MiracleCommerce shopping cart software provides the tool and the frame work that allow web developers and web designers to build fully functional e-commerce websites without reinventing the wheel. Some of our very successful customers include Family Vision Center (www.famvision.com) and New York City Message Bears (www.nycmb.com). MiracleCommerce allows non-profit organizations to collect donations online, without requiring any upfront investment in server or CMS software. MiracleCommerce travel and event management solutions allow event managers to create event website that allows customers to buy travel packages (National Black Arts Festival - http://nbaf.theotgroup.com/store/).

I am currently in the process of upgrading MiracleCommerce to Web 2.0 technology (Key components - ExtJS (www.extjs.com), DWR (www.getahead.org/dwr)). This is a significant technology upgrade that will allow users to manage web stores, much easier then before. Some of the much awaited features include significantly improved search and filtering of data. I don’t want to give away the secret yet however, if you are interested, please see the pre-release screenshots.

I received this in my email today. These crooks have gone to great lengths in creating a website that looks just like Bank of America and I am not quite sure how many innocent consumers have been trapped already. For your reading pleasure, see below:

I am currently working with a major non-profit organization to create a mirror of there current website, which happens to be created with Kintera. Much has been said on the web about the usability of Kintera and my experience is none the better (even though, I am simply trying to use the output produced by Kintera). I have come to realize that there has got to be serious flaws in the software, training process or its usage that produces such bad output. It is very hard for any software to process the website content in any sort of systematic order; I have used a multitude of softwares that claim to make offline copies of website but they all failed miserably. Let me restate - I wasn’t able to make a working offline browsable copy of this website using any commercial software. These software work for most other sites but not for thisKintera produced site.

Anyway, the task that is supposed to take a few hours, took a week to be done correctly. After struggling to stabilize absolute links for a while, I decided to give up and use a technique that I used very recently in a J2EE Project. In this project, I created a PageSnapshotFilter by extending the ServletOutputStream and HttpServletResponseWrapper; this yielded an output filter that allows capturingsnapshots of a WebPage (served by this application)as the user would see it. This allowed to store the captured snapshot for auditing and email the snapshot to the interested parties without having to create it again using String concatenation or any additional template processing.

There are many ways to do the same in the LAMP world; Apache2::Filter comes to mind. Apache2::Filter would probablybe the most logical choice for heavy duty usage (only second to my initial approach of stabilizing links and modifying the mirrored files); after initial investigation, I decided to go on another path:

Turns out, that PHP and mod_rewrite allows you to achieve the same result but much faster (as in wiring it up; Apache2::Filter would win hands down in sheer speed test) and cheaper :-).

Here is how:
1) Configure apache to serve all htm, html, asp, aspx files via filter.php (add others, if needed).

# Site pages
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/(.*\.(htm|html|asp|aspx)) /filter.php [L]

2) Create filter.php by customizing this (filterphp.txt) :

That’s it! After you customize source and target patterns to match your host names (and port), you will have a working mirror website that is an exact replica of the original website.