Archive for the ‘Useful’ Category

Set up Malaysian ISO 3166-2 zones for osCommerce / Zen Cart

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

The standard 'zones' facility of osCommerce has an attribute 'zone_code' which at first glance looks as though it might support a standardised shipping quotation system, but osCommerce comes with a database populated with zone codes that are not at all standard. The kinds of codes that are present in the ...

osCommerce shipping module for spider.my (Pos Malaysia rates) pre-release

Monday, January 17th, 2011

The shipping quote API and shipping modules for osCommerce and Zen Cart is now at Shipping-Quote.net If you've been caught out by Pos Malaysia's recent site updates and now can't quote for international deliveries from your shop, this module is functional at one Malaysian online shop. Pos Malaysia's update has come ...

Expires header fails, max-age works: RFC1123 compliance

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

While I was testing the mobile version of the search at spider.my I noticed that my Nokia phone's browser was briefly presenting an unformatted version of the page, then applying styles, then adding a small image. Doing that once would have been expected, but it shouldn't have been doing it ...

SSH port forwarding from VPS to home server

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Spider.my is served by a very small VPS provided by Nocser. The search function of spider.my is currently served by 2 reasonably-sized Xeon servers near my desk. I can't currently afford to rent the equivalent amount of computing power from a hosting company, so the front-end of spider.my is all ...

Spider.my simple mobile version

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

[caption id="attachment_1038" align="alignright" width="237" caption="Spider.my mobile search on my Nokia 6500 Classic"][/caption] Spider.my really wasn't working very well on any of our mobile phones (handphones as they're called in Malaysia), as the search had been using a terrible cross-domain javascript hack to fetch results from the back-end. A couple of things ...