I’ve been using OptionCart as my shopping cart frontend for awhile - I’ve used it for two clients plus my own retail site.  It’s a frontend for Mal’s E-commerce, which I’ve used since 1998 and about which I have nothing but good comments.

These two work together much like ZenCart or X-Cart by itself, but OptionCart has an advantage for me as being totally based on PHP includes. I can drop a cart interface into any existing HTML or PHP-based site, there are no templates to create.

However, there are a lot of include files to edit. The first time I used it, for a site with about 500 photos for sale, it took me weeks and weeks to get the formatting done.  It’s all in tables (a disadvantage) and I’m a CSS user so that took some getting used to again.

The results looked really good, but I ate a good number of hours getting it the way I wanted it to look.

The second project I used it on was my retail site. Since I’d written down every procedure I used for editing and reformatting each included file, this one was easier - it probably took half the time of the first one, and looked as good.

Over the weekend I tackled the formatting of a site that’s just about ready to launch. I’d already installed OptionCart a few weeks earlier but had done no formatting. I sat down on Saturday morning to start on it, took a break to see a movie that afternoon, and finished it all up on Sunday night.

It looks really nice, and it took me, again, far less time. I think I’ve done it enough that I know where to look for what needs changing (there’s a lot of PHP code to wade through). 

I’m building my first X-Cart site now, so it will be interesting to see how the two compare. I know that X-Cart has many more features, but for most of clients, OptionCart is an inexpensive and very attractive package. Even more so that it’s becoming so easy for me to customize nicely.

Today I picked up a copy of David Allen’s book about productivity and creativity, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity“>Getting Things Done, the predecessor to the other book I mentioned here, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life“>Ready for Anything. Ready for Anything is quite good, but there’s terminology and references in it that rely on the reader having already experienced getting things done, so I’m going to read GTD first. Probably makes sense…

And as a productivity aid, I got a 2007 refill for the paper-based planner I used religiously a couple of years ago. I loved this planner, it was the best one I’ve ever used because it’s so oriented around prioritizing and realizing that everything cannot be done at once, and one of the reasons I like it is because it encourages you to think of tasks like rocks. (Why wasn’t I using it recently? Because I got the Windows version for my computer and because my handwriting is horrible. But having a paper-based system that I can take anywhere has its values too).

Every week you have a big glass container. In it you can put a few big rocks and a lot of little rocks. The major things you need to accomplish are the big rocks and all of the other little tasks, errands, and distractions are the little ones. Big rocks go in first, and little ones fill in the gaps. This is a visualization that makes sense to me.

However, this week I’m going to be working out of town for several days so I have a lot of things to get done before Thursday. What happens when you have too many rocks for your glass and you wind up with rocks on the table and rocks rolling onto the floor…

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.

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.

This is always tough - the only things I really read religiously are the WebProWorld and WebProNews emails that I get several times per week and I know how fast things change in this field. Sad to say, I’d never thought of turning my Google homepage into a page full of RSS feeds - but I read about that today and that’s really a great idea.

Now my personalized homepage is full of SEO, web design and small business marketing news. I can see a few stories at a time and pursue them if I want, but in any event I get a nice daily overview of what’s going on in just a few minutes. This is much better than occasionally visiting some of the sites I’ve collected every couple of weeks, which is just about pointless.

Anyone else have other good ideas for staying on top of things?

I moved a piano downstairs this morning all by myself.

Well, not really a piano. It’s a Yamaha keyboard I received as a gift last Christmas.

My parents had a small piano, a real one, when I was a kid. I played around with it from time to time, and made a few concerted efforts to learn from the pile of old instruction books stored in the seat, but that eventually faded in lieu of the guitar. I took a few years of guitar lessons but never got better than adequate - although I still have two guitars… Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using my Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop as my main business machine since I started my company. It’s pretty good, pretty fast, but I’m now planning to move one of my other desktops to my office and use it as my primary machine.

It’s a Dell, about 2 years old, but was purchased as a game machine so it’s still much faster than the laptop. However, it’s got an enormous old-style 19″ monitor. Huge. Looks like an old TV. I’ve been dreading carting that thing up the stairs.

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