Monday, September 22, 2008

Letter to send to friends who FWD emails

Hi xx,

Like 99.9% of these forwarded emails, this one is also not true.

[http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/missing/penny.asp]

Snopes is a really good place to check the truth of FW[re:] fw: RE: type emails. Or, you can safely ignore ALL these types of emails. In 14 years of internet usage I have only ever seen two that were true. (One was the "uses of bounce sheets" email, which had a few true items on it).

Pepsi and AOL are not going to give us $123 for each email we forward, Captain Kangaroo was not a war hero, nobody shot a 190# mountain lion in Iowa, the lawyer of that deposed Nigerian dictator will not share his former master's 30 mil with us if we help him with transferring some money(to give just a few examples I have seen).

Also, if you look at the top of the email, you will see a whole bunch of email addresses, of all the people it was sent to. These are all now ripe for the picking for any scam artists or spammers who will get this email down the road. And since this email has already been circulating since 2001, we can expect it to get a lot of mileage in the future.

I, for one, don't want my email address to travel along with it.

Feel free to send this back to the person who sent the [amber alert] to you, maybe it will help cut down on this kind of stupidity, and waste of time and network resources.

Funny, if you are a web developer, I guess

"our extensive research has shown that failure in relationships is directly proportional to the number of Alt codes one has memorized"
~Author Unknown
[How bad is it if I only know three? Well, maybe four.]
"I spent a minute looking at my own code by accident. I was thinking 'What the hell is this guy doing?'"
"I went on a 30-day diet, and lost 30 days"
"How can you think you matter when your URL has a tilde in it?"
"leave the advanced tab alone - if you were advanced you'd know how to use it"
"i should just make web sites, then i can make lots of money and not have to work too hard."
"this site best viewed if you come over to my office and look at it on my state-of-the-art graphics terminal"
"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you." -Rita Mae Brown
"Using Navigator? Or a modem? Are you in a school or a library? We don't want your business. Go hunt rats for food. Damn cavemen."

Monday, September 08, 2008

Strange characters ’ and  in Wordpress posts

After a wordpress upgrade we started to get all kinds of weird symbols in our posts, including  and ’. I figured it was a character encoding mismatch problem and a quick search on the Wordpress forums confirmed it. You have to comment out two lines in your wp-config.php file (found in your main blog directory). These are the two lines:
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Comment them out like this:

//define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
//define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Fixed our problem.

Changing the ordering of products in Zen Cart 1.3.7

Here's a simple one, but I didn't know how to do it right away. If you want to feature the products on your main Zen Cart page in a certain order, you can do that by going into the admin and editing the sort order number at the bottom of each individual product. Lower sort order numbers show up first on the catalog page.