Ecommerce

Predicting the Next Pope's Name

Eight years ago, I registered Pope Benedict XVI's domain name three weeks before he was selected pope. Because of this achievement in pontification, I was invited to be on the Today Show, where Katie Couric called me the popesquatter in front of millions of people. This made me as big a celebrity as the Virgin Mary viaduct stain -- but it only lasted 36 hours. Just when I started getting used to all the attention and began making plans to hire a publicist and have my teeth capped, a woman fell ... (read more)

2013/03/12

Creating a Closest Store Locator in PHP

Over the past year, one of my side projects has been the development of shopping directory sites for categories such as wargames, sports cards, videogames and farmers markets, the last of which I launched over the weekend. The sites are running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) using my own code and the Smarty template language, which keeps me from cluttering up my web pages with PHP. As I prepared the newest site, I decided to implement a feature that takes a user-submitted address and ... (read more)

2010/02/01

Identity Thief Sends Purchase to My Address

I'm dealing with an identity theft situation today that I can't figure out. Last night, somebody ordered $259 poker jewelry from an online store using my business address, business phone, and email address along with their name. They paid for it with a VISA card. I've checked my credit card providers and the charge wasn't placed on my cards. It appears the identity thief has established a credit card using my business address, phone and email. I can't figure out what the thief hoped to ... (read more)

2009/05/15