A boom in Internet businesses could open hundreds of thousands of jobs in Britain within five years, a Google chief has claimed.

Philipp Schindler, the London based vice-president of Google Europe, predicted that despite the economic downturn 365,000 jobs could be on the cards by 2015 as more online firms emerge and grow.

Daily Mail article

Could new Internet businesses such as e-commerce websites start a new wave of employment in the UK, generating thousands of new jobs based around these businesses?

This is what Philipp Schindler, the London based vise-president of Google Europe seems to be suggesting.

If you’re starting up an e-commerce website or would like to do so and need some advice, feel free to contact us for advice and a quote on how much it would cost to get your new e-commerce website or idea off the ground!

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Rapid Web is happy to announce the recent launch a t-shirt website based solidly on our main and highly, flexible e-commerce system.

This website offers a full e-commerce experience for both the visitors browsing the advanced front-end shopping basket/cart system, and for the client who can utilise an in-depth, customisable administration system. This administration system allows the client to add and modify products that display on the public areas of the website and to manage the orders received through the site including orders taken via any number of payment gateway systems that can integrate with our e-commerce system.

The integrated payment systems included in this website are the SagePay payment gateway (previously known as ‘Protx’) and the ever popular PayPal, though our e-commerce system’s checkout can easily be integrated with any common or even obscure method of electronic payment.

As well as the background code that powers this website, Rapid Web also created the custom, bespoke website design for this Banksy t-shirts website. The design emphasises the details commonly associated with graphic artists such as Banksy himself. If you wish to view this custom design in its full glory, take a look at our portfolio page or the Banksy t-shirts .net website!

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3. Grab a t-shirt for your child from the recently launched ‘Kids t-shirts’ website

If you want a t-shirt for your child, or maybe your young one wants to pick our a t-shirt of their choice – this brand new kids t-shirts website may be the place to look.

This websites for young t-shirt buyers, is powered by our primary e-commerce system. This e-commerce website system can be highly enhanced and modified to fit the bespoke and ever changing requirements of our clients. For example, this system integrates a custom and unique product page specifically designed for the sale of the particular products which suit a kids t-shirt website. The basket/checkout system has also been customised and simplified using AJAX technologies to provide a more user-friendly flow to the ‘product to basket’ functionality, which helps increase immediate conversions and sales.

The design of this website has also been created uniquely by Rapid Web for the kids t-shirts website. It focuses on a bright, bold and colourful design that is designed to appeal to the targeted kids and parents audience. This unique styling and design have been applying to associated WordPress installation which allows the client to post regular kids t-shirt news and announce the launch of new kids t-shirts and related products and designs.

If you’re interested in a bespoke e-commerce website and/or WordPress powered news/blog system, please feel free to contact us directly for a quote!

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This e-commerce website is based on our custom in-house e-commerce system, which allows our clients to administrate their products and site options via a secure, custom and bespoke administration suite. This e-commerce system can be customised with new functionality as desired by the client in question. For example, the Something Geeky site shows custom hover effects on product selection, an AJAX powered ‘add to basket’ functionality, heavily customised product pages and a tight integration with a custom themed WordPress installation for covering information about geeky news and new geek t-shirt product releases.

The main site and the WordPress installation are covering by a fully custom ‘Something Geeky’ theme and website design which is fully unique to the needs of the client. This design and layout is custom designed to appeal primarily to the geek/gaming audience that the products listing on the website currently target.

Something Geeky is a custom e-commerce solution, WordPress installation and full website design and theme bespoke to the needs of the client. If you’re interested in a new website that covers any of these area, feel free to contact us right here!

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This website uses our in-house e-commerce system to power the online e-commerce shopping experience and the WordPress blogging system to power the Banksy News section.

This Banksy t-shirt website is a great example of how our in-house e-commerce system can be heavily customised, added-on to and made bespoke for the needs of the particular system. In this case, the charity choice during the basket and checkout stages is a custom piece of functionality that has been integrated into our system. This is shown on the front-end of the system as part of the customer experience, as well as in the administration to keep record of required charity donations based on each Banksy t-shirt which is sold.

