Still Working on the online store placing modules I want in place modifying features and taking care of things like getting shipping accounts.
I still have a nice little TODO list like
– Waiting for my two new phone lines to be put in that I ordered already fax and voice strictly for business like I had before. They will not be able to put them in until the end of the month, more time to play with the software for me I guess.
– Taking pictures of items I will be selling
– Getting some packaging that is inexpensive yet affective for some merchandise I already have
– Establishing and becoming familiar with some drop shipment methods of some places I will be dealing with
– Establishing categories and sub-categories on page
– Determining what mechanisms I want to track finances and how I want them extracted from MySQL database.
– Placing my SSL certificate in place that I now have for secure shipping
– Determining what type of merchant account I want.
– Integrating shipping modules (feature) I mentioned before.
This has been a fun learning experience and like anything else the more I edit, modify and add features to the shopping cart software I will be using which is called “OsCommerce” (open source of course) the more familiar I am with what files control which functions and where they are located.
I will soon be removing the Forsake blog or maybe keep that just for garage sale type items or just bring it back later for that if needed but I don’t think I will need that.
Anyway back to the editing.

I have just finished upgrading my backbone networking infrastructure to 1 GB on both of my networks that I use here at home. This means that I can copy critical data between my various internal systems and speed up my backups over the LAN.
This will help when I upgrade a hard drive on one system for instance and I don’t have the physical space to throw another drive on my SCSI bus whether it’s because of not enough connectors on my cable or space in the case or heat concerns. Now that I have the 1 GB backbone just copying data over the network will be 10 times faster!
I have even noticed a little speed increase over the WAN! This was unexpected.
I really like Linksys so it was hard to move off of a vendor that seems to really have quality products. This was especially difficult since my first experiences with D-Link were not positive at all.
Previously with D-Link I had an issue with seeing my website locally without having to type in my local ip.address or my WAN ip.address:80 (pointing to port 80). Called them up and saw others have the issue on forums and they said it was my issue even though the same config worked with no issues on Linksys. I did not hesitate to take the router back after updating the firmware and every combination I could to get it to work. Actually I still have a Linksys 1 Gb switch.
This time that issue didn’t rear its head. I will tell you this though, if not for the fact that they had the 1GB ports LAN ports I wouldn’t have looked at the router. Also the fact that Linksys or other vendors didn’t have this on their road map without getting into a different class of router costing 4 or 5 times more is another reason I bought this. This router was also on sale and with the in store rebate and the mail in rebate it cut the price in half as well.
Time will tell how this works out but so far so good and really fast!

This ones for your health!

Ok testing the smilles plugin feature with Movabletype.
Seems to be working just fine
Nice quick and easy plugin to install took all of a few minutes.

I’m still working on the online store just had to take time to perform life’s other tasks. I still have a few steps to go before making it visible and accessible to people online. Initially the online store I have will be to get rid of items I currently have from various upgrades of systems equipment and purchased items I want don’t have room for in the home.
The next steps will be testing and putting in place an SSL security certificate and then purchasing one. Then making those pages secure. Not that’s its currently needed since initially I intend to use Paypal to handle my transactions at their secure site I just want that flexibility for when I expand in the future.
I also have to take pictures of all of the items I have and then redo them in some photo software to optimize them for the web I will also be working on the look and style of the site.
I am going to make sure that I can easily transfer from my database to other forms like Gnucash (Linux) a financial program, Excel and maybe even Access. I then want this information to be easily pulled automatically or manually into one of my other systems to help with my ease of book and record keeping.
I also can create an inventory list on this system or another program and have it uploaded to my online store.
Those are my most obvious TODO lists for my online store it’s already looking nice and is very functional but I want to make sure I’m as familiar as possible with all aspects of it before I go online.
I just want to make this as automated as possible right now. I know that when business starts happening you don’t want to have to then start building your business infrastructure the basic pieces should already be in place. There will be changes to the infrastructure and improvements but because the common pieces are in place and I hope to be very familiar with them expansion should be very modular and not overly difficult.

