I recently purchased a style template

But in every project, tinkering is a must to make it “just-so” for the audience it’s intended for. And that means tweaking the templates and style sheets (CSS). As I tweaked this template, it occurred to me that tinkering can be disasterous unless you intimately know what’s going on in the developer’s mind.

So developers, unless you are trying to corner the market on updates, follow these rules when developing global templates and I’ll be your customer again and again:

1. Thou shalt separate coding for retrieving and presenting data.
Work smarty (engine) not harder.

2. Thou shalt use cascading style sheets for design
Don’t use style tags and don’t use embedded styles in each page.

3. Thou shalt not use inline styles
Don’t make styling changes in individual HTML elements. Use classes and ID constructors and make changes in the style sheet.

4. Thou shalt separate global CSS from module specific CSS.
Don’t make me plod through gigantic style sheets to find the one entry for a specific page.

5. Thou shalt test CSS in at least 3 browsers
Don’t wow me in Google Chrome just to find out it stinks in MSIE.

The Puerto Rican Heritage Society is a non-profit organization founded in San Antonio, Texas, in 1984, with the purpose of keeping Puerto Rican heritage and culture alive in San Antonio.

The organization promotes personal and career development through scholarships offered to high school graduates interested in pursuing higher education. We are also committed to supporting our community by participating in civic endeavors in the area.

» Visit their website

We recently completed a website re-design for Seven Oaks Women’s Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Throughout every stage of your life, you have certain health care needs and concerns that require attentive, competent and compassionate care.   Seven Oaks Women’s Center believes  by using innovative techniques, sound clinical judgment and the most advanced equipment,  they apply both the art and science of medicine to give you the best possible medical care.

Seven Oaks - Women’s Health Care that grows with you

Monday the 17th was my 11th year of business.  I’m bound and determined to celebrate every year because it’s just so darn fun to be in business for yourself, even in April.    And just like July of last year, I started thinking about ways to celebrate.  Logos, cards, e-mails, promotions, etc.

But again, just like last year, I’ve been so busy, I just haven’t had time to do anything like that.   And then it struck me this afternoon; I’m so busy, I forgot my anniversary.  No better way to continue celebrating 11 years of business by being busy.

And I get to celebrate because of you, my clients. Thanks to all of you and best wishes for your future success.   Gotta go now…busy.

So, I visited their website and tried adding an item to the cart and immediately received an error message :

Sorry - your last action could not be completed

If you were making a purchase or sending money, we recommend that you check both your PayPal account and your email for a transaction confirmation after 30 minutes.

If you came to this page from another website, please return to that site (don’t use your browser’s Back button) and restart your activity.

If you came from PayPal’s website, click the PayPal logo in the upper left corner

I googled the error message and popped quite a few results.  After wading through 3 or 4 pages,  only two possible issues were discussed: Outdated account information and a problem with PayPal cart buttons in frames.

The cart coding is not in an HTML frame so I dismissed the latter.  And after checking with my client, the account was verified as being up-to-date.

So, using my old telecomm maintenance skills (go where someone has gone before),  I reviewed the coding in the product HTML page.  It all seemed correct and was coded according to PayPal’s published HTML Guidelines. PayPal did add a new way of creating buttons in 2007, but the prior method was still valid.

Just to be sure,  I creating the new style button code and inserted it into a test page.   The new button failed as soon as I appended the override variables needed for product amount and custom shipping cost.   Backtracking to the original code, I tried commenting out each advanced variable and testing the result.

Woo-hoo!

The problem was solved when commenting out this line :

<input type=”hidden” name=”upload” value=”1″>

Apparently, PayPal deprecated the use of that tag for it’s own internal cart.  Looking in more detail at the HTML guidelines for advanced variables,  you’ll notice that line is no longer included.   The code line is only used for 3rd party shopping carts.  Unfortunately, I ran into it by trial and error and thankfully, my client’s customer reported it instead of just moving on down the road.

Anyway, if you encounter this problem in your website, check these items:

• Verify your seller account is completely up to date.
• If using a PayPal “Add To Cart” button (and underlying HTML variables) in a frame,  change it to a top level page.
• If using advanced variables, ensure you are not using the upload variable for posting to the PayPal internal shopping cart.
• If you don’t need to override any variables and you have a static product line, use the Create Button functionality for Website Payments Standard.

If all else fails, contact PayPal support or post to the PayPal Developer Boards.

Joel Perez is a federal and state criminal defense trial lawyer and has successfully defended hundreds of individuals in federal and state court.

On the right, a 80  Gb ADS external drive purchased in Feb 2005 for $220.00.  On the left, a Western Digital 320 Gb external drive purchased this past week for $99.00.

Last month, three of their 1 & 1 domains came up in my calendar as requiring renewal.  I dutifully logged into the domain control panel and saw that the client had set-up automatic billing and there were no notices from the company.  Cool beans…all handled.

Coincidentally, and a week later, I was ready to deploy a new website using one of those domains.   I wanted to update the nameservers,  so I logged back in to the 1&1 Hosting Control panel only to discover that all 3 domains had expired and the account was cancelled.

Furious - I called the company.  Here’s a snippet of several phone and e-mail support conversations over the next few days:

Why was it cancelled? Payment had not been made in the past two years for the domains.

Why weren’t we notified of the problem? You were notified through your contact e-mail address.

We never received any notices. You were notified through your contact e-mail address.

Why didn’t you call to resolve the issue? You were notified through your contact e-mail address.

What is the billing problem? Incorrect credit information.

Why wasn’t there a notice on the account control panel? You were notified through your contact e-mail address.

To sum this all up, we ended up paying the outstanding amount PLUS a “Domain Redemption” fee to re-claim the domain before it was returned for public use.

• What kind of company shows such disregard for their customer service that they don’t do everything in their power to resolve a billing issue?
• Furthermore, what kind of company demands billing addresses and phone numbers and then relies totally on spammy e-mail to communicate all customer issues without one follow-up call?

Answer: The kind of company I no longer do business with.  I moved the offending domains away from 1& 1 Hosting to another registrar.

As a post script in irony, the website being deployed was to advertise and sell a book about superior customer service.