Usually we don’t want to Google to index these pages because it could be duplicated content which can be bad for our ecommerce shop’s ranking. One option would be to have nofollow links in your template but the easier way is to build a robots.txt file your Magento ecommerce shop. I also included some other important directories we usually don’t want to have indexed by search engines.

Here is my robots.txt example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /404/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/term/popular/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /checkout/cart/
Disallow: /contacts/
Disallow: /contacts/index/
Disallow: /contacts/index/post/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customer/account/
Disallow: /customer/account/login/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /install/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /magento/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /newsletter/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /poll/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /var/
Disallow: /wishlist/
Disallow: /anyothercontentyouwouldliketodisallow/
Sitemap: http://www.your-amazing-magento-ecommerce-shop.com/sitemap.xml

The solution is simple if you know where the default setting is hidden:

1. Go to /app/code/core/Mage/Media/Model/File/Image.php
2. Copy Image.php to /app/code/local/Mage/Media/Model/File/Image.php
3. Go to line 174 in your Image.php and change the following code

Old setting with high compression:

$result = imagejpeg($object->getTmpImage(), $object->getFilePath(true), 80);

New setting with almost no compression:

$result = imagejpeg($object->getTmpImage(), $object->getFilePath(true), 100);

In this case 100 means 100% of the image quality. You could also enter 95 or 90 to get a smaller filesize.

4. Save Image.php and upload it to your server
5. Go to your Magento backend System -> Cache Management and clean your image cache and all Magento cache

Preview TYPO3 4.2 E-Commerce book

• Run your business like a pro and earn good profits in your online shop by harnessing all the features of TYPO 3
• Create an eaffaaective search system for productive navigation of your site
• Incorporate smart payment and delivery modules
• Packed with expert guidance on all aspects of building a lucrative online shop

Sample Chapter
More Information

Preview of Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide

• Extend and customize the Magento e-commerce system using PHP code
• Set up your own data profile to import or export data in Magento
• Build applications that interface with the customer, product, and order data using Magento’s Core API
• Packed with examples for effective Magento Development

Sample Chapter
More Information

The following setting is the solution for everyone who got a HTC Desire not from o2 and wants to use it with o2 data package in Germany. Maybe it works in other countries as well.

Go to Settings > Wireless & networks > Mobile networks > Access Point Names, hit the MENU button and create a new APN.

Name: o2 Internet
APN: internet

Everything else can be empty or default. Save and enjoy mobile internet!

Just from reading the subtitle of the book which is “Over 50 great recipes for effectively managing multimedia content to create an organized website in TYPO3″ I would never have guessed how advanced techniques this book shows. This book is definitely for the experienced TYPO3 user who already built some TYPO websites, has at least basic understanding of TypoScript, knowledge about PHP and basic knowledge about the TYPO3 Core API would also be good.  For some recipes from this book you definitely need more than a shared hosting account because you need to install some special applications.

In my opinion this book has more than kept its promises. You will learn much more than just organizing multimedia content. For example in one chapter you will learn how to work with externals services as Amazon S3 to organize your DAM files, the YouTube API to get videos or flickr to upload images.
The chapter I liked the most is about creating services with TYPO3. You will learn how to extract metadata from OpenOffice documents, how to convert videos to FLV or convert your audio files. Of course you need shell access to install some applications. The book only describes the procedure for Debian systems. If you are not familiar with the Linux shell you might get stuck here and ask Google for further information.
As I’m a big fan of automation I also liked the last chapter about automating processes which also covers geolocation support.

Overall I liked the book and can recommend it to developers who like to have a deeper look into TYPO3 and its possibilities to extend the basic system. I think it will be useful in the future for me to get some inspiration from the recipes or just grab some snippet. For some developers without Linux knowledge or limited access it might be hard to follow some steps.

View the table of contents

View a sample chapter

Here you can buy the book!

I decided to share some of my daily cooking experiences here. This is my first recipe for Pad Makua Yow (my own variant).

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 tbsp fish sauce or soy sauce if you are vegetarian
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 2 fresh chili peppers or powder if you don’t have fresh ones
• 1 clove chopped garlic
• 2-4 large eggplants and a couple smaller ones
• a couple mushrooms if you have
• 1 bunch thai basil, leaves without stems
• green chinese chives

Preparation

Wash all the vegetables and herbs thoroughly. Quarter all of the eggplants and mushrooms, chop the garlic and slice the chili peppers. Pick all leaves of thai basil from the stem and set aside.