I run two LAN’s at home for the two static ip.addresses. I use and I put D-Link’s new Gaming Router on one LAN to cut down on my switches/hubs I’m using on my LAN’s and improve my overall LAN speeds.
Most systems I have are multi-homed with dual NIC’s. I have the two most recent systems with two 1 GB NIC’s this will speed up my LAN transfers when backing up or moving data across my LAN, especially my mp3’s for redundant copies.
The reason this should help is the new router has 4 1gb LAN ports that coupled with my Linksys 5 port gigabit switch will up the transfer speeds on at least one leg of my systems.
My web server is also on this LAN with only one NIC.
I will upgrade the other LAN to 1 GB when I acquire some more 1 GB NIC’s. The next router I get I would really like a nice Cisco 8 port router but I will see where my expenses are when that time comes
Oh yes I also briefly took down the site to place a new keyboard and mouse on that system. No big deal right? Well it is when you are late at night configuring files and code in files and your keyboard is spitting out multiple characters all of the time. I’m not a great typist anyway and that was an extra burden late at night when I’m working on something.
All looks cool for now!

Oscommerce shopping cart software is now installed on my web server and so far everything looks like its working fine. I still need to get familiar with the software and setup merchant links so will not be publishing the URL for the site just yet.
I also need to setup some other business tools like another phone line exclusively for business along with a dedicated fax line.
I need to renew business & resale licenses and setup accounting software to pull data out of the database etc…re-organize filing cabinets etc…

Hi, all I’m by no means an MT expert I have been running my blog pretty vanilla for a few years on my personal Linux server at home to give me another project to hone my IT skills that I don’t use on my normal IT job. I’m posting to try and give back to the very nice Movabletype community.
I recently migrated my MT 3.2 from one system to another. I had StyleCatcher set up on my original system but never had it working all the way. Setting up my new system in parallel allowed me the time to play with things and acquire some additional familiarity with the Movabletype software. I now have StyleCatcher working on my new system beautifully the way it’s intended to work. I select a style hit apply go to my blog site and it has been properly applied! I was so excited I lost it and went looking for Style libraries on the web for a while instead of finishing my sites!
Previous Issue:
The issue I had with StyleCatcher on my previous system was that it would grab the Style I wanted and then say it was successfully applied and then when I went to look at my blog page it was blank! T o find out what was happening I had to go and look at what files were being changed and time stamped after applying the StyleCatcher settings.
I would then find that it had copied the accompanying “.css” file in my static files directory $WEBROOT/mtstatic/. I would then edit styles-site.css in my blogs root, $WEBROOT/, directory to point to the new theme in my “mtstatic” directory. It was a real pain figuring this out since I was not really familiar with css files or a web site developer!
Resolution:
I’m leaving my paths in “/var/www/html”= my web root =$WEBROOT
“/var/www/html/snake-ice-radio-blog/” = My Blogs root home
I have several blogs and have recently discovered there are global settings for all of the plugins if you go to System Overview you can see the plugins also have global settings. StyleCatcher was using these global settings I was unaware existed!
(How to get to global StyleCatcher settings)
Main Menu -> System Overview -> Plugins -> Show Settings
The global settings look like this:
************************************************************************
StyleCatcher Settings
Top of Form
You must define a global theme repository where themes can be stored locally. If a particular blog has not been configured for its own theme paths, it will use these settings. If a blog has it’s own theme paths, then the theme will be copied to that location when applied to that weblog. The paths defined here must physically exist and be writable by the webserver.
Theme Root URL: /mt-static/
Theme Root Path:/var/www/html/movabletype/mt-static/themes
This is most likely where your files are ending up and these settings override anything if you don’t make the following setting changes for your individual Blogs here:
Main Menu -> “Blog-name” -> Settings -> Plugins -> StyleCatcher -> Show Settings ->
(my StyleCatcher blog settings)
************************************************************************
Theme Root URL: http://www.dhoytt.com/snake-ice-radio-blog/themes/
Theme Root Path: /var/www/html/snake-ice-radio-blog/themes
************************************************************************
The other thing that has to be done is create the themes path if it doesn’t exist and then change the permissions to be writable for your webserver.
mkdir /var/www/html/snake-ice-radio-blog/themes
chmod 777 /var/www/html/snake-ice-radio-blog/themes
or
chown apache:apache /var/www/html/snake-ice-radio-blog/themes
By the way my mt-config.cgi static setting is:
StaticWebPath /mtstatic/
*Note May wish to chmod 755 for security after getting everything set up.

