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Developing with Bigcommerce: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

By on Mar 18, 2014 in Blog Posts, Internet | 0 comments

Note: This article was originally posted to the new defunct Ecommerce-platforms.com back in May 2013. It got a lot of attention and Bigcommerce reached out to review some of the issues I presented. I’ve added an update to the bottom of the article as well.Six years of experience in ecommerce has taught me one thing: no platform is perfect. They all have pros and cons and often what separates the best from the competition is a handful of features and customer service. I’ve come to accept that I’ll never find the perfect solution without building it myself and let’s face it, ain’t nobody got time for that.I recently had a project come up and spent a lot of time testing different platforms to find one that could handle digital products the best. For various reasons I settled on Bigcommerce and began building out the store. I knew from reading the Ultimate Bigcommerce review that I...

NextScript’s Social Network Auto Poster: A Flawed Tool With Miserable Support

By on Jan 14, 2014 in Blog Posts, Internet | 0 comments

SNAP: Sorry, No Auto Posting So let’s say you have a WordPress site with content that you’d like to automatically post to all of your social networks. There are plenty of plugins that will auto post to one or another of the networks, but few that will post to several at once. So far I’ve only found one that posts to Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Google+ and that is NextScript’s Social Network Auto Poster (SNAP) Pro. The free version doesn’t include Google+ or a few other important features, which I’ll get to later. Right off the top: SNAP is not a “snap” to setup. It takes quite a bit of effort to connect all of your social media accounts and some testing to get them posting just as you’d like, but after a few hours of hard work you should be able to get your newly created content to auto-post as desired. I didn’t have...

eBay Permanently Suspends My Account, Won’t Discuss It

By on Dec 4, 2013 in Blog Posts, Internet | 3 comments

When I created my account with eBay back in the halcyon days of 2004 I had no idea that almost a decade later the company would shut it down and refuse to discuss it. My “membership” started out as many do, with a casual interest in the site and learning how the online auction system worked. I won my first auction in 2005 and since then I’ve used the site to purchase and sell a dozen or more items, accumulating a flawless record of ratings for items sold to other members. I would consider myself a lightweight in the eBay world, but I’d be willing to bet there are a lot more people like me in their database than not. In June I received an Email from eBay notifying me that my account had been suspended. It was titled “MC999 Your eBay account has been suspended”, which I have since learned is a death notice. I didn’t even see the Email at the...

My Name is Scott Carter and I Suffer From Resting Bitch Face Syndrome

By on Sep 9, 2013 in Blog Posts | 0 comments

For years I’ve wondered why people steer clear of me in public. I had eliminated the obvious possibilities such as body odor and dress with assurances from my friends, who I do have, that my fragrance is agreeable and fashion acceptable. One day while sitting in a coffee shop working I noticed a certain strain on my face. After a few hours of being in public, my eyebrows and cheeks were aching. It dawned on me that I wear a near constant scowl in public.This is my face as I am typing this post. I’m not doing it on purpose and can’t make it stop.I posted about this on Facebook and was quickly informed that I suffer from resting bitch face syndrome. From Urban Dictionary:resting bitch facea person, usually a girl, who naturally looks mean when her face is expressionless, without meaning to.I’m 31 years old and this is the first I’m learning of this. My face...

How To Renew Your Expired Driver’s License in Virginia

By on May 22, 2013 in Blog Posts | 0 comments

Over a year ago my driver’s license expired and I was too lazy to get it renewed. Because I’m a hermit I rarely use the thing, I didn’t put renewing it high on my to-do list. Then I got pulled over by the coppers because I didn’t have a front license plate (someone hit my car and it broke off, then I was too lazy to fix it) and they ticketed me for that and my expired license and took it away.Then my little journey began. Now that I didn’t have a license, I could no longer (legally) drive. My lovely girlfriend was kind enough to ferry me around for the next two weeks until I was able to get my license. Before going to the DMV we did some research and found out what I needed in order to renew my license. Come to find out that because my license had been expired for over a year I would need to start from scratch, including taking the road signs, knowledge...