As it turns out, it is not that difficult. Although you need to have basic knowledge of running UNIX command lines and text editor. You can probably found many detailed tutorials to install SSL certificate on DO + SP stack, but most of them are for Nginx environment. Mine is for Apache, which I am more familiar with.

There is nothing original here. I am merely summarizing the steps from excellent references I found:

1. How To Install an SSL Certificate from a Commercial Certificate Authority | DigitalOcean
2. Install SSL certificate manually on serverpilot for Apache

Create a directory for your keys and certificates

To keep things tidy and make it easier to follow this tutorial, I am going to create a dedicated directory to store all the keys and certificates. So let’s create a new directory after logging into the server using SSH. We want to put everything under /etc/apache-sp/certs/appname  so let’s do that:

mkdir /etc/apache-sp/certs
mkdir /etc/apache-sp/certs/appname

* replace appname  with your application name on ServerPilot

Generate a CSR and Private Key

Once it has been created, you want to change into the directory:

cd /etc/apache-sp/certs/appname

Then generate a pair of certificate signing request (CSR) and private key:

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout yourdomain.com.key -out yourdomain.com.csr

You will be prompted to enter information about your certificate request. To save time, DigitalOcean already provides excellent instructions on what to enter here.

Once that’s done, copy the content of the generated CSR using this command:

cat example.com.csr

Purchase an SSL certificate

At this point, I assume you are already familiar in purchasing and requesting an SSL certificate. In case you need some guidance, DigitalOcean gives a couple of examples to do this using NameCheap and GoDaddy.

Installing the SSL certificate on the server

Once you have completed the process of generating SSL certificate, you are most likely will receive 2 files:

1. The SSL certificate
2. The CA intermediate certificate

You need to copy both of these files into the /etc/apache-sp/certs/appname  we created earlier. If you do everything correctly to this point, you should have 4 files within that directory:

1. The certificate signing request (CSR): yourdomain.com.csr
2. The private key: yourdomain.com.key
3. The SSL certificate: yourdomain_com.crt
4. The CA intermediate certificate: yourdomain_com.ca-bundle

Enabling SSL on your domain

We have come to the magic moment and most critical step. You will need to edit Apache’s configuration file to enable the SSL. You have to create a separate configuration file from the default one(s), otherwise ServerPilot might overwrite your custom file when it is updating your server.

The config files are located on /etc/apache-sp/vhosts.d  directory so let’s change the directory to it:

cd /etc/apache-sp/vhosts.d

Then you can view available config files under that directory using the ls  command. There are probably several .conf  files there if you are hosting multiple sites on the server.

Now we want to create a new config file related to your app/site name. I am calling it appname.ssl.conf .

vi appname.ssl.conf

This is going to open the Vi editor where you are going to enter the edited lines:

Listen 443

<VirtualHost *:443>
    Define DOCUMENT_ROOT /srv/users/serverpilot/apps/appname/public

    SSLEngine on

    SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache-sp/certs/appname/appname_com.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache-sp/certs/appname/appname.com.key
        SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache-sp/certs/appname/appname_com.ca-bundle

    ServerAdmin webmaster@
    DocumentRoot ${DOCUMENT_ROOT}
        ServerName appname
    ServerAlias appname.com
    ServerAlias www.appname.com


    RemoteIPHeader X-Real-IP
    SetEnvIf X-Forwarded-SSL on HTTPS=on
    IncludeOptional /etc/apache-sp/vhosts.d/appname.d/*.conf

    ErrorLog "/srv/users/serverpilot/log/appname/https_appname_apache.error.log"
    CustomLog "/srv/users/serverpilot/log/appname/https_appname_apache.access.log" common
</VirtualHost>

Save the file and restart your Apache server:

sudo service apache-sp restart

Done! Test it out by opening your site using https://  prefix, eg: https://www.yourdomain.com.

You may need to adjust your site’s settings to ensure all components are called using https://  instead of http:// , but that’s a whole different process and not going to be covered here.

