At last! I’m very excited to announce that Prestashop is getting the jQuery 1.4.4 library update! This has been implemented in Prestashop 1.4 Alpha 4 version, which as tha name says it, is an alpha version and is probably not enough stable to become your “live” shop. I want to thank the Prestashop team, and invite all of you to try to develop more and more Prestashop modules and themes and make Prestashop the “WordPress” of e-commerce!

Lots of new features for this e-commerce package.

Here’s the change log, where you can find lots of new added features and possibilities:

http://www.prestashop.com/download/changelog_1.4.0.4.txt

One this to mention, is the SMARTY template engine upgrade to 3.5 for better performances.

Prestashop’s API?

One great feature added recently is the Webservice feature. It looks like an advanced API. As says the e-commerce’s newsletter ”The Webservice is a fabulous tool to develop customized features in a simple and fast way!” Go to Prestashop’s blog to find out more: http://www.prestashop.com/blog/article/the_feature_of_the_week_the_webservice/

I’ve had a problem with WordPress last 3 months, and at last, I found the solution. Here is the story:

WordPress Custom Fields

WordPress posts have meta data (Custom Fields) where additional information on the post are stored. For example the featured image, number of views, comments count, keywords, SEO description and so on…

When posting new posts, the Custom fields where not getting stored on WordPress, so basically nothing was “tracked” and optimized. I looked everywhere on forums and internet resources for a solution to this issue, no luck!

Today I was rechecking Gibni’s data base and in the “post_meta” table, I found that “meta_id” was not set to “auto_increment”. You can see this in the “extras” column in phpMyAdmin while you see the “post_meta” table’s structure. Once setting this parameter to the “auto_increment” value, everything got back in order.

Problem Solved!

Now all the “custom fields” get stored and updated as they should. If you have the same issue, check your database!

There’s a great plugin for the WordPress platform, called SEO Super Comments, which creates a single “virtual” page for each comment on your site. It increases the number of pages you have on the site, and improves your SEO a lot. Read more on SEO Super Comments on the authors page: SEO Super Comments by Vladimir Prelovac .

“The concept relies around optimizing the target page using title and H1 tag using the context of the comment. So basically we will take the excerpt of the comment and use it to create the page title and H1 tag and in the body we will hold the content of the comment…” says Vladimir.

Download modded Google XML Sitemap Generator 3.2.3

I created a modded version of XML Sitemap Generator 3.2.3 to work with SEO Super Comments which puts all your comments pages in the sitemap, and once submitted to Google, you should see a huge raise in your traffic.

Installation

To install, you should replace the downloaded sitemap-ui.php and sitemap-core.php in your Google XML Sitemap Generator Plugin’s directory and overwrite the original files. I would recommend you back up your original files.

Once installed, Go to your administration panel, and to the XML Sitemap Generator settings, and check the ‘Include Comment Pages’ option, click ‘Update Options’ at the bottom, and “Rebuild Your Sitemap”

I personnaly recommend this plugin and would thank the developper for it.

Please send your comments and queries here if you have any issues regarding my modded version of Google XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress.

Donate

Please go to the Donations Page  and contribute to the developpment of more updated plugins if this modded version helped you increasing your traffic.

The first goal of the PrestaShop Revolution, is to use the latest JS librairies, as latest jQuery, and its plugins. Here is the place for everyone interested to share their knowledge, and work toward making PrestaShop a better e-commerce solution.

To be more efficient, I beleive that loaded JS and CSS files should all be defined in template files, and not main PrestaShop PHPs; e.g. the JS files for the Product Page, which are defined in /prestashop/product.php rather than prestashop/themes/mytheme/product.php

For longtime I’ve been a WordPress developper and I beleive that the success of WordPress not only relies on its community, but also on its way of handling themes and interfaces.

 Basically, Smarty – the templating framework used for PrestaShop – is complex and difficult to understand, so why making it more unreliable by using unclean and unhealthy coding?

I’m actually working on integrating latest jQuery 1.4.2 on PrestaShop and updating latest jQuery Plugins, and most important, I moved JS librairies to theme’s folder, rather than PrestaShop’s JS directory.

I invite everyone interested in this project to share their work, knowledge, experiences and ideas here, and on a dedicated forum in PrestaShop Forums called PrestaShop Revolution.

