I was getting 500 errors after an installation. After surfing some forums I learned that the permissions should be the following (magento/ being your root Magento folder).  For some reason, they weren’t necessarily correct by default:
777

magento/var/.htaccess
magento/app/etc
magento/var
all the directories under magento/media

755

magento/
magento/install.php
magento/index.php

644

all other files

Hope this helps anyone who [...]

[Read more →]

Randy Pausch died today.  He became famous over the past year after delivering his inspirational last lecture about “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” at Carnegie Mellon shortly after learning that he had pancreatic cancer and only months to live.  My thoughts are with his family and friends.
Donations can be made to the Pancreatic Cancer Action [...]

[Read more →]

If you have happen to have a list of ASINs and you want the product images from Amazon, it’s a lot easier than I expected to grab them. Their consistent naming structure makes it easy to put together a list of URLs to their Amazon’s product images of different sizes.
All images are available [...]

[Read more →]

I recently wrote an article for Website Magazine that will be published in the August issue.  The article covers deal negotiation with Internet ad networks and affiliate programs, maximizing your site’s earning potential, and how to conduct the legwork to put you in good positioning for a higher revenue share from your ad provider.
The article [...]

[Read more →]