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Why you need to understand PABP and Visa Compliance Rules and Regulations You'll be hearing more and more about PABP and VISA compliance. It's not something you can afford to ignore any more. Visa developed the Payment Application Best Practices (PABP) to help vendors create secure payment applications that help merchants limit compromises, prevent the bad practices of storing sensitive cardholder data and support compliance with the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Wow, that's a mouth full. What PABP basically means, is Visa wants to decrease fraud while increasing customer and vendor security. If you are a new website and seeking a vendor to process your orders. Full story

SEO Review of ASPDotNetStorefront online store While many shopping carts and online stores have made great leaps in making their carts search engine friendly, they all seem to have room for improvement. Many shopping carts require fairly substantial modification to optimize the product, category and topic pages for the shopping cart. Some shopping carts are much better than others and ASPdotNetStorefront is one of them. Full story

Have you ever been driving and started to wonder what the wave buoys are doing? Interested in wave height and conditions offshore? Wonder what directions the winds are at your local break? If you're a surfer or an avid offshore fisherman, chances are you have. I do too and that's why I made a few new web pages, specifically with mobile devices in mind. I ... Full story

One click to access your yahoo email Do you ever get tired of having to enter your login and password every time you want to check your yahoo mail? Well, there's a really easy way to access your email quickly and it only take a little time to set up. Each browser is different, but this method will work for all browsers and most web enabled cell ... Full story

Fast, easy and very low bandwidth. If you need or ever thought you needed buoy weather on your cellphone, you need to check this out. I was envolved in the project and I think we made soething very useful for surfers, offshore fisherman and anyone who has an interest in ocean weather. Buoy Weather Conditions and Forecasts on Your Cell Phone Full story

In this series, I will try and broach some of the pros and cons of various shopping cart and various ecommerce solutions. Part 2: ASPDotNetStoreFront. If you're looking for the ZenCart guide, check here. ASPDotNetStorefront is a lot to type out, so hereafter, I will refer to it as ASPDNSF, which is easier to type. ASPDNSF is another great shopping cart. This cart is used by some big names and it's used by them for a reason - the cart is great. Out of the box, this cart excels. It has the basics you would expect from an online shopping cart: payment gateways, shipping gateways and so much more. Image handling with ASPDNSF is really good and by far, the best out-of-the-box image management I've used. But all these features come at a price, which is currently $1295 for the 'good' version. If you want the source, which you will, add an additional $995. Want updates, that will cost another $299. Total price for the store, the source and 1 year of updates: $2,589.00 - yep. Wait, don't make up your mind just yet, even though that seems like a lot of money, it's not a bad deal when you consider what you're getting. Full story

When you're ready for an online shopping cart, there are a lot of questions you need to ask yourself. What cart will work best for my situation? What about Visa's PABP and PCI compliance? Credit card gateways, PHP, ASP, custom carts or out of the box; which one do I need? Should you host your shopping cart or do you want to have your cart hosted? Perpetual license or a one time fee? And that's just the beginning. In this series, I will try and broach some of the pros and cons of various shopping cart and various ecommerce solutions. We will begin with ZenCart. Zen Cart is a really nice online shopping cart. Out of the box, it works. It's basic, but it does work. There's a beauty to its simplicity, thus Zen. Out of the box, you get basic image handling, easy to use and create templates and built in credit card processing gateways. You also have the ability to add a lot of features that would cost thousands extra for most pay shopping carts, but with Zen Cart, most every extension and contribution that add functionality to your cart are free. $0 is a very attractive price for a piece of such powerful software, but there's a cost. ZenCart management is not for the faint of heart. ZenCart requires a fairly high level of knowledge to really have a good shopping cart. Full story

After a lot of work,  another site is up and running. Built on ASP.net this site can do it all. Since this was my first forray into non open source software, I was a bit worried, but the features were nothing short of amazing. After much struggle with my open source mindset, I dove into uncharted waters. Full story

Here's a quick little script for predicting tides. Be sure and change the high tide time on line 2. You may have to play around with the numbers a little to get it working on your site. Please, don't ever use this script for navigational purposes. Seriously, this is a rough estimate and not for marine navigation purposes. Tides depend on many factors, sun, moon, wind and some other things I don't understand. But I do understand tides differ by a set amount of time in most places - usually. I developed this code to work for Folly Beach, but it will work in locations with a 12:50 time difference between high tides. As a general rule, this works fairly well, but you will still need to update the tides occasionally or during time changes. Full story

So, you've finally got an online site for your brick and mortar store - that's great. You've entered all of your products, uploaded images, provided detailed descriptions. but why isn't anyone buying from your site? Here's a list of some of the most common reasons your site is failing to meet your expectations. Unreasonable Expectations: If you think you're going to make a site and sit by as the customers roll in, Full story