Dear Just X-Cart client,

As part of our server maintenance, we will be performing a range of upgrades and security checks on your server in the next few days. There are a range of changes and enhancements so I will explain them individually. These include:

KERNEL UPGRADE

The kernel on your server will be upgraded this week and a reboot will be scheduled for 10pm AEST on Saturday 30th May to apply the kernel. The reboot should only take a few minutes to perform.

APACHE/PHP UPGRADE-SECURITY ENHANCEMENT

Apache and PHP will be upgraded on all servers that are currently running older versions to Apache 2.2.11 and PHP 5.2.9, some security adjustments to Apache and PHP will be made, including the introduction of Suhosin, a PHP hardening module to the server. Most changes should cause no effect to client sites however there could possibly be a few sites with older scripts etc that may require adjustment. If anyone has any issues please contact us immediately.

SUHOSIN – HARDENED PHP

Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations. It is designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core and on our cPanel servers will tie directly into the Firewall system to block offending users illegally accessing scripts on the server.

We have a well developed ruleset that we have been running and testing on our cPanel hosting servers for some time now and we believe the settings we will be applying will cause no issues to any clients, however if any issues please open a ticket at the helpdesk.

EMAIL SPAM ENHANCEMENTS

In a bid to reduce spam and to enhance email security cPanel has introduced SPF records and Domain Keys to the mail system and we strongly advise all clients to login to cPanel and enable these functions. Details about SPF records can be found at http://www.openspf.org and information on Domain Keys at http://www.dkim.org.

Clients can access and enable these functions by clicking on the Email Authentication link in their email hosting cPanel (X-Mail). See your ‘Welcome email’ for email hosting console link and your username and password.

FTP SECURITY

We have found an increasing amount of websites, in particular insecure PHP websites, being infected with Javascript and other related worms, trojans and hack attempts. A lot of these are caused by insecure scripts, which should be checked and upgraded or secured where possible, however an increasing amount of people are having these sorts of hacks caused via insecure FTP connections.

We strongly advise clients to either set their FTP programs to use secure FTP (FTPS) which is accessible on port or to use SFTP on port 22351 to ensure security of uploaded content. 

Clients will need to check their FTP programs to see what options they have available to them.

Further to this, despite previously recommending Filezilla to clients, we now advise against using Filezilla FTP client as we have seen a number of clients report connection issues. A number of people have issues with Filezilla and the global connection setting when they upload it causes too many simultaneous connections and they get blocked by the firewall.

Try using another FTP client such as:

• CuteFTP
• FireFTP add-on for Firefox Browser
• Fetch for Mac

Kind Regards,

If anyone has any queries or concerns, or find your site experiencing any problems, please do not hesitate to contact us for assistance.

Kind Regards,
Natalie Verhoek
Head of Technical, Data & Training

If you are hungry, you could go to McDonalds - If you are wanting to have some fun, you could go to Disneyland.

Of course, everyone knows who McDonalds and Disneyland are but how did they become so well known? 

 If one needs a hammer, he would go to a hardware store.
If one needs pain killers he would go to the drug store. 

And you may now say in return that everyone knows what hardware and drug stores are for.
But what would you do if you do not know where to look for something?

One option is to just walk along the street and ask the first man you meet to point you the right way.

But, the world of the Internet differs from real life, but there’s something in common.

There are site-giants like: YouTube, FaceBook or eBay on the Internet, just like McDonalds and Disneyland in real life, and everyone goes there and always finds what he expects.
If you don’t know where to go you can always ask Google and it points you in the right direction.

However, a user can surf the web at random for years and never come to your site if no one on the Internet, even Google, knows about it.

And the main question is: how do people know where to go if they need what you sell on-line, who will point them the right way?

And it is SEO you can utilize to carve the visitor’s way from the browser right to your site.

• Thus a distant aim of SEO is to make your site as popular as possible in your industry, like McDonalds is in the restaurant fast food business.
• A more material reason is to let the other know about your site so that people wandering in the Internet can run into your site.
• But the most important goal is to make sure that people looking for something special are told where to go and the place they are directed to is YOUR SITE.

Once you have updated your twitter page, why not add it as a ‘widget’ to your store?

All you have to do is to go to twitter.com/widgets/ and select the appropriate type of site (if its a store, then select ‘other’)

Hit ‘continue’ and you will have two choices : Flash or HTML. I personally select HTML to avoid any plugin problems. 

Hit ‘continue’ and you will be able to copy the code. If you are wanting us to add this to your store, please provide us with the code. This will be a minimum cost of which will be confirmed when job is scheduled in.

‘Happy twittering’

 Within X-Cart, you used to be able to generate an HTML catalogue in order to make the pages Google friendly. However, it limited the ability to design your own index or home page as the index page was overwritten.

However, if you run CDSEO, you can create your own custom designed home page and still have the google friendly generated pages within your store – and never run a generated catalogue again:)

Perfect for a fully customised store that requires a different look on the home page!