The post SSL certificate installation on DigitalOcean + ServerPilot (Apache) appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Countless threads have been created asking the simple question: should I use Magento or [name other popular e-commerce application]? I can very confidently answer this now: if you never had any experience managing e-commerce site, limited budget or resources, then look elsewhere. Many other e-commerce applications will save you money and headaches, while you can build up your revenue before moving to the next level.

Do not get me wrong, as stated in the beginning, I really like Magento. It opens up new possibilities of actions and automations that I could not do with previous systems I worked with before. But until you can see the limitations of other applications in your list, then keep it with lower priority in your list.

Here are a few reasons why Magento could create more problems than solution to your business requirements:

Magento requires more time and budget to develop

Given its complex nature, you cannot turn finalized HTML pages into Magento templates overnight. It involves break them into tiny blocks and combining them again through its XML-based layout file. Tons of free and premium extensions can also be very tempting, but implementation may not be as easy as adding plugins to your WordPress blog. Conflicts will be expected and your developer needs to have full knowledge in how your e-commerce site is set up in order to be able to debug effectively.

It is much harder to find good and experienced Magento developer

Unless you have very huge budget of course, in which you can just go to the best digital agency specializing in e-commerce and/or Magento development. Many developers may offer affordable budget and can actually build the site as specified, but they might sacrifice Magento’s strict rules which lead to more problems in the future. Or you could also spend a lot of money but do not get the results you expected. Bad coding will only make your site slow and vulnerable.

Related to the next point, if your developer does not have server or networking skills at all, that is another reason to look for another one. At the very least, Magento developer should be able to recommend a good configuration and setup.

Magento needs to run on a very good server

If you are not willing to spend more than $50/month, then you should forget about it. Even VPS might not be enough, depending on the traffic and how good the server is optimized. My suggestion: go with Magento optimized hosting providers. Installing and properly configuring full page cache will also improve the performance significantly.

Magento admin has long learning curve

You want to use e-commerce platform that does not require a formal training? Then Shopify is what you are looking for. Magento settings have so many layers which you can easily get lost or forget. Google is always your best friend, but if you do not want to go through the trouble just because you want to change the contact email address, then Magento is not for you. I even feel that it is not designed to be self-managed, instead you need a dedicated person to help you manage it.

Taking The Risk

All the reasons above will be worth if you have identified the restrictions of other systems and could only find it on Magento. For me, here are some:

1. You need advanced price and marketing rules. This one is very obvious. You can create extremely complex promo rules out-of-the-box, or even extend them further if needed. This is achievable because you can create multi-level conditions and actions within Magento’s Shopping Cart Price Rules.
2. Integrations with other systems. Including accounting, warehouse, fulfillment.
3. Multi store setup. This is always one of key decision factors against other systems. Magento multi store feature is very mature and deeply integrated with everything else. It is part of the framework and very solid.

Still confused of which e-commerce platform you should use? Please share it here.

The post Things to know before choose Magento appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

If you have read my post about WordPress hosting for personal and small business, I listed Lightning Base with its Personal plan for only $9.95/month. After recommending it to a couple of clients, I am impressed with it as it is fast and running cPanel which I am very familiar with. It would be the finest choice with my requirements.

Amazon EC2

Then I got my eyes on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It is basically a scalable cloud-based instance where you can increase or decrease its capacity almost instantly. Just like any other cloud based hosting provided. Its lowest instance t2.micro is priced at around $9.52/month and comes with 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM. More than enough for my needs at the moment. The wonderful thing is, AWS offers a [Free Tier] program where new customers can get started with Amazon EC2 for free for one year.

There was only one thing that held me back: like all other cloud based hosting services, EC2 requires deep knowledge of server (Linux) command line to set up everything. Of course AWS provides an extensive tutorial in how to set up WordPress on an EC2 instance, but it was still too much in my opinion since I needed something more practical.

Bitnami Cloud Hosting

The answer came in the form of Bitnami. It is an open source project that offers open source installers or software packages for web applications and development stacks. Over 100 open source application stacks are ready to use, including ever popular WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and more coming soon. I had known about Bitnami for a while, but I had not noticed about its Cloud Hosting product which was released in February 2010.

With Bitnami Cloud Hosting, you can monitor all your cloud servers and applications from one dashboard. Imagine being able to set up new WordPress blog on Amazon EC2 with a few clicks and less than 30 minutes. What is even greater, it comes with a free Developer Plan for one server (application).