I have been messing around on and off for the past week with Gallery2 and finally decided to make it visible on my site.
I really like the search capabilities it provides using the MySQL on my Linux Fedora 4 system.
What really has me sprung though are the “slide show capabilities”
There is so much more to this software and for that matter the Photo Gallery software I’m not sure which one I will stick with so I will have both up on the site for a while.
Photo Gallery integrates seamlessly into my Movableype blog system (that uses MySQL) I currently have and that is very nice! The developer also say this is really a package just starting off and is in its infancy, that’s incredible I can’t wait too see the product as it matures!
Gallery has so many tools I have just scratched the surface and is a bit more mature.
Both packages provide me with something new to learn and have been fun implementing as I learn more about each product I will be making changes along with the rest of the site
I will most likely drop and remove my “Photo Blog” altogether since discovering these other photo software packages I’m integrating into my system. There’s more gallery software I can use on my system but for now I think I will stick with these two.
There is a bit of a learning curve on each one and I don’t want to learn another photo gallery software now with other things like shopping cart software still needing to be implemented. Besides these two pieces of software seem pretty hard to beat in my opinion, I have even looked at some major photo hosting sites and the look is very familiar and I bet they have Gallery2 as the software engine. Soon they may have Photo Gallery as it matures.
You can access the two photo gallery software’s by using the links on the side and see how each one is different but remember I just started using them so they are not totally set up just yet.

This all starting to get a bit exciting the more I work on things and research ideas the more future projects come to mind. I am constantly bookmarking sites so I can get back to them later.
I of course make sure I bookmark using Firefox so that all I have to do is go under bookmarks and “manage bokkmarks” and search for the key words in bookmark manager because there is no way I would remember all of these sites or want to sit down and waste valuable time organizing them
I’m researching one item whether it’s a plugin to Movabletype or a rpm or library needed on my Linux Fedora 4 or something else I come across another association with that item I would love to try out at a later date!
Sometimes I get a little off track from my issue that I’m pursuing but it also helps me want to hurry up this aspect and continue moving to the next step on this site development.
Even mistakes have led me to some really nice discoveries. A simple typo in a browser while I was sneezing brought me to the fantastic application Gallery2 (http://gallery.menalto.com/ ). I now have that application up and running and publishing a on the web (http://www.dhoytt.com/gallery2/ )just not linking to it yet from my other site pages. I am still getting familiar with all of the nice features Gallery2 gives you. It’s really nice so far but investigating which Photo software I want displaying photos on my site.
I like the album features of both PhotoGallery and Gallery2 but I really wanted the slide show capability that Gallery2 provides. Gallery2 has a plugin for Movabletype as well but PhotoGallery seems to totally integrate with the Movabletype blog. I guess it depends on what features are important to you and how you want to control and display your photos. I’m still getting familiar with both and may have them both up side by side while I play and see how they interact locally and remotely plus see which ones gives the whistles and bells I need or want.
I was also talking about a couple of weeks ago to some co-workers saying I didn’t want to place the shopping cart software on my server. Well I have changed my mind! While doing research on other issues I have found various Shopping Cart software’s that can run nicely on my Linux server and integrate with MySQL or other databases just fine! The software then takes the user to a banking website like PayPal where they complete the financial portion of the transaction totally off my server protecting the purchaser and myself.
Stay tuned I’m doing a lot of work, research and learning behind the scenes and will be alternately tackling and changing portions of the site.