Creating shipping rules for Magento

Posted on November 19, 2010

Shopping costs are one of those areas that people tend to ignore a little bit when developing an ecommerce store. Now Magento has some brilliant integrations with the major couriers to let the store calculate costs based on destination, but what happens if you don’t use UPS, USPS, FedEx or DHL? You might need to turn to the Weight vs Destination shipping module.

You can simply import a .csv spreadsheet for those countries you do want to ship to. Make sure you use the 3-letter ISO codes to indicate countries otherwise the import will fail. You can also add postcode and county zones to further refine your shipping charges.

Unfortunately, you don’t seem to be able to have a “wildcard” rules for any other countries that you don’t explicitly include in your .csv file, which is rather an oversight. If anyone know differently, I’d love to know how…

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Repairing iMacs with faulty video cards

Posted on November 19, 2010

I’ve just finished repairing an iMac which started to display the dreaded “vertical lines” – a surprisingly common symptom seen on a wide range of Macs that indicates a faulty video card. Typically that means replacing the entire logic board, which is often prohibitively expensive. But in this case the machine was a “white” 24″ iMac, which has the video card on a separate daughterboard, so a swop was possible.

Because the local Mac repair places in Bristol and Bath were quoting very expensive prices for the part, we got it shipped in from the USA, which worked out a lot cheaper. Replacing the old part is fairly involved, as you have to strip out the screen and logic board, but compared to some iMac repairs I’ve done it was fairly painless. Customer happy, I didn’t lose much blood and it is satisfying to get a perfectly good machine back up and running.

If you do have a Mac that starts to display strange patterns on the screen, you might want to try monitoring the temperature of the video card using a tool like Temperature Monitor, and possibly even force the fans to work a little harder with something like smcFanControl.

Mac behaving strangely? Randomly crashing? Why not give it a little Sweet-Apple?

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Importing Magento product data from .csv files

Posted on November 10, 2010

Magento is a fantastic ecommerce tool, packed full of just about every feature you might possible need – but some tasks are just painful. Importing product data into the catalog is one such thing. Typically you do this via .csv files and it’s slow, but relatively painless. However importing data that contains “special” characters, such as é, can become rather agonising if you’re not careful.

Magento stores data internally in UTF-8 encoded form, and it expects any .csv files it uses for import to contain UTF-8 encoded text. Sadly Excel cannot export .csv files in anything but Windows 1252 encoded text. On a number of occasions this has caught me out as I’ve imported the data only to find that certain product attributes get truncated at the point the special character appears.

There a 2 solutions. One is save the data from Excel as an Office .xml spreadsheet. The other is import your .xps file into Google Docs, then export it as a .csv file. Google Docs creates .csv files that are UTF-8 encoded, and hence special characters get pulled into Magento seamlessly.

Need advice on setting up your ecommerce store? Pick up the phone…

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Apple cancels the XServe

Posted on November 7, 2010

Over the years at Sweet-Apple we’ve been responsible for installing, managing and remotely supporting a number of OS X Server installations for clients in and around Bath and Bristol. A good number of those were running on XServe, Apple’s rack-mounted server chassis. Earlier this week Apple announced that from January 2011 they would no longer be selling the XServe. It marks the end of an era of sorts, during which Apple tried half-heartedly to break into the lucrative server market.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the XServe. The G4 and G5 models had any number of stupid hardware omissions. Chief amongst those was the lack of a video card. Have you ever tried using Apple’s Remote Diagnostics on a “headless” XServe? Stupidly and unnecessarily complex. Fine if you’re in a large organisation with dozens of XServe’s racked up, a complete nightmare for small workgroups. The utter stinginess of supplying 3 slots and caddies for hard disks, but failing to provide the hard drive interface was breath-taking. You couldn’t just slot in a hard disk, you were forced to pay way over the odds buying an Apple drive ‘module.’

But the biggest problem for most of my customers was simple. Noise. XServe’s can be dreadfully noisy, and not every office has a server room.

So what machine should you choose for running OS X Server. The Mac mini makes a perfectly decent cheap OS X Server, but for creative workgroups I’d be more inclined to got for the MacPro solution. Not only do the dual ethernet ports allow you to do connection bonding and get fantastic network performance, but the PCI slots let you stick in an E-SATA adapter and get terrifically fast external storage. Plus the 4 internal drive bays can let you make a pretty tasty internal RAID.

If you need assistance installing, configuring or supporting OS X Server, give us a call.

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Disable Java in OS X browsers to avoid Koobface infection

Posted on November 5, 2010

As you may know, there’s been a lot of hot air created recently about the ‘port’ of the Koobface worm so that it can now infect Macs. Whilst it is possible that you might get the malware downloaded onto your machine in a “drive by” attack on Facebook, you’d have to be rather silly to jump through all the hoops to install it.

However, as a large number of OS X and Windows security exploits have been targetting Java recently, it makes sense to bolt the door by disabling the Java plugins in your browser. Instructions on how to do this can be found all over the web, but MacLife has a nice article showing you how.

Unless you’re using some very odd websites, you’ll see absolutely no difference to your browsing experience, but will be that little bit more secure…

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