Eric Carle meets J.R.R. Tolkien

I am an eye and I can covet one ring. Can you do it? I can do it!

Yahoo Store Tags Not Working - The Fix

In my spare time I am building an e-commerce website for a friend. As it is my first e-commerce site (I've built many a static site before) I steered him towards a Yahoo! Merchant Starter account. I am already familiar with their small business webhosting tools and I figured the store and cart tools would be similarly easy to use.

Not quite. At first I was looking at their store editor tool. This is barbaric to say the least. Luckily I am a web designer so I decided to build the site myself. I had planned to do so from the outset but I wanted to see if the store builder could give me a starting point. Not really. The merchant started account is acutally two accounts in one, one side is if you are using the store editor. You don't have access to things like HTML files, you are forced to use the aforementioned barbaric store editor tool that was probably written in 1996 and never updated. The other side is the web hosting side, which I am familiar with and where you can make your own pages from scratch.

Going with the later you then have to get information from the catalog manager into your own page. This is done with Yahoo's own Store Tags. The look like an HTML comment or a server side include if you're familiar with those. Something like <!--#iamatag--> or some such magic.

At first I designed a static page without the store tags just to make sure everything would look correct once the data populated. Then I replaced things like product images and descriptions with the store tags, uploaded to the server and... ...nothing. I made sure the catalog was published. Yup. Searching the help area tells me nothing I don't already know. Time to email customer support.

Customer support is good but not great. They respond quickly but not accurately. For each question I have it takes 3 or 4 emails back and forth, usually escalating to different people, before I get information that is useful and should have been in something known in most circles as documentation.

At any rate, it turns out that either my OS or Dreamweaver were setting my file permissions to be too strict! It doesn't matter which because this was easily fixed by telling my FTP application to change the permissions on upload. The owner, at least needs to be able to execute the file, not just read and write. Even if I couldn't do this automatically, I could change files one by one on the server after upload (not ideal). I had to post this because it drove be crazy. For a while I thought it was the file encoding and I tried every encoding combo under the sun. Permissions! Got it? Good.

Real Genius + Frozen = Real Frozen

Is Frozen Disney's best since the Disney Renaissance?

To quote Olaf: Nope. I enjoyed the movie, I thought it was good, but I don't think it lives up to all of the superlatives being heaped upon it. A lot of people are saying it was the best Disney film since the Disney Renaissance (generally considered to be the 10 year period of 1989 to 1999) or the best since the Lion King. I enjoyed a lot of the Disney movies since then. There were also some that were meh. But here are some post Renaissance, pre-Frozen movies that I enjoyed more than Frozen:

Fantasia 2000
Lilo & Stitch
Home On The Range (one of the most underrated)
The Princess and the Frog
Winnie the Pooh
Tangled
Wreck-It Ralph

These films, in my opinion had either better artwork, a more well-crafted story, both or other less tangible qualities that I feel make them superior.

There. I just had to put in my two cents. Now go build a snowman.

* Bonus content and potential spoilers:

Here is how I would have made Frozen better:

1) The trolls were a bit unnecessary. They could have replaced them with the ice-cutter folk from the opening scene. I want to see more of those guys. Of course I know why they included the trolls. They're part of Scandinavian folklore, they're cutesy and, of course, the Norway Pavilion in Epcot is riddled with them.

2) We didn't need a bad guy. The story of a rift between two siblings is powerful enough. It would have been even more powerful if we didn't have the bad guy. Hans could have been in the film, he should have just been the wrong guy. And the Duke of Weselton red herring, also unnecessary.

That's my two cents.

I've had it with not-summah

Howard Kremer - Summah Is Coming