Method

Heat 1 tbsp of oil in a wok or pan at medium to high heat. Add garlic and chili peppers. Stir until the garlic gets golden brown. Add the eggplant and mushroom to fry it very quick. Add a cup of water and cook for 5-8 minutes until the vegetables are done. Inbetween add sugar and fish sauce. At this point almost all of the water should be gone. Now add the thai basil and green chinese chives. Stir well for 1 minute until everything blends together.

Turn off heat and transfer to a plate. Serve with rice or noodle.

Enjoy!

This is my first Wordpress plugin. It displays a weather widget using the unofficial Google weather API.

Features

• show today’s weather
• show weather forecast for next 3 days
• specifiy output language
• choose between Celsius or Fahrenheit
• comes with predefined CSS style
• valid XHTML output

Example

You can see a working example down right in my sidebar.

Requirements

You need at least Wordpress version 2.8 or higher and a theme which allows widgets.

Download

For more information have a look at the plugin page or directly go to plugin page at wordpress.org.

You can avoid this cache-pollution by specifying a range of valid values for your linkVars configuration. You can append the values in round brackets to your L-params. It’s also possible to use regular expressions here.

Example:

config {
linkVars = L(1-5), print(1)
}

Otherwise it can happen that TYPO3 puts malformed URLs in your cache and your clients will get mad.
You can find more examples in TSref at typo3.org.

A couple days ago I had my first experience with Apache Ant. If you have never heard of it before you should definitely check it out. Apache Ant is a very simple JAVA-based build tool with xml-based configuration files for automation.

I wanted to automate the process of importing/exporting specific MySQL database tables.In the next step I wanted to update and commit the data to SVN. After a quick research I found the JAVA lib svntask which is based on SVNKit very useful.

The only disadvantage in my opinion is that there is almost no documentation yet. To help other developers to get off on the right foot and save some time I’ll give some examples in the following section.

SVN update example:

<!-- SVN update -->
<target name="svn-update">
	<svn>
		<update
			path="/workspace/path"
			force="false" recursive="false"
		/>
	</svn>
</target>

Optional arguments you can use are recursive(default: true) and force(default: true).

SVN add example:

<!-- SVN add -->
<target name="svn-add">
	<svn>
		<add
			path="/workspace/project"
			force="false"
		/>
	</svn>
</target>

Optional boolean arguments are force, mkdir, climbUnversionedParents, includeIgnored and makeParents(default for all except mkrdir is true).

SVN commit example:

With version 1.0.7 authentication failed for me. So I added the username/password authentication to the commit class. You can get the temporary version here until the next update of svntask.

<!-- SVN Commit -->
<target name="svn-commit">
	<!-- don't store password in property files, use input  -->
	<input
		message="Enter SVN password:"
		addproperty="svn.password"
	 />
	<svn>
		<commit
			path="/workspace/project/trunk"
			commitMessage="Test commit"
			force="true"
			username="user" password="${svn.password}"
		/>
	</svn>
</target>

Optional boolean arguments are keepLocks and force.

SVN ls update example:

<!-- SVN ls -->
<target name="svn-ls">
	<svn>
		<ls
			repository="http://domain.tld"
			path="/svn/repos/project/trunk"
		/>
	</svn>
</target>

Optional argument is delimeter(default: , ).

SVN info example:

<!-- SVN info -->
<target name="svn-info">
	<svn>
		<info
			path="/workspace/project/trunk"
			committedRevisionProperty="revisionVersion"
			authorProperty="revisionAuthor"
			committedDateProperty="revisionDate"
		/>
	</svn>
	<!-- show revision, author and date -->
	<property
		name="version"
		value="At revision ${revisionVersion} by ${revisionAuthor} on ${revisionDate}"
	/>
	<echo message="${version}"/>
</target>

I didn’t use log, status and switch so far. I will post examples if I will use it in the future.

Some useful links:
svntask: http://code.google.com/p/svntask/
Apache Ant project: http://ant.apache.org/