Information Superhighway, Infobaun, and other various sundries

For those of you who routinely tune into my audio stream, my apologies for today. My cablemodem died sometime around 4:00am, central, last night. I didn’t get it swapped out until twelve hours later. I am, however, extremely happy that I did. I’m now surfing at about twice the speed I was.

I’m currently sustaining a 278k/sec download of a linux iso, and am surfing sites (even with excessively large graphics) at no appreciable loss in speed. Time Warner Houston upped their maximum speed to 2.0mb guarenteed sustained, with up to 5.0mb bursts, here recently. I just needed the newer cable modem to take advantage of it. Rock on. Now if they would just up my upstream bandwith, I’d be a much happier camper. heh.

I also did some quick edits of the site, when I discovered mysql giving “too many connections” errors on some documents. An edit of every file fixed that. I removed all calls to my configuration file (which connects to the database, as well) and all mysql_close() statements in all files.

I then did a single include() of my config file at the top of the header file, and a mysql_close() at the bottom of the footer. A single connection that is automatically closed when the page finishes loading. This has not only sped up loading of the site (although it really isn’t noticeable, unless you look at the numbers at the bottom of each page), but it has also reduced the CPU and memory overhead required, and – in turn – has made my hosting provider much happier.

I’m stuck looking for alternate providers for credit card processing, today. We were going to go with Concord EFS, who is owned by First Data (owners of Telecheck). They’ve been in the business for years. Unfortunately, their merchant agreement contract has a clause that would give them lein against our bank account used for processing, and any other bank accounts under our company name.

With that lein, they would have authorization to make withdrawels from our accounts if they believe we owe them money (not with proof.. just if they think we owe them), as well as have the authorization to freeze our accounts, if they believed it neccesary. Needless to say, we elected NOT to process with ConcordEFS, despite their having some of the best rates availible (Discover/AMEX rates were REALLY low).

So, today I’m stuck researching merchant account solutions. Tomorrow I get to make multiple calls to said providers, our hosting provider for our store site, our bank, and our attorney. Getting a decent processor is the last major hurdle in getting our store fully online. After that, it’s just the marketing, and product fulfillment.

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