Wic 1 – osCommerce 0

I just edited the index page on Victoria’s Floozees Doozees web site. Well, on the osCommerce program that I’ve installed there. The general idea is that Victoria can turn the floozeesdoozees.com domain into a full-fledged Internet store. Don’t bother going there just yet. Right now going to floozeesdoozees.com will only see you forwarded to Victoria’s eBay store. And while there’s a specific address to the store catalog, we haven’t stocked it yet. There’s a bunch of stuff in the catalog as examples, and I wouldn’t want anyone trying to order stuff that they can’t get from us.
I was trying to figure out how to install a PayPal module that would let her process payments from the web store through PayPal. For at least a month I’ve been scratching my head because my server provider wouldn’t let me install the module that I downloaded from PayPal. Then, for some reason, it clicked yesterday that the program already had a PayPal module built in, and all I had to do was click on this nifty little grey button that was labeled “install”. Doh!
Well, today I put up a test item and went shopping on Floozees Doozees. I added the test item to my shopping cart, paid for it through PayPal, and then was redirected back to the store. Cool beans! We have ignition!
Then I set about figuring out how to edite the main page of the catalog. It gave me a fit. Mostly because my brain could not process that the error I kept receiving, that totally screwed up the page, came from my use of punctuation. In short, I was thinking like a write and not a programmer. If a character such as ‘ is being used in a program, if you then type word like “we’ll” the program sees “WE command character LL”. I think finally realizing that little glitch warranted a second “Doh!”. Once I realized what was going on, straightening out the main page was no problem at all
I’m kinda psyched about this. It not only means that Victoria now has a functioning web store if she wants it, but I can use the same thing on my web site. Not only to have an Internet version of my eBay store, but to sell my own CDs and posters later on.
Okay, so maybe the title of this post is a little misleading. If anything, osCommerce kicked my ass all throughout this particular game. But whatever the final score might have been, I won it in the end. That’s what matters, right? It means I can say “I win, you lose!”