If you want, please go ahead and browse one or more of these awesome Banksy t-shirts!

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With one of the biggest features of smart phones being their near anywhere web browsing, the mobile website market is every increasing. Going to a website on a phone which has not be optimised for mobile devices can be a huge pain to navigate well and could easily turn off your visitor (and potential customers), while an optimised website can make the experience a pleasant and swift experience.

In terms of mobile websites, there are two main types.

• Optimisation of an existing website

This mainly involves ensuring the website displays well on mobile devices, and tends to revolve around changing the styling for mobile devices which not performing any major functionality changes.

• Development of a full mobile site

Such development creates a bespoke, fantastically user-friendly experience, designed specifically for smart phone users. Such developments can be specifically designed for touch interfaces and can focus on quickly getting mobile users the information they require and directing their attention to the areas of your site that will let them enquiry or purchase the product/service your company is offering.

Without a doubt a fully fledged and specifically designed mobile site is the optimal solution for you and the best experience for your customers.

If you’re increasing in optimising your website for mobile phones or indeed, creating a bespoke mobile experience for your site, please feel free to get in touch!

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There have been a few cases where previously defined function errors have cropped up when adding a pre made system to a custom developed application. This is has been most prominent with Word press or any system which has generically named functions. It’s often unavoidable to prevent function clashes as it requires knowing any other external system definitions which of course isn’t always possible.

Keeping generic function names in a class is a possible option to reduce the problem; however this brings about the requirement of instantiating a class before being able to use the function. Another way to get around this issue is to use the scope resolution operator to statically call functions or even properties. In PHP this can be achieved using the scope resolution operator, otherwise known as the double colon operator.

Example:

class foobar {

public static function call_me() {}

}

Usage:

foobar::call_me();

The scope resolution operator should be used wisely. It is often best practice to only use static methods when they are stateless in nature, i.e. basic helper functions that do not modify any external state beyond their own contained execution.

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“The royal wedding has broken records for the biggest ever live streaming audience online, according to a internet firms.

…

The BBC website meanwhile wobbled under the strain this morning as huge numbers of Britons accessed its coverage.

Visitors were intermittently greeted with an error message saying the website was experiencing “abnormal traffic” around the climax of the ceremony after 11am.

A spokesman said: “We are experiencing some technical issues with BBC Online due to the sheer weight of traffic, which may cause the site to be slower than normal in some cases.”

Other major websites appeared to be cope with the royal wedding, an event that was widely expected to break traffic records.

YouTube’s live stream, which was expected to attract 400 million viewers, ran smoothly.

…

Akamai, a major traffic carrier, said that its own record of 1.6 million concurrent live streams during the World Cup was broken.

And Livestream, which provided online video for the Associated Press and CBS, also said the royal wedding was its most popular stream ever.

It is likely to take several days before a complete picture of how many watched the royal wedding online emerges, however.

Network upgrades by mobile operators along the royal wedding route were successful in ensuring that well-wishers were able to call, text, tweet and update Facebook.

O2 and Vodafone installed temporary network base stations around Hyde Park and St James’ Park to double capacity. A spokesman for O2 said it was braced for 65 million royal wedding pictures to be posted online from smartphones.”

The Telegraph

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The inventor of the web has said that governments must act to preserve the principle of net neutrality.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC that legislation may be needed if self-regulation failed.

He been asked by the UK government to negotiate an agreement on an open internet between service providers and content firms like the BBC and Skype.

Sir Tim would prefer self-regulation by the internet industry, but progress has been slow.

“If it fails the government has to be absolutely ready to legislate,” he said.

“It may be that the openness of the internet, we should just put into law.”

Net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally, has been a controversial issue in the United States and is now moving up the political agenda in the UK.