Just now, I got a $30 web hosting coupon from the best web hosting site !

If you doubt buying a web hosting plan, this could help you make the right decision. Here’s a ThinkHost coupon, giving you $30 off your bill! So no more hesitation please!

ThinkHost Coupon Code: oak_ah98 

Why choose ThinkHost?

1. It’s a “perfect” host,
2. It runs on renewable energy (wind and solar)
3. Gives you 100% uptime guarantee
4. Gives LOTS of unlimiteds ( Space, Bandwidth, Websites, Databases…)
5. AND FREE SITE BUILDER FOR BEGINNERS
6. It’s not expensive at all, and also becomes very cheap after the coupon code!
7. And above all, just because I recommend it!

Due to some yet unknown issue, WordPress version 2.8.2 might be causing server errors.

Lunarpages, my “current” and might become “ex” webhosting company, shut down Gibni.com yesterday without any prior notice, saying they’ve taken an emergency action, as the “index.php” script in my wordpress root was using huge server resources, and could cause a server crash.

First problem is, not only they changed the “index.php” permissions to “000″  (no read permissions) but they took ownership of the file, so neither I could make any changes to the file, nor analyze it for troubleshooting.

Secondly, they made the domain return an “internal server error” to all visitors.

Third, they did not manage to put an “under maintenance” page at the root untill the issue is solved.

Anyway, thanks to my linux skills, I managed to put an “under maintenance” page for Gibni, and get the site back online very soon.

Until I figure out what caused wordpress to eat server resources, and was it really wordpress or Lunarpages’s poor servers and administration, was it the running theme which ran without any issue for months or even the plugins installed on wordpress a year ago; I’ve decided to switch back to wordpress default theme and upgrade to wordpress 2.8.4.

After all, I believe that you should now:

• Enjoy Gibni, Ad free!
• Always have a maintenance page and an emergency code, just in case!
• Be careful choosing your webhosting company!

Making money online is one of the most researched topics for many of web developpers, bloggers and website owners. It takes a lot of efforts to produce quality content and get enough traffic, to be able to rank better in search results and improve your different ranking factors. After a while of being online, website owners will get advertising offers from different companies, which might be interesting at first.

Well, this is a good sign, as it means that your site is getting some interest and attention; but it’s also an alert, warning you to be cautious.

There are lots of scams out there, which try to fool you by offering great business opportunities and make you run some ads or malicious scripts on your website. They (the scammers) will try to get detailed information about you, your website, personal details and even your bank account(s).

You Should be carefull…

You would get an email, from an unknown party, who shows interest in your website and usually represents himself as an advertising company who wants to buy some ad space, or publish some content on your website (or blog) for one of his clients.

First thing to do is : DO NOT reply with your personal information and  DO NOT show that you’re very interested!

Second, start to gather some information about the company who sent you the email. See its WHOIS record (you can use InterNIC WHOIS ) to find out more about the website owner, registrar, their address, and phone numbers if any.

Use your favorite search engine to find out more about the company, visit their website, check their “About us” page, check their portfolio, recent clients, latest works…

Look for user reviews on the company, search to find out if ” {the company name} + scam ” returns anything in your search engine? Search and investigate a little bit to keep your website (blog) safe from advertisement scams.

Use SiteAdvisor form McAffee to check if the website is a safe website or not.

If you come across any types of scams, just DO NOT reply to their emails and ignore them. You would help other website owners and bloggers if you write a post on how to identify scams and spams and how to avoid scams.

You can share this post and link back to it from your website (given that you mention the source).

Recently I’ve came across a scam from Production-Time.com . They’ve sent me an email in French, in which they shown interest in Gibni.com and asked me to reply if I wanted some more information.

I’ve done a WHOIS research and some investigation and found out that the email, even if it was well personalised, has been sent to thousands of people and some website owners have already announced Promotion-Time.com as a scam. I’ve found a detailed article about this scam in EPN.dk, which I translated to English to be able to understand it.

