vengavenga

Just a very quick note to thank all of the team at TCH for their ongoing help and support. In the last week they've dealt with a billing issue (my fault) and a security issue (a hackers fault) speedily and effectively as always. Would never even consider another hosting company. Ali.

There are a few osC modules that will do what you want. Two I'd suggest are ... http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contri...tiple+flat+rate (if you want it a set of flat rates as in your example) or http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contri...iple+table+rate (if you want to vary the amount based on weight) Hope that helps Ali

Don't often have time to post on the forums unfortunately, but this is one occasion where I feel I really must do. I'm not going to go into detail as to what's been happening with the 130 or so sites that we host with TCH, so to cut a long story short, the last week has been a stressful, hectic time that actually threatened the future of our business. None of this was the fault of TCH, yet everyone I've spoken to (Jesse, Kate & Carl) have been more eager to help sort out OUR mess. Upshot of it all is that Jesse is in the process of sorting everything out for us and everything is looking good. Thankyou everyone at TCH Ali

It also depends on what tye/size of files you are trying to upload. Most of my work involves uploading hundreds or even thousands of tiny files (1kb, 3kb) which often seems to confuse things. Nothing wrong with TCH or my ISP, it's just the way it is when trying to carry out such intensive uploads. Best solution that I've found, and that might work for you, is to put all the files you are trying to upload into a zip file. Upload that zip and then use the File Manager in cPanel to extract the zip on the server. I find this to be much more reliable and way, way quicker. Ali.

It's loading as quickly as I'd expect for a site with that many images for me here in Spain Ali.

Not checked any of them out Jim, but you'll find a few at http://www.hotscripts.com/search/15767789.html Ali.

knife

I installed Vista more or less as soon as it was released, but only managed about a week before rolling back to XP. Not so much because of Vista (which has many great features which I love), but because of incompatibilities with third party software (Dreamweaver being a good example which crashed randomly). Decided to leave it a while and give developers a chance to catch up (although Vista betas were available, many developers didn't want to spend time working on Vista compatible software until they were sure what the final Vista was going to consist of). Thought it was time to try again about a fortnight ago and everything is MUCH better. Everything apart from a very old webcam works perfectly (gives me an excuse to get a new one!) and I'm finding it much quicker to work with than XP. Equally impressed by the latest Mac OS and Linux releases though I don't think anyone should upgrade to Vista unless: 1) You like new toys to play with 2) You must have "the latest thing" 3) You manage to get a free/cheap upgrade But if any of the above do apply, it's really (in my opinion anyway) not that bad at all Ali PS- the annoying "do you really want to do this?" pop up that is mentioned earlier in this thread can be easily turned off in the control panel if you want it to be.

Yes please Bill! Sent you a PM Cheers, Ali.

Doh! I knew there was a reason why I should make time in the day to visit the family Forums more often

It can pay for several months hosting at TCH, but not even cover 1 months hosting with some other hosts. Although $35 is a lot more than $4 or whatever, it's still a fairly small amount for the one2one time of a skilled IT professional. Surely you don't expect your mechanic to service your car for free this year because you already paid him to do it last year? Just my two cents worth Ali.

Veering slightly off topic, but if you find you want to look up IP addresses on a regular basis (which I think most website owners do) you can download Sam Spade for Windows. http://www.samspade.org/ssw/ It's free, and is a great way of quickly looking up IPs without using the website version that Madmanmcp recommended. It can also be used for traceroutes etc too. Ali

I spend a lot of time answering emails from clients on this very subject. There's so much information about SEO online that it's easy for someone who spends just a couple of hours surfing to think that they've got a good grasp of how search engines work. The problem is that the majority of the information and tools (such as spider simulators) are hopelessly out of date. For anyone still wondering why metatags are suddenly no longer relied upon .... Search engine spiders are constantly evolving - they are much more sophisticated than the ones a few years ago. It used to be that the spiders did look for metatags that would describe what the site was about. Obviously that is very open to abuse - if you have a website that only sells red widgets, then what's to stop you putting "green widgets" in your metatags? People searching for green widgets would end up at your site even though you don't sell them! The search engine market is fiercly competitive. All the big players - Google, MSN, Yahoo, Alltheweb etc want the biggest share of the market, and the only way they are going to get that is by giving visitors accurate and relevant search results. Because of that, spiders have now concentrate on looking at sites the way visitors see them. If you have lots of good content on your site, spiders will have no problem indexing that and passing that onto searchers who are interested in what you have. Most attempts to manipulate search engine results now fail - they may work for a very short time, but the search engines soon pick up on it. Search engines will index sites they way they want to, not the way you want them to. If you keep that in mind, and make sure that your site has a lot of keyword rich content (not in a spammy kind of way) then you won't go far wrong! Same goes for a lot of other advice given on the web. A lot of these spider simulators that you see online which you can use to check your site reckon that they can't index sites with dynamic content - osCommerce sites are a good example of that. We've got clients whos osC sites are getting spidered daily and have literally every word of every page of every product indexed and listed. The fact is that the simulator people aren't going to put as much time and money into developing their spiders as the real search engines do. Of course, all that's just my opinion on it - the real joy/pain of SEO and website marketing is that everyone has their own ideas as to what doe/doesn't work and really there's no right or wrong way of doing things ... Ali.

