HexxWorld Blog

I own a Cafepress Premium shop called HexxWear and for the past month or so I have been working on optimizing my shop for mobile web and smartphones. My mobile site is not yet ready for purchasing product from it but I do have featured products displayed with links to them in the main desktop version of my shop.

As with most web development one of the keys to owning a website is ensuring that there is as little manual maintenance as possible. This is done by developing or integrating dynamic elements on your page by means of scripts or other software.

Previously, on my HexxWear mobile site, I had to manually post five featured products. This is approach is not very convenient. So I decided to add PHP into the mix by displaying random featured products. In order to do that I needed a database of my products that the PHP can pull from. Cafepress, as far as I know, will most likely not provide me with a database dump of my shop products (no one has answered my question in the forum yet).  So how can I obtain the necessary data from my shop that I can import into my own SQL database?

The answer to this question is not quick and simple and takes a little time to cleanup prior to importing. However, I have proven that it is possible using a combination of a third party tool called podToolbox, Microsoft Excel (or equivilent spreadsheet application), basic text editor (i.e. notepad, wordpad). There may be quicker procedures for obtaining your cpshop data, but I could not find one aside from the third party tool cpshop. I may look into that later, but from what I saw from the sample sites they are not mobile compliant.

You can also download and view the .pdf of this procedure for viewing later. I also have this posted on Instructables.com.

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Any computer savvy person knows its best to always ‘backup your work‘. Unfortunately, sometimes even we forget. I sometimes catch myself saying “I need to back this up..I’ll do it later”… Yeah well this very blog you are visiting almost didn’t survive this weekend. ‘What had happened was..’ I was performing some cleanup on my webserver deleting old files..blah blah..which also included old databases that are no longer used. I accidently dropped the wrong database, Oops! Fortunately my host has scheduled filesystem and database backups, but even that may not be the most recent data, especially if I upgraded after the last backup or added new content.

I decided to create this post to help remind others who use Wordpress or really any other application that is using a SQL database to back your data up. I did some ‘googling’ (I wonder if that term has reached to Dictionary yet ) and came across a blog post describing how to back up your SQL database through the phpMyAdmin Console. I am not going to re-post what I feel is already a perfectly simple breakdown on how to backup your Wordpress database. I am just pointing you in the right direction.

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I’m not sure about everyone else but I developed an internal webserver at home, just for use internally at home. Our? son is 8 yrs old and even has his own homepage with links to educational sites such as pbskids.org or edheads.org. On one of my earlier blog posts I described how I re-purposed an old Pentium II into a webserver which is running LINUX distro UBUNTU Jaunty. I am also using this old PC as a proxy and internet content filter server. I configured the browsers on our son’s PC to use the proxy and content filter to prevent access to unwanted and dangerous websites.

The reason I am creating this post is because our son figured out how to bypass the proxy through his browser, he was sneaky and saw me do it one time. So I am going to describe how I removed his internet access through third party firmware on my router requiring him to keep his browser pointing to the proxy, otherwise there will be no internet access even to his favorite children websites.

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