SEO – what does it stand for?

People search for some specific information over the Internet and search engines provide the service which supposes the links to the sites that may
contain information you are looking for.

If you want to attract more visitors to your site you should worry about search engines and be well informed about what do they know about your site.

• How do search engines know where is your site and what is your site about?
• How can you make the search systems provide these people with the link to your site?

You have may have already heard of the Search Engine Optimization, the service that many companies offer. Before you make any decision about its usage, let us please explain a little bit what SEO is.

Search Engine Optimization means making the search engines indexing your website most effectively.

SEO is a long and laborious job which consists of several steps, which ensures your site appeal and success to your business. There may be plenty of different approaches in SEO more or less successful, but with regards to the x-cart driven sites we’ve worked out own aproach you may be interested in. We will soon be launching our SEO service – the launch date will be announced on Just X-Cart plus via our newsletter.

Read what the basic steps in SEO are:

W3C and HTML standards

It is well known that a site consist of a useful text (information) and service code (markup or HTML code).
SEO is aimed to help robots get a maximum of useful information from your site while the service code shouldn’t prevent robots doing this at least (and help them at best).

What robots are?

Robots are the programs which are not able to “see” how your site looks like in a browser.
They analyze the contents of your site according to some specific rules, recognizing wholesome information and rejecting auxiliary data.

So, when designing a site webmasters or designers are to follow the rules according to which markups were made so that robots not mixed the useful info up with service code when indexing the site later.

Certain standards were made for the purpose. You can learn more about this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_type_declaration
If you want to improve the accessibility of your page your site needs to follow these rules. You can check if your site follows these rules here: http://validator.w3.org/

So the first thing you should do as regards to SEO is the following: you should make your site compatible with HTML markup standards.
If your site has markup errors and you need our help we will be glad to check your site and correct markup errors if you have any to make your site HTML 4.01 transitional. Thus you can be sure there are no technical obstacles and your site is perceived by robots fully, with no distortions or data loss.

If you need help on checking if your site follows the standards, you can utilize our SEO service: Please email us for more information.

1. From top menu of ‘Mail’ application, select ‘Preferences’ from drop down menu.

2. On Pop Up window, choose ‘Accounts’ tab and click on the ‘ + ‘ symbol to create a new POP account.

3. Enter the relevant details into the fields, using the email address / password that you used to set the email address up on your server.

4. Enter details here – note the incoming mail server – click continue. Select the outgoing mail server – eg. mail.bigpond.com

Enter the details of your pop account - as supplied by your webhost

5. Once the account is set up, it will appear in the left hand column. If you highlight this, you will see the following

Account is now set up. You can now go into 'Advanced' for extra settings

Each store runs off a style sheet which is formatted to reflect the style of your site. If you add a text page and paste directly from Word, you may notice that the page does not look as it should. 

To prevent this from happening, try these easy tips – to ensure the page reflects the site design: 

We are glad to announce that the new X-Cart v4.2.1 and the upgrade kit for upgrading X-Cart v4.2.0 to v4.2.1 are now available for downloading in “File area” and “My Licenses” sections correspondingly of your HelpDesk account at https://secure.qualiteam.biz .

v4.2.1 is a minor bug-fix release which also features improved security.

For the detailed changes description see the CHANGELOG file, which can be downloaded from the “File Area” section of your Support HelpDesk account at https://secure.qualiteam.biz.

For the installation instructions see the the README file, which is included into X-Cart v4.2.1 installation package.

See the UPGRADE.NOTES file in the relative upgrade kit for the upgrade instructions.

If you have any questions or wish for us to assist you, please do not hesitate to contact Just X-Cart

Sometimes on order to assist identify email issues, you may be asked to provide email ‘internet headers’. Here is the process you need to follow in order to supply such information:

Outlook 2003

Option 1

(1) In your email list (folder view), right-click on the actual email in question.
(2) Go down and select Options.
(3) When the box pops up, go to the ‘Internet Headers’ section
(4) copy-n-paste contents of this box into an email or Word doc for forwarding as required.

Or

Option 2

(1) Open the email message.

(2) choose View >> Options.  

(3) When the box pops up, go to the ‘Internet Headers’ section
(4) copy-n-paste contents of this box into an email or Word doc for forwarding as required.

For previous version of Outlook (2002, 2000, 98), the above options will work.

With the exception of Outlook 2003, Outlook displays only the headers, not the full message source.

Beautify your site, at no extra cost!

All the skins are compliant with the W3C standards, have a CSS layout and are optimized for search engines.

X-Cart software has never looked so stylish and professional, straight out-of-the-box.

Use one of the existing skins that come with your software as a fantastic starting point to customising the template to your exact requirements.

New X-Cart skins

 Or, where previously you would spend money on a pre-designed template, you can now instead afford to add on a module, get some custom design work done or enhance your site with a specific feature or function that you really want and need.