Here’s the a part of the email they’ve sent me:

Bonjour,
J’aimerais vous faire part d’une proposition commerciale à propos de votre site Web, qui pourrait très fort vous intéresser.
En effet, ma société Promotion-Time, souhaiterait vous rémunérer pour la publication d’une petite publication textuelle sur votre site pour un de nos clients.
Il s’agit d’une annonce francophone ciblée qui convient à certaines pages de votre site.
N’hésitez pas à me contacter si vous avez besoin de plus amples informations.

Sincèrement,
Francq Petit
francqp@promotion-time.com

Si vous ne souhaitez plus recevoir d’emails de Promotion-Time, répondez à cet email avec comme sujet : STOP.
It is possible to continue this correspondence in English, if you prefer to do so.

Here in this post, you can help the community by letting other know about the scams you faced and also know about scams already running on the internet. Type in the information you have in the comments section (Be carefull not to spam the comments section) .

Making money online, avoiding the scams, aims to help you avoid scams, help spread the word and show your support.

Many people have visited Gibni.com since its first day and the number grows everyday. Do you want to mark the history of this site by bringing some help to it?

• Articles like TOP N95 Applications, Symbian S60 Applications – Part 1 , 2 , 3 brought a lot of people to this site, and gave them useful information on mobile phones applications.
• Articles on the Delayed Write Failed error message or the second version, helped a lot of people solve their hard drive issue and get their data back with no data loss!
• About 20 000 people read the article on MSN Messenger and its conflict with NOD32 and got connected back again with friends and familly.
• The Conficker removal article, is getting a lot of attention as it helped many people to delete the virus and protect themselves from conficker’s infection.

Currently I am writing the 3rd article on the Delayed Write Failed error message which will hopefully help people with this issue to get their hardware work properly as expected.

The 4th part of TOP Symbian Applications is on the way too.

I expect an increase in my unique visitors by 7 000/month. Which will lead to about 30 000 unique visitors per month.

My first goal is to provide information for free, and make it accessible to everyone. All of this takes time, a lot of time.

Many visitors wanted to say “Thanks” for the information I provided here and that helped them in some way, so I recently started a new section, which you might have already seen, it’s the Donations page. Here you can donate any amount of money to help me continue the developpement of Gibni and if you donate more than 10 USD, you can show a name and a link of your choice on the Donators list.

Go ahead and Buy me a drink (Coffee: 3.5 USD, Beer: 4.5 USD or Fresh soda: 2.5 USD) at least if you can’t donate a larger amount.

Thanks for your great support.

Well, some may answer with “Yes! in French!” (or Portuguese, or Italian…), but, what I mean is in other languages like Arabic, Farsi (Persian), Urdu, Chinese…, languages which have characters other than the basic “A,B,C…”

Basically, when you write a blog post on your blog, it is stored in a database, and what characters that database supports, defines the characters you can use for writting your post.

Well discuss about the two general types of WordPress, the WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted WordPress installations.

WordPress.com blogs:

Typing other languages such as Farsi or Russian or Arabic should be supported by default and you should be able to write in almost any language without problem.

But if it’s not enabled on your account, according to Fatih Syuhud [1], you should:

- Login to your administration area on WordPress.com

- Go to “Settings” > “Reading”

- and set the encoding for “Pages and Feeds” to “UTF-8″

This procedure gives you the possibility of writing all kind of characters on your pages and posts and feeds.

Encoding for other specific character:

• Latin/Hebrew: ISO-8859-8
• Hebrew: windows-1255
• Latin/Arabic: ISO-8859-6
• Arabic: windows-1256

Self-hosted WordPress installations:

Remember that you take full responsability for the modifications and actions you do on your blogs/sites! Proceed at your own risk.

The contents of posts are stored in a table called wp_post (by default) inside your WordPress main database.

What defines the type of characters supported by a table, are the charset and collation of the table.

By default, all installations of WordPress (prior to 2.3.1), use the latin1_general_ci (or latin1_swedish_ci) encoding for their rows and tables.

To post articles in Arabic or Farsi (Persian) (or Urdu, Chinese, Russian…), you should change the encodings of specific tables and respective rows to utf8_general_ci.

Step One: Backup

You should first of all, backup your files and database! use Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan’s WP-DBManager plugin, or do it manually by following the procedure from this article: WordPress Backups.

