Archive for May, 2006

Amazon Web Information Service

Saturday, May 27th, 2006

Everyone knows about the Amazon E-Commerce services and everyone loves it. It’s a simple, too simple really, way of starting your own Amazon affiliate store. Not to mention for gathering information from Amazon. Take a look at Amazon.com and you’ll see why people want that information, they have everything, literally.

Amazon also has another very interesting service, Alexa Web Information Service. Some service highlights:

  • Gather information about Web sites including traffic data, contact info, related links and more.
  • Access an XML-based search index based on Alexa’s Web crawl and incorporate search results into your site or service.
  • Build a Web directory into your site or service using an Alexa enhanced DMOZ-based browse service.
  • Use the Alexa WebMap to gather links-in and links-out information about all pages on the Web and invent wholly new search engine algorithms.

(more…)

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The world now belongs to Skype

Monday, May 22nd, 2006

Calling International from India has always been a … pain to say the least. First off, getting through was impossible. Notice how I say “was” because that was the case in the early and mid 90’s. With the entry of private operators into the field, things got easier because the state monopoly was over. Getting through to an international number is relatively easy today and simple. The only problem is mobile operators take about a week to activate your ISD (I have no idea why). (more…)

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HSBC CPI Payment Gateway Integration

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

I had a very interesting project this week, to integrate the HSBC online payment gateway into a custom built shopping store. I have never done this before and I admitted as much to my clients but I was adamant on learning it so I took up the project. The clients were very understanding and decided to go with me.

As always, I started off completely blank. I didn’t know where to begin really till I found an OsCommerce module for integrating HSBC gateway into an OsC store. After going through the code I was still quite lost because I couldn’t get the hash checking to work. No matter what I did or how many times I read the CPI specification, I couldn’t get it to work, something was wrong. It doesn’t help that HSBC provides no way of testing their payment method without a valid StoreFrontID and a HashKey. (more…)

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