Net neutrality is an important issue in Internet related politics. Without net neutrality, Internet service providers could offer packages in which certain online services, such as video streaming websites, e-commerce websites or certain web applications have increased priority over other web services.

The concept of net neutrality is such that all data traffic on the Internet is treating in an equal manner.  This is already becoming an issue in the case of Internet services providers which shape traffic of certain types. This is often done to curb data usage for high-use customers. However, when other traffic is prioritised and ISP to Internet/web company partnerships come into existence, this could mean that we see ‘packages’ of Internet access which allow faster access to certain websites while leaving other sites (who may not be able to partner with ISP financially) out in the cold.

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HSBC have recently updated the SSL certificates on their payment gateway system. However it seems they did not provide the intermediate certificates for the certificate authority they used. This leaves the job of updating the CA bundles up to HSBC’s clients. The following advice refers to resolving the issue on a Linux server.

Step 1 – Check the problem is definitely related to an SSL Certificate mismatch

To do this, it is best to simply request the main secure-epayment API via curl. Running the following command will suffice.

curl https://www.secure-epayments.apixml.hsbc.com

If this issue is present, you will likely see a message such as the one below. If you do not see this message or one similar, the issue is likely to be unrelated and we recommend you contact HSBC’s epayments support line to resolve the issue.

 curl: (60) SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details:
 error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed
 More details here: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html

 curl performs SSL certificate verification by default, using a "bundle"
  of Certificate Authority (CA) public keys (CA certs). The default
  bundle is named curl-ca-bundle.crt; you can specify an alternate file
  using the --cacert option.
 If this HTTPS server uses a certificate signed by a CA represented in
  the bundle, the certificate verification probably failed due to a
  problem with the certificate (it might be expired, or the name might
  not match the domain name in the URL).
 If you'd like to turn off curl's verification of the certificate, use
  the -k (or --insecure) option.

Step 2 – Update the CA bundle on your server

Obviously it is possible to remove the verification of the SSL certificate, but this is heavily not recommended due to potential negative security implications. To update the CA bundle file from the curl website, use the following commands. Note that may have to adjust to certs path mentioned to conform to the distribution and configuration of your operating system. Also, it is recommend to back up any existing ca-bundle file and any related configuration.

 cd /etc/pki/tls/certs/
 wget http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem
 mv cacert.pem ca-bundle.crt

The file available from the CURL site shown above is generated weekly from the latest Mozilla certs, so should be reasonably up to date with all existing certificate authorities.

Step 3 – Test the CA bundle update has resolved the issue

This is merely a case of rerunning the curl command from step 1 mentioned previously. If the update has been successful you should now see the following response from HSBC (or similar) indicating a secure connection has been established.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <EngineDocList>
  <EngineDoc>
   <MessageList>
    <MaxSev DataType="S32">6</MaxSev>
    <Message>
     <AdvisedAction DataType="S32">16</AdvisedAction>
     <Audience DataType="String">Merchant</Audience>
     <Component DataType="String">CcxXmlInput.A</Component>
     <ContextId DataType="String">CcxXmlInput</ContextId>
     <DataState DataType="S32">1</DataState>
     <FileLine DataType="S32">793</FileLine>
     <FileName DataType="String">CcxXmlInstance.cpp</FileName>
     <FileTime DataType="String">13:30:24Jul 14 2009</FileTime>
     <ResourceId DataType="S32">8</ResourceId>
     <Sev DataType="S32">6</Sev>
     <Text DataType="String">The HTTP method received is not valid.  Only POST is accepted.</Text>
    </Message>
   </MessageList>
  </EngineDoc>
 </EngineDocList>

Step 4 – Restart any dependant services

This step may or may not be required depending on your software and/or configuration. You may need to restart any services which are dependent on the updated CA bundle.

For example, the following commands are commonly used to restart the Apache 2 webserver.

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

/etc/init.d/apache restart

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

I hope this article aids any server administrators currently experiencing issues due to the recent HSBC epayments SSL certificate update.

Feel free to discuss this issue further in the comments section below.

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