Personal Blog
Mike Smullin
Husband, Father, Entrepreneur, Investor, Engineer, Artist, and Self-motivated Student currently located in Eagle Mountain, Utah.
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Posts by Mike Smullin
Keeping Kids Safe Online
0732 days
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children recommends parents set rules with their children to know what’s allowed and what isn’t when it comes to time spent online. These are the rules they suggest:
1. I will not give out anyone’s personal information such as any part of a name, home address, credit card number, phone number, age, password, school name or location without my parents’ permission.
2. I will tell my parents right away if I come across any information that makes me feel confused or uncomfortable.
3. I will never agree to get together with someone I “meet” online.
4. I will never send a person my picture or anything else without first checking with my parents.
5. I will not respond to any messages that are mean or in any way make me feel uncomfortable. It is not my fault if I get messages like that. If I do receive that kind of message, I will tell my parents right away.
6. I will talk to my parents so we can set up rules for going online. I will not break these rules without their permission.
There are ways to monitor the websites your child visits, as well as chats and e-mails. The Utah Attorney General’s office has information about how to do that, here.
SafeTeens.com is another site with advice to help parents keep their teens safe online. That site also includes advice about cell phone safety for teens.
cufón – fonts for the people
1734 days
by Mike Smullin
in Development
I just discovered cufón – fonts for the people. According to Google’s cached version of their META description, “It is a fast text replacement with canvas and VML – no Flash or images required.” Very interesting. The last thing I was using for this was sIFR but even though it worked it was somewhat painful. This looks very easy.
There is also a WordPress plugin for it called WP-Cufon which I saw used on this blog 7 Ways to Watch TV Online for Free. Also a good post for other reasons. 
On a side note, I wish I knew how digitizd.com was doing their social bookmark icons. They look slick. Either they are custom or some WP plugin. Hoping its a plugin I can use.
A/B Testing – Experiment Driven Development for Rails
0734 days
by Mike Smullin
in Development
assaf’s vanity at master – GitHub looks interesting. going to have to try this sometime.
Use Categories in Product URLs for Magento SEO without Duplicate Content
181063 days
by Mike Smullin
in Development
Magento provides the option to use categories in your product URLs for the search engine optimization benefits it brings, but they’ve implemented it in a very unusual way. Basically, if you enable this option, you’ll end up with at least 4 URLs per product. Once people realize it, this often raises a number of concerns including possible duplicate content penalty from Google, fractured link juice for product pages, frustrated admins, etc.
With so many people also searching for a clever solution, I decided disabling the feature was an unacceptable solution, and took the challenge.
Automatically Sorting Magento Catalog Categories Alphabetically via MySQL
11064 days
by Mike Smullin
in Development
Beats me why this isn’t an option in Magento core back-end administration already. I have been using the core patch for Magento Dataflow which allows me to import categories with my products similar to the way Yahoo! eCommerce lets you do it. It makes things easy for importing but you end up with the categories appearing in the order they were specified in your .CSV file you imported, and not alphabetically as most customers would expect when browsing your product catalog from the front-end.
So, rather than manually attempting to reorder 68 categories across 3 levels one-by-one using the tools provided in the Magento back-end, I decided to write a simple MySQL script that would do it all for me automatically. Here it is, for anyone else who may be running into this problem.