Shopstix is being built by Abstraktion, a UK based web application company.  Here’s what Abstraktion says about Shopstix.

an eCommerce engine which is flexible but not too bloated. Shop owners can add any custom set of “fields” to describe their products, add “galleries” of product images and even add custom “variations” (such as size, weight, etc). Shopstix then creates a bespoke admin panel around these preferences, to ensure that adding a product to your shop is as effortless as adding a new post to your blog.

I am excited to see what Shopstix does.  In particular, the idea of a bespoke admin panel is intriguing.  This should allow for serious customization so that back end of each store is tailor made to the needs of that store.

Can they compete with WP e-Commerce?  I seriously doubt that their first release will be anywhere near as feature rich as Instinct’s shopping cart.  WP e-Commerce works with numerous gateways, has a bucket load of configurable options and after a couple of years of development is finally more than a plugin for selling the occasional t-shirt or cd from a blog page.  Having observed Instinct’s ongoing struggles to build a true e-Commerce solution for WordPress I know it isn’t as easy as it looks.  Will Shopstix be a serious ecommerce solution?  Only time will tell.

Hope this helps.

Author : Satellite TV (IP: 117.254.157.153 , 117.254.157.153)
E-mail : kiran@gmail.com
URL    : http://www.dishnetwork.com/
Whois  : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=117.254.157.153
Comment:
This is really a very god software, google map this is really great it takes us were ever we want to go

You can see all comments on this post here:
http://www.dewpointproductions.com/seo_blog/local-search/google-map-ny-locksmiths/#comments

We’ve broken the link here, to not give them credit for an already unethical practice.  Now DISH could come back and say well we never authorized this, but lets face it, why else would a company in India be putting this out there.  Certainly, someone at DISH authorized it and is even paying to have their link spammed to the World Wide Web.

Way to go DISH, you just ensured that we’ll never be fans.

I returned to the office today after being away on vacation to find a letter and decal from Google recognizing our company as a “Favorite Place on Google.”  The letter reads in part“Because you’re so popular, we’re enclosing a window decal that shows customers you’re a ‘Favorite Place on Google.’ The sticker includes a special bar code that potential customers may scan with cameras on their phones.  Then they can see your business listing on Google, read and write reviews, and add you as a favorite right there.”

There’s only one problem,  after a Google employee Brian B apparently lied lacked the information necessary to give an accurate answer to queries about the problem back in November about how there was a bug keeping web site design and marketing firms from showing up; Google employee Joel H of the “Geo Consumer Operations Team” has now admitted in the same thread as Brian B that the manipulation of Web firm listings in search is intentional.

I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today.

Matt McGee, over at Search Engine Land, points out that nearly identical searches with the exception of the word “in” return entirely different results.

Here’s a screen shot of the results for Website Design in Mountain View Ca

Do the same search but drop the word “in” and sure enough the local 7 pack disappears Google and all.

Mike Blumenthal, who writes one of the definitive blogs on Google Maps, has posted some good questions that I would love to hear answers for from Google even if they did treat themselves the same as their treating everyone else with a listing for Website Design

If you have a business name that could cause the search engine for Google local similar confusion, you should check to see if you’re showing up for terms you don’t want to appear for.  One easy way to do this is to go into your Google Local Business Center and see what terms your getting impressions for.  You can also, of course, look at your analytics.

You can see from the Adwords on the right that they do in fact know my location is in Lakewood, Colorado.  So what gives?  Other than a bug / coding error on Google’s part there’s really no explanation.

What’s the most interesting Google Local Blooper you’ve seen?

To deal with the trackback spam go to Settings > Discussion and make sure that “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” is unchecked. If someone wants to link to a page or post on the site they can grab the URL and paste it in. Doing this prevents spambots from blitzing your site with trackbacks.

To deal with the comment spam make sure that you have activated Akismet, it’s one of the two plugins that comes with WP by default and it is really good at catching over 90% of the spam. For example, on my blog out of the last 4861 comments I’ve had 4,713 spams caught by Akismet, it let through 148 legitimate comments, and missed only one with an overall accuracy rate of 99.589%. That’s good stuff.

The other plugin I recommend for stopping spam comments is SI Captcha Ani-Spam by Mike Challis. This puts a captcha on the login and/or comments.