vengavenga

I narrowed my search for a new host down to 3. If I'd gone purely by the "look" of the site, it would have been between TCH and one other, and I think I may well have gone for the other. It's what's inside that counts though ... Server status info Detailed FAQ Detailed technical info Large support section Access to forums in other words information. TCH have probably 10 times more info on the site than any other host I looked at. Once I realised that, there was no longer a choice to be made. In my humble opinion, there's nothing "wrong" with the site at the moment, but a little bit more "gloss" wouldn't do any harm - especially if it makes all the info in the site even easier to get to, by improving the navigation system. One small point that was actually the final clincher for me - I wanted to pay by Paypal for my reseller account. It wasn't essential, but useful as there's normally some money floating around in my account. The other host made it clear that they accept Paypal - I couldn't find any reference to it on the TCH site (I probably just missed it) - I used Live Support to check. Perhaps others who can only pay by Paypal have just assumed it's a "no" and have gone elsewhere. Just my tuppenceworth ... Ali www.vengavenga.com world wide web weavers

pin

I've just taken a look at the site to see how their gateway integrates with cart systems and can't really find any information. I thought it might be possible just to modify an exisiting osC payment module to suit, but the info on their site is very vague. Might be worthwhile sending them a quick email explaining that you need more specific technical details about the payment gateway(s) that they use. If they don't provide a helpful response then they're probably not worth dealing with anyway ... Ali www.vengavenga.com

toucan

My 256 ADSL connection has been upgraded to a 2mbit one this morning. When I connect, it shows the connection speed as 2mbit, however speed tests/downloads etc all indicate a "real" downstream of around 26Kb/s. Upstream is higher. I'm not sure how good the extension phone wiring is in this house, it might well need improving, however - before I start moving stuff about, does anyone know: 1) Is wiring a likely cause? I'm assuming they must have carried out a line test before upgrading. 2) Does the fact that it shows the connect speed as 2mbit suggest that wiring is probably OK and that it's an ISP/Contention issue? The reason I ask this is that when I recently moved computers, I found that my (old) connection was connecting at 192 when it had always been 256 before ... it turned out that the lead I'd plugged into the modem from the phone extension socket was the one that had previously been connected to the phone. Swapping them round solved this, so I assumed that one of the leads was of an inferior quality. On that basis, if the extension is no good, I'd be getting a lower indicated connection speed. Any ideas? Thanks, Ali www.vengavenga.com

vocabulary

Not familiar with the package you're using, but is there a configure.php (or similar) file that tells it which database to use? Alternatively, PHPMyAdmin will allow you to create a "dump" of the data you want to keep and then import it to your new set of tables - just make sure you've some backups first woooot Hope that helps, Ali www.vengavenga.com world wide web weavers

There are a few osC forum systems in the osC contributions download section of the osC site (oscommerce.com). I've not looked for a while, so I'm not sure how well they've developed - last time I needed one was around August last year - all I needed really was a guestbook type system for a client, so I took one of the forum contributions that worked (several of them didn't) and hacked it to bits. There's always been a lot of talk about phpbb integration with osC (so that users could login to both with the same password, and not have to login to one if they were already logged into the other) - again, I've not looked for a while but I think it was getting close to working. Again, you'll find contributions for this in the download section. Content wise, it depends what type of content you need - there are loads of "latest news" type contributions that will let you add news and articles to the left, right or center column. Take a look at one of the sites I designed (www.dappernippers.com) - it's got the latest news and the "guestbook" that I mentioned (was originally a full-blown forum) in the "dappernatter" section. Hope that helps, Ali. www.vengavenga.com

Yes, indeed osCommerce is incredibly customisable. As Rob suggests, you can start off which the basics like changing the logo, background colour etc and then move on to more advanced things as and when you need them. It can all be a bit overwhelming to begin with, the best thing to do is forget trying to "learn" osCommerce as a whole, and instead concentrate on tasks one at a time ... trawl through the forums, play around until it works and then worry about your next task. 90% of the sites I design for my clients are osCommerce based and I really can't imagine there being anything better Good Luck, and if you get stuck on anything in particular, let me know and I'll try and point you in the right direction if I can .... Ali www.vengavenga.com

secret

should have added the url just in case .... www.opera.com Ali.

Not sure if this is close enough to what you're looking for and I haven't tested it, but Opera has good unicode character support, including Japanese, and although it's not strictly a "text-only" browser, it does have a range of flexible "viewing options" - all images, no images, only cached images etc - think it emulates wap as well, so it might be of some help. Ali

Great list ... don't forget www.istockphoto.com "the web designers dirty little secret" as they describe themselves. I use it loads ... a massive collection of user submitted stock photos, flash etc with flexible licensing and very cheap (50c per download). Would be lost without it! Ali

judge

Thanks for your quick reply ... Actually - problem solved, in fact there was no problem. Because I hadn't changed the nameservers from Neureal, I'd assumed that the test store (hosted on TotalChoice) would send emails to the store owners email address (which it did) and that it would get to that mailbox via dns information. It disn't - it went to my (as yet un-setup) mailbox at TotalChoice - and I found it there in the catch all folder. Don't think any of that makes sense reading it back ... but I know what I mean .. and it works Now just need to convince all my clients that moving their sites and getting them to change email settings etc is really a fantastic idea Thanks again, Ali Rock Sign

For the last 6 months or so, I've had several osCommerce sites running perfectly with another host. A few days ago, the sites all stopped sending out mail (the "Contact" form and automatic order confirmations). Contacted support of the host thinking it was a simple sendmail problem - but 96 hours later were still "looking into the problem" (but appeared to have done nothing). Signed up here today with the aim of moving all the sites over (before my clients get too annoyed) and uploaded my test store. The same thing happens - no error messages, the user gets a "mail successfully sent" message and then nothing. No mail arrives. Now, I haven't changed the dns nameservers yet - I'm using the alias that you get given in the welcome mail, so that could be something to do with it, but I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced the same problem, or knows of a reason why the nameservers not having propagated yet would cause this. Absolutely nothing has been changed on the stores (the "oldest" one has been working for 6 months without any modification). The osCommerce forums suggest adding the -f switch to the sendmail path in php.ini (obviously a job for TotalChoice not me), but even that seems a bit drastic. Any ideas greatly appreciated! Thanks, Ali