9.15am, Southern Spain, working outside on my laptop .... perfect Should hit around 85ºF this afternoon. Ali

Hi Sandra, I work every day with osCommerce and I'm sure you'll love it once you get your head around it all. Rob is right - it's not worth paying someone just to install the standard store for you - much better that you accept Robs kind offer of talking you through the set up. The more you understand about how it all works, the easier it will be for you to add extra modules and customize the look of the store. In answer to one of your other questions ... Harald Ponce De Leon is the person who leads the team that develop osCommerce. His name appears on in the store (along with all those products that you see) just as test data. It gives you a chance to see how everything works and play around with things in your admin area. When you are ready to add your own products, you can easily change all of this info in your osCommerce admin area. Hope that helps, Ali.

Have you tried not entering an admin password? Just press return and it should accept that if you didn't set one. HTH Ali.

Sky News in the UK have just reported that Rita has been downgraded to cat 4 ... Ali.

Yeah, I agree that all types of user are just as important. Wouldn't be surprised though if there turns out to be a "classic" interface option as well in the same way as the XP Start menu and Control Panel can both be set to "Classic" (which is the first thing I do after installing Windows). Ali.

I dunno really - I'm not great fan of MS, but I'm resigned to the fact they are here and that their software is an every day part of life for the majority of modern world. Usage of computers has changed so much over the last 5 years or so with "normal" people now having them in their homes whereas previously they wouldn't have known how to even switch one on. I think it's fair to say that on this forum, most of us are either very computer literate or at least more computer literate than average - it's easy to forget that what we know has taken such a long time to learn bit by bit. How many hundred menu options does Word (and other similar programs) have at the moment? How many "normal" users need, use or know how to use any more than a handful of those options? I bet I'm not alone in saying that there have been times when a family member has wanted to do something with their computer and I've cringed at the thought of having to explain it to them ... even though it's often a simple task, it's only a simple task if you know what you are doing. Computers have changed, and so have the people that use them - anything that makes things more "real user" friendly than "geek user" friendly has (reluctantly I agree) got to be a good thing. Skype is a good example - my mother in law is petrified of everything computer related. We live in different countries, so in order to talk to her grandchildren she had to face up to the possibilities of IM. We started off with voice chat on MSN Messenger with hilarious results (not ending calls at her end and us listening to all the conversations in her house for the rest of the evening etc), but then moved on to Skype which she is totally happy with - why? ... because it rings like a real phone and has a dial and hangup button Ali.

Hi Nelson, Don't worry - osCommerce is great to work with. There's plenty of us on the forums that use it on a daily basis, so I'm sure that if you get stuck one of us will be able to help Ali.

Hi Valerie, That doesn't sound like something you've got any control over, so best thing to do is submit a support ticket and I'm sure they'll sort it out for you very quickly Ali

Excellent link - quickly updated from 2.0.15 to 2.0.16 and then 2.0.17 without losing any customisation - thanks Ali

Forgetting the fact that I should really be looking at it from a webmasters point of view, as a user, I like visiting forums that run on vBulletin. Don't know why really, just do! Ali.

You think you've got it bad? In the UK (where I no longer live thankfully!) the average price of gas is 89.7p per litre. 1 US Gallon is 3.79 litres, which makes it £3.40 a gallon. According to xe.com, that's $6.26 a gallon! That's normal everyday pricing. Here in Spain it's slightly better, around 1€ a litre = $4.75 a gallon. It's the governments that get rich in Europe with fuel taxes. Ali.

OK, that's great thanks Don & Mike ... Ali