Free Tech & Business Books

Borders Books has gone out of business. The ebook revolution is here. If you read technology and business books like myself, you’ll be happy to know that you can access a lot of free, new books online at Safari / ProQuest. The catch is you need to access the site as a member of your local library.

For the San Francisco Public Library, the link is at

http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000005001

 

Continue reading Free Tech & Business Books

eBay Tricks for Success

Yesterday I got a call from eBay’s Seller Outreach department. They gave me some useful tips on improving my sales. Here they are:

  • Optimized Title 
    Put keywords closer to the beginning of your listing titles than at the end. e.g.
    BAD:  8GB RAM Quad Core Processor T420 Thinkpad Laptop by Lenovo
    GOOD: Lenovo T420 Thinkpad Laptop Quad Processor, 8GB RAM, other selling points
  • Offer FREE Shipping
    You can price an item $5.00 and charge $2.50 for shipping or you can price the item $7.50 with FREE shipping. By offering FREE shipping, eBay will automatically give you 5 stars for your shipping and handling rating category. Plus, people like “free”. Of course, free could just be for the cheapest shipping. You can charge extra for priority or overnight shipping.
  •  Custom Fields
    When creating a listing you can add many custom fields  like Condition: New, Material: Wood. Adding custom fields will help you get found.
  • Put Links To Your Website From Your “About Me” Page
    eBay doesn’t allow external links in product listings. But, you can put external links in your “About Me” page.
  • Offer Discounts
    Create a Facebook Fan page and link to it from your “About Me” page. In your product listings, tell customers they can get 10% off by going to your “About Me” page and “fanning” you. Then, they can notify you when that’s done so you can apply the discount before they pay.
  • Use 30-Day Good Till Canceled and Don’t Let Listings Expire
    Each listing shows the number sold. The larger this number, the higher the listing gets in search results. Don’t let listings expire so that this number continues to grow.
  • eBays Apps
    Browse eBay Apps and use some apps like the “Analytics” app to help you manage.
  • eBay Advanced Seller Guide
If you sell at least $3000 worth of items in a 12 month period and have an overall rating of no lower than 4.6, you will automatically get “Top Rated Seller” status which pushes your listings to the top of search results. This will obviously lead to increase visibility and potentially more sales.

Batch Processing / Automation Tips

Text Processing

Dreamweaver Find and Replace (w/ Regular Expressions)

Finding and replacing text is pretty straightforward. For example, you can find all text matching “car” and replace them with “cars”. Other types of find and replace are not so obvious. Here are some examples.

  • Replace “x” with “x followed by a tab”
    This is useful when you want the text to be tab delimited so you can copy and paste it all into Excel so that each column (separated by a tab) will appear in its own column for further processing.
    FIND: x
    REPLACE: xt
    REGEX: checked
  •  Replace new lines with “x newline”
    This is useful if you need to edit text that appears at the end of a line.
    FIND: n
    REPLACE: xn
    REGEX: checked
  • Wrap multiple values (one on each line) with single quotes (‘x’)
    This is useful when you’re building a long drop down list of options in the format
    <option value=’a’>a</option>
    <option value=’b’>b</option>
    <option value=’c’>c</option>

    FIND: n
    REPLACE: ‘n’
    REGEX: checked

Continue reading Batch Processing / Automation Tips

Windows Command Prompt Shortcuts

Recently I had to do some Recently I had to do some stuff in Windows Command prompt. I got tired of having to type everything out letter by letter so I found these shortcuts.

Copy Text To Clipboard

Highlight  the text you want to. It will be copied to your clipboard.

Paste Text Within Windows Command Shell

Right-click your mouse to paste

Auto-Complete Entering Commands

Type the first few letters of a command or file / folder path and then hit TAB

Cancel The Currently-Running Program

Hit CTRL+C

How To Set Up SSL on Multiple Sites / Virtual Hosts on Apache

This example uses Apache that comes with Bitnami’s WAPPStack (Windows, Apache, PHP, Postgres) installer.

Create your SSL certificate keys. Instructions on creating a self-signed SSL certificate are available in chapter 8.5 Creating a Self-Signed Certificate Key in O’reilly’s Website Cookbook. It uses openssl to create the certificate keys. If you are on Windows, you can install Cygwin and add the openssl package to follow the instructions.

Once you’ve created your SSL certificate keys, do the following: Continue reading How To Set Up SSL on Multiple Sites / Virtual Hosts on Apache

Best Way To Label and Ship Your Packages

When shipping an item, there typically are 2 pieces of information you need:

  1. Return Address (usually your address)
  2. Recipient Address (your customer’s address)

If you’re selling on eBay, you can print an invoice including shipping labels for the return and recipient address. You could then cut the printout on the dotted line, insert the invoice into your package, and tape the return and recipient address on our package. I did this at first but the result was unprofessional and time-consuming. I could never cut my shipping labels into perfect rectangles and I could never apply transparent tape on the labels perfectly. In addition, some times the tape would not stick to certain types of plastic bags. This method also required that you wait in line at a post office which can be very time-consuming. I have since discovered a better, faster, and cheaper way to print and apply shipping labels. Continue reading Best Way To Label and Ship Your Packages

Configuring 404 File Not Found Error Handler in Apache

I recently needed to configure how 404 file not found errors were handled in Apache. This was easily done by editing httpd.conf (search for “404” to quickly find where the relevant directives are) and changing a line of code. Here’s what it looks like by default

[cc lang="php"]# Customizable error responses come in three flavors:
# 1) plain text 2) local redirects 3) external redirects
#
# Some examples:
#ErrorDocument 500 "The server made a boo boo."
#ErrorDocument 404 /missing.html
#ErrorDocument 404 "/cgi-bin/missing_handler.pl"
#ErrorDocument 402 http://www.example.com/subscription_info.html
[/cc]

Continue reading Configuring 404 File Not Found Error Handler in Apache

Unicode Regular Expressions in PHP

Recently I wanted to perform a regular expression match in PHP to match all printable characters. I used the character class [:print:] to do this. My PHP test code was

[cc lang=”php”] preg_match(“/^[[:print:]]*$/”, “abcde”)[/cc]

Although this worked, it didn’t work for non-ASCII characters, e.g. French characters with accent marks like réseau. What I needed was the ability for preg_match to match all unicode printable characters. It turns out there is a modifier (/u) that supports this. But, I also had to use a special unicode character class so my test code became

[cc lang=”php”]preg_match(“/^P{C}+$/u”, “réseau”)[/cc]

P{C} basically matches everything EXCEPT control characters in any language.

You can find more info in the Regular Expressions Cookbook by O’reilly in chapter Unicode Code Points, Properties, Blocks, and Scripts.