Two essential components offered for free, no reason to hold me back from migrating my WordPress installation. The process went well, now I am ready to share with you the steps to set up yours.

Step 1: Create AWS Account

Just to be clear, EC2 is only one of dozens of AWS products and services. The AWS Free Tier program is free for 18 products/services within the limits defined by them. For EC2, you can run 750 hours (31 days = 744 hours) of Linux, RHEL, or SLES t2.micro instance usage per month.

Creating an AWS account is as simple as it can be. You just enter your personal data such as email, name, address and phone number. Note that you will need to enter a valid credit card information, but if you set everything right, you will not pay a dime until the following year. One next important step is automated phone validation but you only need to follow the on screen instructions and is very straightforward.

Step 2: Create Bitnami Cloud Hosting Account

This is much more simple and like most great web apps, creating an account is only a matter of minutes. You only need to enter basic data such as name, email and password. Click the link from the confirmation email, then you are all set. No credit card required until you need to add a second server/app.

Step 3: Add AWS as Bitnami Cloud Instance

We are now starting the fun part. First, you need to add your AWS account into Bitnami Cloud Hosting panel. Everything works through AWS’s API through its Access Key:

1. Login to AWS Management Console
2. From the console dashboard, click on your name on the top right and select Security Credentials
   
3. On “Your Security Credentials” page, click on Access Keys (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key) and then Create New Acess Key
4. New Access Key ID and Secret Access Key strings will be automatically generated and displayed on your screen, copy and save it; you can also download the key file
   

You are done from AWS side, next you need to share the access to Bitnami:

1. Login to Bitnami Hosting
2. From the left navigation, click on Clouds
3. Under “Manage Cloud Accounts”, click New
4. Enter the name and default location of your preference, for AWS Credentials enter the key strings generated from AWS then click Save

Bitnami Hosting now acts as the control panel of AWS and you can install application stacks on AWS through it.

Step 4: Spin WordPress from Bitnami Cloud

Next, let’s roll WordPress on AWS EC2 instance.

1. From Bitnami’s panel, click Servers on the left navigation
2. Under “Server Management”, click New and on the pop-up box select Launch Regular Server
3. The next step involves selecting options:
   • Name: your server/application name, ie. “My Blog”
   • Domain Name: for every server you run on Bitnami, you need to create a subdomain under .bitnamiapp.com; you will be able to assign your own domain later
   • Application Options: enter admin login details and under Email Configuration you may also want to add your Gmail or Custom SMTP details
   • Development Options: the default components are enough, but I added Memcached and Varnish
   • Add New Application: click the button, search and tick on WordPress
   • Operating System: I just selected Ubuntu Linux (hvm) 64-bit
   • Server Type: T2 Micro
   • Disk Size: I just use 10GB, but AWS Free Tier allows you to use up to 30GB
   • Cloud Account: your AWS account name from step 2
   • Server Location: select from your preferred location, remember though that different location has different pricing after your Free Tier period expires
   • IP Address: you can select Dynamic IP or Static IP, I chose the latter
     
4. You can ignore the “Estimated Amazon charges” table because it is only Bitnami’s dynamic cost caculator; Amazon will not charge you if you only select the components within their Free Tier range
5. Click Build and Launch

Now you just sit and wait for a few minutes for Bitnami to take care of things for you.

Step 5: Complete Your WordPress Site Installation

When your EC2 and WordPress installation is ready, you will receive an email from Bitnami. You can go into Bitnami Hosting panel and see your server under Servers. To customize or gain more information, click on the server name (eg. “My Blog”) and click Manage.

Some important items you may need to look at:

1. Under Properties tab
   1. IP Address – this is the static or dynamic IP assigned to your server, you will need to enter the IP address on your DNS to point your domain to your server
   2. Application Credentials – if you did not assign a password of your application, it was automatically generated and can be retrieved here
2. Under Applications tab, you want to change the address to your domain instead of a prefix under bitnamiapp.com subdomain; this will automatically linked to WordPress General Settings

Once you have updated your DNS to the IP of your WordPress installation and it has propagated, your site is ready and you can use it as you would install it from any server.

