CIA Problems and eCommerce Syrup
Late last night I got an email from Joel about problems he was having running CIA on the ISP's servers. So I called him this morning and tried to track down the problem. Well... there are a bunch of problems with this ISP. First, my account on the server is not put in the PostgreSQL database - and it needs to be so I can test the code. Also, I cannot see the contents of the /www/cell/webapp/ROOT/ directory where all the PHP files and the links to cia are maintained. Also, Joel cannot execute cia which is puzzeling because I've properly set up the permissions on the executables and even run them myself. But since I don't have access to the database, I can't test what Joel, or the web server, are trying to do. And since Joel can't execute the code he can't tell me what's wrong either.
So... the ISP needs to put me in the database as a user and also figure out why I can't see the /www/cell/webapp/ROOT/ directory. When those are cleared up I should be able to run the code and see what problems might be there. Then we can go about figuring out why Joel can't run the code. Lots to do, and it doesn't help that there seems to be so poor communication between the ISP and Joel, but that's life.
Another thing that happened this morning was really nice. I got an email back from Leslie, my cousin Mike's wife in VT. I had emailed them about getting some syrup because I've finally tired of the store-bought kind, and mentioned that if they were interested in setting up an eCommerce site for the farm, I'd be glad to help. And so she emailed back with their problems and I went about trying to track down solutions.
The first problem is getting a general eCommerce Shopping Site up. This is pretty easy these days for the Farm as their selection is fixed and doesn't occupy more than a page. I went to Freshmeat and did a serach on shopping systems. I got more than 40 - some Perl-based, others PHP... some used MySQL, others PostgreSQL, still others used files. In the end there certainly looks like there's more than enough to pick from. We need to know the capabilities of the ISP they're using to know which one(s) will work in their installation, so I've asked Leslie to check on it for me.
Her second concern was UPS shipping. When they ship meat - which they do a lot, they need it to arrive in a very timely fashion as it is not frozen. So if someone orders from Boston, it can go UPS Ground, but if the order is from California, then it needs to go Next Day. Thankfully, UPS has a series of free tools available on their eCommerce web site. They tend to work in concert with one another and can be used either by HTTP or by XML. UPS seems to have gone to a great deal of trouble to make these tools easily available to the eCommerce web site builders, and I am impressed. They have a tool that verifies the city, state and zip for correctness, and then another that calculates the shipping time for different shipping methods from the source to the destination. This is exactly what Leslie needs. She can get the city, state and zip from the web site, and then pass that to UPS for verification, and then get the shipping times and see what ones are really available to the customer. Then that can be integrated into the order and away we go.
I have to admit that I'm really interested in helping Mike out on this. I know it isn't much, but it's nice when we can reach out and help family. I mailed off all this info to Leslie and we'll see what she comes back with. I can build this all on tux or sparky and then when the time comes I can ship it to their ISP for deployment. It sounds pretty nice.
UPDATE: I exchanged a few more emails with Leslie and it looks like their ISP has an eCommerce option with database support and credit card processing. For $50/mo this might be their best option and I let them know about it. If I used their ISP and wanted me to put an eCommerce site on it, I'll have to stick with Perl/CGI and forgo any database. I mentioned this to her, and suggested that it might become necessary to move the site to another ISP that supports PHP/PostgreSQL/etc. for less than $50/mo.