Step Two: Convert

First Solution proposed by Fatih and Mukhlas Rowi [3] ( 70% success rate , maybe some data loss)  is:

- Open your WordPress database in phpMyAdmin (in cPanel),

- Click on the “wp_post” table and then click on “Operations”,

- Change the collation to “utf8_general_ci”,

- Save.

- Now, browse to the “wp_post” table, and check all rows with a collation attribute,

- Click on “Edit” bellow the list of selected rows,

- Change all collations to “utf8_general_ci”,

- Save.

That’ it.

Second solution: Use a plugin to do the conversion! I’ve tested the bbwp2UTF8 plugin and it works great (at least with WordPress 2.7.1), you can download it from my Downloads Page or from WordPress.org home page: bbwp2UTF8 Home page. ( 30% success rate, big data loss)

- Install the bbwp2UTF8 plugin by extracting its content in your plugins directory (usually /wp-content/plugins ),

- Go to the plugin’s page (link is below the “Plugins” section on the left side of the page in WordPress 2.7) .

- Check the desired tables to convert ( I recomment you convert all tables),

- Proceed with the steps to complete the conversion procedure.

That’s all! Your database and tables have been converted in the right manner, and you should not face any loss of data.

(In case you don’t like the plugin suggested above, or it doesn’t work for you, you may try: UTF-8 Database Converter by g30rg3_x ( I haven’t tried this out!) )

Geeks’ solution: Follow the guide at WordPress.org : Converting Database Character Sets

Now you can type UTF8 characters in WordPress and let your visitors type in UTF8 characters in the comments section.

Read More here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Converting_Database_Character_Sets

http://www.haidongji.com/2008/11/11/convert-character-set-to-utf8-in-mysql/

http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/ultimate-solution-to-weird-utf-character-encoding-problem

http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Database_character_set

http://www.haidongji.com/2009/02/16/perl-script-to-convert-mysql-character-set-to-utf8/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/utf-8-database-converter/installation/

Ref:

[1]- http://fatihsyuhud.com/2009/01/16/how-to-enable-arabic-letters-in-wordpress/

[2]- http://codex.wordpress.org/Converting_Database_Character_Sets

[3]- http://www.mukhlas-rowi.web.id/2008/11/11/mengatasi-problem-penulisan-huruf-arab-di-blog/

First of all let’s agree on one point, we should build websites for people, not bots, but people find us through bots.

So keeping in mind to build “useful and good content“, let’s see how a bot sees your website?

First of all, for some people who are completely new to the topic, a bot is a kinda program (or software) used by search engines to browse the Internet and saves all the information it can read in the search engine’s index, and bots, basically are Text Browsers, and they read your website, they don’t see it the way humans do!

…So that way search engines know about everything!

Bots travel through websites by following links on one page and jumping back and forth through different pages and websites.  You may ask why you should care about a bot (or sometimes called a spider) and the way it sees your website?

The answer is that you should be aware that bots build a search engine’s index and they introduce your website to the index. So your website will appear on the search results of a search engine the way you shown it to the specific bot!

To make your website search engine friendly, you should know few tips.

1- Build websites for people, not for bots.

2- Put the most important content on the top, in the code (html, xhtml, php, asp, etc.).

3- Make a navigation menu and a navigable one!

4- Use formatting styles as headings and bold or italic text where appropriate.

5- Optimize images and use “alt” text for ALL images.

6- Use CSS positionning techniques to place your content on your page.

7- Browse your website with different browsers and on different platforms.

8- Bots are basically TEXT BROWSERS! use a text browser to see how your website look in it. Use Lynx!

You can find Lynx for Windows on my downloads page.

Lynx is easy to use, and there’s a good documentation already built in. But to get you started, once installed, start Lynx, and at the prompt, enter “g”  (without the quotation marks) and it will ask you for the URL you want to go to… and you’re good to go!

9- Create strong and complete header meta descriptions and keywords.

10- Choose your page titles carefully and responsibly.

11- Introduce your website to different listing directories.

By providing good and useful information to a bot when it comes to your visit, you will help the search engines to bring you the right visitors and the most important thing is that a visitor will come to you, because he wants to, and not by chance or mistake.

Worst thing which can happen to a visitor is to click on a search result, start to read a site’s text and advertisements all around and at the end say “This is the wrong place! I lost my time!”

Build great content and present it right!