Additional Step: Optimize WordPress Installation

Out of the box, WordPress stack prepared by Bitnami is already good. Your website or blog will load blazingly fast. To some, including myself, it may not be enough though and you may want to make it even better. In that case, you want to read Bitnami’s excellent wiki page in how to optimize default WordPress install.

There you go. Free WordPress hosting for one year on a terrific cloud instance with less than an hour to set up. Do keep in mind that EC2’s t2.micro is probably ideal only if you have an average of few hundred up to low thousand page views per day. Above that, you may need to use their better instances although those are not eligible for AWS Free Tier program. If your blog is that popular, please be generous with your hosting budget.

The post Set up free WordPress hosting using Amazon EC2 and Bitnami Cloud appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

My take of it? It’s great. With new web apps (SaaS) come out every day, it is becoming harder to find ones that you know will work for your business. Based on personal experience, there are also shady ones out there that you should try to avoid doing business with. This tool will help you find and screen those apps.

As it is powered by the reviews from real users, I encourage you to sign up and share your experience. Sign up is quick and simple using LinkedIn only, which I feel it is 100% fair. You can spend as less as 5 minutes for posting a review which will later be validated.

I am looking forward to see G2 Crowd to grow its community and will definitely check and contribute there from time to time.

The post G2 Crowd – “yelp” for business software appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

…think of it as “anything that isn’t bulk“. Basically, it is email sent to an individual based on some action.

In my own words related to e-commerce, transaction emails are all notification emails sent out by your e-commerce/shopping cart platform related with a customer’s account or order activities such as:

• Account creation welcome email
• Password reminder/reset instructions
• Order confirmation/invoice
• Order status update
• Shipping tracking number
• Order review request, etc

By default, if you host your e-commerce platform on your own server, most likely these emails are sent directly using the server’s built-in mail application like sendmail on Apache/PHP environment. If you have this running then all is good, but what if you can make it even better? By using 3rd-party transaction email provider, you send out these emails through their server. Usually communication between your server and theirs is done through APIs or SMTP.

Benefits

Why is it better? There are additional features that you can gain from using a separate server/service to send our your transactional email:

Higher rate of deliverability

Even if you have a very good and clean server, there is still a possibility that your server’s IP to get rejected by certain ISPs (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) when they feel that too many emails coming from the same origin. Like email SaaS, transactional email services most likely have a farm of servers with multiple IPs that has been optimized to get maximum acceptability across different ISPs.

Additional insights of your email activities

You now have the options to track the numbers of bounced emails, open rates and click rates just like when you are sending your newsletter email campaigns. While the accuracy of this not 100%, you can only track open rate if the customers’ email readers supports HTML, it is still a valuable additional insight. Let’s say you see that the open rate for your invoice emails is very low, probably the subject is not clear enough and you can make an improvement on it.

Create additional rules

Customers occasionally enter wrong email address in their order details which may result the notification emails never get delivered to them. By setting a simple rule like to notify you when an email gets bounced, you can then check the cause and email address, and if possible correct it before the customer contacts you regarding his order.

Services Compared

There are few services that offer to send transactional emails. There are typically 2 types of pricing:

1. Monthly plan
   You pay a flat monthly fee and you will be given a quota of number of emails that can be sent within that cycle.
2. Pay-as-you-go
   You pay based on the number of emails or credits that you have sent out within that month.
3. Buy bulk credits
   You buy a bundle of credits where it will be subtracted every time you send out an email.

Honestly I cannot rate each of the services’ quality and features, as in the context of e-commerce applications we are not using the features or APIs too extensively. For now, I only compare them based on pricing and compatibility with most popular self-hosted shopping cart platforms, Magento and OpenCart.

Price starts from	$9.95 per month – 40,000 credits	$1.50 per 10,000 emails	Free for first 12,000 emails in a month	Free for first 6,000 emails in a month
Magento integration	documented	plugin	MagentoConnect extension	plugin
OpenCart integration	via SMTP	via SMTP or PHP class	extension ($10)	via SMTP
Website	sendgrid.com	postmarkapp.com	mandrill.com	mailjet.com

If you have experience using different transactional email services for your online store, please share it here.

