Joomla 1.0.9 and Virtuemart 1.0.0 problems with MySQL 5

One of my clients just complained his Joomla/Virtuemart website stopped to work.
Joomla was pretty old, version 1.0.9, the same ancient version was Virtuemart.

The description was more meaningful: it looks working but the list of products is empty.
Admin panel however shows a lot of products and everything looks ok from that side.

The client was completely disappointed because nothing has been changed on the site since month ago when everything worked just fine.

The only major update on our server for that month was MySQL database upgrade from version 4.xx to MySQL 5.

And that was the answer:
Virtuemart's SQL statements just crashed on the new database.
I'm totally disappointed with both Virtuemart and MySQL and how they work with each other. :)

Here is the solution.

1. Find administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop_browse_queries.php file and backup it.

2. Find the following line in the file

#__{vm}_product, #__{vm}_category, #__{vm}_product_category_xref,#__{vm}_shopper_group

and replace it with this one:
(#__{vm}_product, #__{vm}_category, #__{vm}_product_category_xref,#__{vm}_shopper_group)

There are 4 replacements required for the file.

3. Enjoy! or let me know if you have any problem...


So as I understand MySQL brought more restrictions on version 5 so your website might experience some problems with such upgrade.

Another problem with Google products

Found a problem with google products/services.

Google Chrome browser doesn't work well with Blogger service owned by Google now.
I already reported to Blogger support but no reply for the last two weeks, and the bug seems still here.

The problem is that I cannot upload a picture.
On a certain point Blogger complains about some strange error (some parameter missing) and refuses to go further.

So writing posts I do everything in Chrome,
then open Internet Explorer, login to Blogger.com, upload pictures, save the results, and then it works.

Other than that no problems with Chrome so far.
It works definitely much faster than other browsers.

The fall and crisis are here

Even "Google almighty" going down these days.

So that may mean market expectations regarding marketing budgets are not so high.
And earn something on advertisement may become a bit harder.

Following this idea we can find that doing something for advertisement may be not so attractive as before.

So the result can be a new direction for online investment and online business.

Market is not going down.
Market is looking for other ways to go.

Ebay payment gateway doesn't work with Google Chrome

Installed Google Chrome browser,
but couldn't use it on ebay.

Trying to pay there, ebay complains "Your Safari browser is bulls**t, please use another browser".

So nothing is perfect in this world I think...

Link exchange techniques

Sometimes I receive email messages that look like spam however it's not a spam.

Those are link exchange offers.

Like "Hi, let's do links exchange. Please place this link to your website and send us the URL, and we'll place the link too. Bye."

You know it looks like scam for me.
Some strange guys ask or even push me doing something promising to do something as well.
I don't even know you, why you think I should trust you?

But... what message may work in this situation?

I think if I receive something like this I would pay more attention to that.
"Dear Alex! I am so happy to find your website and I like it so much! I even placed a link to your lightseo.com (you can find it here....) And your link to my homepage would be very appreciated! Thank you!"

Do you think it should work better?
I do.

How to find clients for SEO service

Talking to business owners (or other decision makers) sometimes there are some difficulties explaining what is search engine optimization and what could be benefits for the client's business.

Usually a SEO specialist (or company) needs to explain what is that service, estimate how good that could be for the client, prepare some homework with statistics (at least some numbers) to confirm pros and cons of the promotion in search engines.

Mostly that happens because some persons are far away from internet, they are scared by dot com crash they heard about and don't trust these strange technologies anymore... you think I'm kidding and there are no such business owners anymore?? c'mon there are tons of them! :)

So instead of permanent proving of what I'm going to sell I started to think about an opposite approach to the problem.

And now I want to check another idea: doing business together with my clients instead of trying to improve their business explaining them benefits of internet popularity.

So...
I register a domain name, investigate some business area, find popular keywords, find major players on the market, perform the whole set of SEO actions and move my website to the first page of google.

My idea is to get a number of visitors and - more important! - number of contacts (phone calls, emails, or just web form submittings).
Even one contact a day.

After that I can come to a business owner, and tell him "Hey man, how are you today?"
Instead of selling him SEO, google promotion, search engines, visitor conversion and other buzzwords I can offer him this one contact a day.

They like what they understand.
One contact a day - it is clear.
A promise to improve his website's page rank is not.
And here is the difference.

You don't promise anything, you sell a lead who is interested in your client's product or service.


Benefits for me are that I can sell that for a higher price.
And I don't need to sell something that my client is not familiar with.
The cons are that I have to invest my own money first.
But I'm sure it makes sense.
At least - to try :)

So how to promote website in search engines?

So when we see both black and white SEO methods the next question you might have would be "So how to make my website(s) visible in google, yahoo and other search engines?"

As you may know the best results can be achieved by using balanced methods.
Have you ever heard about balanced portfolio in investment?
The same idea: not concentrating on one method but using different ones in some proportions.

Instead of giving your website natural development we'll probably need to push it a little bit.
The art is in defining how little is this bit.

Later we'll define the main steps of promoting - a "light" promoting, a conservative promoting. Our targets order would be 1. Not banned by search engines, 2. TO be promoted.
Exactly in this order.
I don't like dangerous procedures.
Minimizing risk is the task number one.

Stay tuned.

How to ask Sergey Brin to promote your product/service

It looks RIM shares have to move up.
Sergey Brin was advertising their Blackberry device :)