I enjoy a simple web game called “Canvas Rider“.  I’ve always wanted to make a cool track for the game, but the editor for the track is not very friendly.  Even making simple shapes takes a lot of work.  So I decided to try to write a converter that would convert files generated in InkScape to work with Canvas Rider.  While doing this I needed a better way to search through parsed xml in php and came across QueryPath (a jQuery like tool for php).

Once I became familiar with QueryPath (which I was highly motivated to do because of the personal interest I had in the project I was working on) I’ve since used it in numerous other projects.  From doing some Screen Scraping to read linked contacts, to auto-generating an sdk for “Wrike” from their documentation.  And now, again scraping a wholesalers site to send real-time inventory notifications to a reseller.

At Novak Solutions, every Friday after 1pm self-directed time starts.  The only expectation is that you eventually report what you did and learned.

Another company “TrackAbout” has a nice blog post about the benefits they’ve seen from implementing 5% self-directed time.  Dan Pink gave a very cool Ted Talk about motivating employees and how autonomy and mastery are 2 of the 3 factors that impact employee motivation.  Self-directed time breeds these two factories.

So, give it a try.  Give your employees some structured self-directed time for a little while and see what benefits you get from it.

But…  To get a bitnami image running on a vmware image to be useable you need to install vmware tools…    First thing you need to do is download the bitnami vmware image you want, as well as either VMware Player, of VMware Workstaion.

Once you have the vm running, you go to the player menu, and select manage, and then “Install VMware Tools”.

Next, you need to mount it…  run the following:

sudo mkdir /media/cdrom

sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

Now copy the tgz file in the cdrom path to your user directory, and untar it

tar -zxvf filename

Now, we need to install the kernel header files so that vmware tools can be compiled (the bitnami vm image doesn’t come with them included. First we need to update the apt-get indexes… So do this:

sudo apt-get update

That will take a minute or so….

Now we need to find the exact version of your kernel so that we can get the right headers, type

uname -a

Your version is what comes after linux. i.e.  on my image it is:

Linux linux 3.2.0-31-virtual #50-Ubuntu SMP Fri Sep 7 16:36:36 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GUN/Linux

The underlined part is the kernel version.  To install the right kernel headers type:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-VERSION

Now, you can run the vmware tools installer...

cd ~ && sudo whatever_directory/vmware-installer.pl

That should do it.  Now, I do one extra step.  As much as I dislike Linux GUI’s, it’s nice to have a browser on the dev server, the reason being we use *.nlocal.info for all our local development sites, then we setup apache mod_vhost_alias on our dev machines, this allows us to setup a new dev site on our local boxes without modifying the hosts file at all…  All .nlocal.info addresses will resolve to 127.0.0.1

So I need the test browser to be running on the same box as the server.  Yes, there are lots of ways to get it to work without a browser, but if we use a browser it means we only have one server config to manage, and it should always “Just work” which is what we like

To install a lightweight x environment just do:

sudo apt-get install xorg

sudo apt-get install openbox

(If you do this, you’ll need to run the vmware tools config script so that it will enable all the X goodies)

Now we’re ready to do some work!!!

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(function(){
 jQuery('#middleName').parent().parent().hide();
 jQuery('#addressLine2').parent().parent().hide();
});
</script>

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG0S8_v5UvE

Below is a picture that shows the field name of each text field in the shopping cart.

Go to Setup->Misc Settings->Order Settings->Triggers From the drop down select “When an autocharge attempt is made”.

Select 3rd and successive failure in the screen that comes up, and select all subscriptions on the right side.

Add an action that deactivates all subscriptions.

Now, if a customer’s card fails three times in a row it will deactivate all their subscriptions. If you want it to only deactivate the subscription that the charge failed for, you will need to create a separate trigger for each subscription.

Have fun!

Joey

It’s easy… First, make sure you have a test merchant account. Follow these instructions to create one: http://developers.infusionsoft.com/forum/topic.php?id=75

Next, open the order form you want to test, and at the bottom you will see a “Clone” button. Click this button. It will prompt you for a prefix for the order form and type “TEST ” (no quotes). This will help you differentiate the test order form from the real one.

Now, edit the test order form and set the merchant account to your test merchant account.

Open the order form, fill it out, and for credit card information select visa and put in 4111111111111111 (4 with 15 1′s after it, this is a generic test Visa card number, works with almost all merchant accounts in test mode). Put in any date in the future for expiration date, and put in anything you want for the cv2 code.

That’s it!

Pretty simple huh?

So, I wrote a javascript library that you can put in the header of your Infusionsoft Hosted Order Form that allows you to paste your own html for the order form with special placeholders for the fields, and another special tag for the error list, and it lets you make your order form look any way you want.

One of the things you’ll need for this to work properly is this bookmarklet. The Infusionsoft Source code editor on the Order Form Header and Footer editor is very slow when your html get’s HUGE. This bookmarklet will convert the “Big Tiny” editor into a text box so that you can edit your code easily without waiting minutes for the code editor to highlight your code.

Just drag this link to your toolbar: Order Form Header and Footer Code Editor To Textbox

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