The post Using Transactional Email Service for Your E-Commerce Platform appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Had the interview back in October 2012, but have not been able to share it here. Check it out, I can honestly recommend ViralSweep if you are thinking of running a giveaway on your website.

The post ViralSweep for Your Social Media Powered Giveaway appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Few web developers hesitate to include one because they think it will take too much time or effort to make it work, specially if they do not have any server-side programming basics. That is no longer the case, these tools will help you build nice contact form for any project quickly:

Contactable

Contactable is a jQuery plugin designed to make contact/feedback forms simpler and more accessible. This plugin will enable you to create a contact form on any page of a site with minimal effort. I also made a small modification of this great plugin to appear on the right side of the page instead the left, you can check it here.

Wufoo

Wufoo is one of the easiest form builder around. It helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code. Its free account is more than enough to create basic online forms, but you can easily upgrade to premium plans to fit your needs.

pForm

Similar with Wufoo, pForm comes with an online form builder with simple interface that will help you build forms of any kind. Integration with your existing web page might be a bit more complicated than Wufoo, but still more simple than building a custom form yourself.

MachForm

MachForm is developed by the same company as pForm. It is the server installable version. You have more options like: receive submission and save to database, send entries to email, send autoresponder email, validate inputs, and lot more.

The post Tools to Build Your Contact Form in Less Than 5 Minutes appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

One inconvenient thing that might prevent you to do an update immediately is it cannot auto-update (WordPress style), so you need to manually reupload the necessary files. Official documentation from Interspire to upgrade your ISC installation can be found here.

Following the instructions there is the safest method for sure. But if you do not have the super fast connection via FTP to your server, overwriting the files one by one might take at least a few hours. So I tried to find with a faster way with the help of SSH. Let’s start.

Preparation

Make sure you have done the followings:

1. Backup your store’s database and files.
2. Read the changelog.txt file from the latest update to know which template files that need to be updated.
3. If you changed or customized the system files, you might want to reprogrammed some of the files first.

Step 1: Rename your current ISC folder

By default, the store folder is named ‘shoppingcart’. You can rename it to ‘shoppingcart-old’. If it is on your root folder, you can create a new folder and move everything there.

Step 2: Upload and unzip the update file

You can use FTP to do this. Then using SSH, unzip the file:

unzip Interspire_Shopping_Cart_(Edition)-5.x.x.zip

The folder can be renamed after unzipped.

Step 3: Copy product images folder

This folder contains all the product images that you have uploaded, so it is very important to keep it intact. First you need to rename the ‘product_images’ folder from the new system folder. Then go to your old store folder and copy the ‘product_images’ folder:

cp -r product_images ../shoppingcart/

Step 4: Copy the template folder (if you use custom theme)

Go to ‘templates’ subfolder, find your custom template name:

cp -r CustomThemeFolder ../../shoppingcart/templates/

Step 5: Finalize the upgrade

From here, ISC upgrade script will take care of the rest. Just open your ISC admin URL, then it will do the database upgrade and all necessary steps.

Done.

The post Upgrading Interspire Shopping Cart Using SSH appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Luckily many free or premium applications are now available for you to choose to quickly create your online portfolio and resume, with easy-to-use interface to manage and regularly update them. Here is a shortlist of ones that I found to be really nice and are packed with features that you will mostly need:

Carbonmade

Carbonmade is one of the most popular online portfolio services with many features. You can create a free account for up to 5 projects with 35 images. Whoo! pro plan is available for $12/month, where you get 50 projects with up to 500 hi-res images and 10 high quality videos.

Coroflot

Coroflot is focused for creative industry with a very active job board. Based on their About page, it is hosting portfolios of over 150,000 creative professionals and students.

Raveal

Raveal is another one that you can consider. It is oriented on the social media and search engines parts to make your names easily heard by the rest of the world. Its Free plan gives 100MB of storage, while the Professional plan provides 1GB storage with some additional features.

Need more functions or different look? Then installing WordPress with a theme optimized for portfolio might be the best and easiest solution. I will save that for different post.

The post Online Portfolio Applications appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.