Clement Nedelcu's Development Journal

Paypal has just "resolved" a dispute that a customer filed against our small-scale online business and I am absolutely disgusted by the outcome. Not because of the amount that they've stolen from us (11.25€, we will survive without it), but for what it represents and the inherent risks. I should never have been charged that fee. Let me explain. A regular purchase? A few months ago a customer purchased the most expensive VPN plan (72€) on my website VPN1Euro.com. The account was immediately set up, and the customer started using it. A few months later, the customer requested a full refund for the payment (through an automated Paypal dispute), without contacting me prior to sending the request to Paypal. I responded to the dispute by telling the entire truth: the customer purchased the account legimitately (IP address matches the location entered in the Paypal billing address, nothing indicates that there was some kind of Paypal account fraud) the customer used the ac...

I have lived in China for two years now and I must say I am absolutely disgusted by the new censorship measures enforced by the Chinese government. Especially this new one. Here's how the story begins. Late April, before the Easter holidays, I was still enjoying live TV streaming from french channels through my regular VPN. It wasn't too fast but good enough to stream correctly without much buffering. When I got back from holiday early May, I noticed that all my VPNs still worked but the speed had become incredibly bad , I could barely access websites - let alone stream live video. I thought it would be temporary or that maybe peering between China Telecom and Europe was saturated. But it got worse. At work (I work at a foreign school) ever since I got back from holiday, our connection would get shut down every now and then . Nearly every single foreign website (most IP addresses outside of China) would be unreachable for hours. We decided to investigate the issue with our ...

Hello, I have already implemented this module on two shops rather successfully. The concept is quite simple: websites that want to get rewarded through affiliation must link to your website using an identifier in the URL. If your website is http://website.com/, then your links must be of the form http://website.com/?ref=123 where 123 is the affiliate ID. when a visitor clicks the link, the affiliate ID will be placed in a cookie that will expire after 15 days (this can be configured) when the visitor purchases an item: if the affiliate ID cookie is still enabled, the affiliate will be credited of a certain amount, it can be a share of the sale or a fixed amount. affiliate accounts are simple customer accounts, there is no modification to make regarding accounts. When a sale is made, they receive store credit. They can either spend the store credit to purchase items on the store, or they can manually request for a withdrawal (managing withdrawals is up to you). I will detail the i...

It's been a while since I made my last post on this blog, but that's because I've been busy with work! Anyway, today I've chosen to publish a simple finding that I've come up with myself (not that it was any difficult anyway). It could be useful for people who want to run a web shop, particularly the excellent Interspire Shopping Cart . It comes with a set of rewrite rules for Apache to enable search-engine friendly URLs, but nothing for Nginx unfortunately. Here is the Apache .htaccess file provided with Interspire Shopping Cart. I'm only pasting the section that we are interested in, in other words the Rewrite Module section:     RewriteEngine On     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d     RewriteRule . index.php     In order to achieve the same results in Nginx, you simply need to enable this location block:         location / { ...

Nginx HTTP Server was published and is now available for purchase on various locations. It will begin to appear in store in the coming weeks. You can already purchase the eBook from the publisher's website at the link below: https://www.packtpub.com/nginx-http-server-for-web-applications/book The eBook can be purchased for 23.79€ whereas the book is 31.49€. There is also a preview chapter available on the website for anyone to read! Please feel free to leave your comments, feedback and questions if you have read the book.

Hello, I am glad to to announce the first Nginx book on the market: Nginx HTTP Server , written by... me . :-) NGINX HTTP SERVER "Adopt Nginx for your web applications to make the most of your infrastructure and server pages faster than ever." Focused on the primary aspect of Nginx (HTTP serving), the book covers the following topics: Get started with Nginx to serve websites faster and safer Learn to configure your servers and virtual hosts efficiently Set up Nginx to work with PHP and other applications via FastCGI Explore possible interactions between Nginx and Apache to get the best of both worlds A step-by-step guide to switching from Apache to Nginx Complete configuration directive and module reference There are 8 chapters and 3 appendices, listed here: 1. Preparing your work environment: getting ready to work under a command-line environment, with a reminder on the basic tools and commands. 2. Downloading and installing Nginx : downloading the source, th...

Julien Dollon, whose blog is available here , recently finished writing his book about web development under Visual Studio 2010. Knowing the professionalism and the talent of Julien, this book should turn out to be an excellent read for all of us web developers interested in the .NET platform. The book is already available for pre-orders on Amazon . Congratulations Julien!