:

A new strategy at Borders will reinforce the message that its stores are not just about books: the company has been installing 37-inch flat-screen televisions to show original programming, advertisements, news and weather.

I can watch original programming, advertisements, news and weather at home, if I feel the urge. I certainly don’t want to see (much less listen to) them while I’m enjoying some quiet time at my local bookstore, and I’ll bet I’m not the only one. I’m thinking this idea might not go over so well…

I need a cart (must be customizable PHP/MySQL/open source) that can do this:

1) Needs to be able to download order info in an Access-friendly format (this is easy).

2) Needs to interface with Authorize.Net (also easy).

3) This particular client will never have more than 10 products but often gets orders of 200 to 400 boxes to separate shipping addresses from a single customer, like holiday corporate gifts. The client wants the product page to look like this:

• the list of products is always visible on the page

• a radio button at the bottom - ‘order for myself’ or ‘order a gift for someone else’

• the customer should be able to fill in the address on the same page where the product is selected (the full list of up to 10 products)

• the process would be: customer selects product, selects ‘order a gift’and sees the address box to fill in. Customer fills in the address, seesanother set of ‘order for myself’ or ‘order a gift’ buttons, selects one, sees a new page (maybe) with a full list of products and another empty address box, and so on. The important point is, the customer doesn’t have to jump back and forth between product pages and addressing.

4) The total including shipping charges is displayed as a running total at all times while the customer’s in the cart (like when they’re entering their 200 addresses by hand).

Does that make any sense? On his current site, he has it set up so that a customer can enter 8 addresses on his order form and then has to place another entire order for more.

Now I’ve been checking around at the usual suspects - X-Cart, ZenCart, Cubecart - and haven’t found any that can do the hard parts here. Someone pointed me to Magento, and this one looks very promising, but it’s beta and the working version won’t be available until early 2008 (which might not be a problem). This is the best-looking one so far…

But does anyone else have suggestions? Ideally I need a built-in address book with an unlimited number (or 500, say) addresses per customer. It’d be really cool if they could provide my client with an Excel spreadsheet full of shipping addresses that my client could dump into a database and ship to, but I’m not sure if that’s even possible.

This morning I tried to cancel my Yahoo Search Marketing account, but I couldn’t figure out how. Nothing in the help section about it… I had to leave for a meeting so I sent them an email and just sat back down here.

No answer from email yet, so I Googled ‘close my yahoo search marketing account’ and the first page I came to was on the YSM site and it actually did lead me to a page with information on how to close the account.

I made the call. I went through three levels of menus and then was routed to my ‘customer solutions advocate’ (I like that). He had my account closed in about two minutes and it was very pleasant. He didn’t try to convince me to stay (I was closing the account because we sold the business to which it was connected) and was polite and fast. I couldn’t ask for more.

If anyone’s interested, read more here about closing a YSM account (not that I’m advocating this!)…

I’ve been looking around for places to submit my CSS-based sites (galleries, that kind of thing). I just got my business site listed in CSSGlance, an Italian CSS gallery.

I think my site’s getting three stars in the ratings because of that big ‘Colorado Rockies’ logo (which is of course no longer there on the live site!).

I met with a new client yesterday who was extremely interested in what I can do for them as far as SEO. Whenever I build a website, I always include what I refer to as ‘basic SEO services’: a limited amount of keyword research and incorporation of 2-3 keyword phrases per page in the content and elements of the code. The client understood this when I explained it, but wanted to know whether this is enough to begin showing up in SERP’s.

By itself, with a badly designed site, it might not be. But in my experience creating a usable site (cleanly coded, very clear navigation, well-written content, appropriate doctype, an intelligent site structure) goes hand in hand with SEO. Without one or the other, a site often won’t perform well in the search engines. But with both, I’ve found that my clients’ sites begin showing up earlier, not later, and often wind up outperforming their competitors even without an ongoing, expensive SEO campaign.

That’s not to say that ongoing monitoring isn’t important, but for the initial launch of a new site, paying attention to both basic SEO and usability is a key combination that I never skimp on.