RE: Go to checkout only if login is successful

[Greg Evans <raisplin@rcn.com>]

******    message to minivend-users from Greg Evans <raisplin@rcn.com>     ******

on 3/2/99 12:56 AM, Thompson-Jordan was rumored to have said...

>******    message to minivend-users from "Thompson-Jordan" 
><Thompson-Jordan@mindspring.com>     ******
>
>Hmmmmm......
>
>Though I empathize with some of your frustration with Minivend, your
>choice to act like those whose behaviour you don't like strikes me as
>..... well .....

I would like to say that while minivend appears to be a great product 
epecially at the price it is offered for <g> and I intend to continue 
developing my site with it, just the install process is _extremely_ 
frustrating, at least for a minivend newbie.  I believe it took me about 
3 days to get it installed _after_ I subscribed to the list, and before 
that, I had tried to install it at least 10 times.  Unfortunately the 
docs are not as good as what minivend itself seems to be.  What threw me 
off the most was the seemingly redundant questions during the install 
process and the fact that the installer does not (at least for me) set up 
the directory and file permissions correctly on install, which makes the 
setup only that much more frustrating.

Looking at the frames pages for minivend frames/left.html for example I 
see:

     <TR><TD VALIGN=top [var TABLEFG] ALIGN=right width=100%><A 
HREF="[area scan
         di=category
         df=yes
         dl=Renaissance]"><FONT SIZE=1 FACE=ARIAL,HELVETICA
style="text-decoration:none"><B>Acupuncture&nbsp;</FONT></A><BR></TD></TR>

now I know how to change these to achieve a desired effect of my own 
personal categories, but looking at the documentation on 'One-Click 
Searches'  I see some explanations of what things are as follows:

     di  mv_dict_limit 
     df  mv_dict_fold
     dl  mv_dict_look

ok, so (not so obviously) 

mv_dict_limit appears to tell minivend what field in the db to search, at 
least that is how I am reading it          

mv_dict_fold I have no clue what this is for

and  mv_dict_look appears to tell minivend what string of text to look 
for within the db field that was chosen

Now after searching the docs I find that :

mv_dict_limit  Automatically set the limiting string (mv_dict_end) to be 
one character greater than the mv_look variable at the character position 
specified....

This means absolutely nothing to a non-programmer

mv_dict_fold seems to do the exact same thing as mv_dict_case, except the 
mv_dict_fold is ignored unless mv_dict_look is defined..it says it is the 
reverse sense from mv_dict_case, theyappear to do exactly the same thing 
to me, except one requires an extra variable

mv_dict_look: The string at which to begin matching in a dictionary based 
search

seems to me this could have been metter written as somethign more like

mv_dict_look: what you are looking for 
     usage: mv_dict_look=String_you_want_to_find
     or               dl=String_you_want_to_find

I am only making that example from what I can gather from the docs, can 
someone either tell me if that would be interpereted correctly, or if I 
am mistaken

>And, comparing this list to those for VMS, Unix, Linux, Roxen, etc. Well,
>I took a survey of Minivend users and got about 50-60 responses. 

One of which was mine :)

>Of those,
>about half had ever finished a Minvend site. You can extrapolate total
>users yourself. I think that VMS, Unix, Linux, Roxen have a little larger
>user base. 

Makes sense to me then that if a application (in this case) has a small 
user base the users would _want_ to help each other out as much as 
possible.  For instance, I am using FileMakerPro to maintain the database 
that is being created for my site and since I don't have a clue how to do 
what I want to do with minivend, I jumped online and found a Filemaker 
person that created some calculations in FileMaker that will, by the time 
the database is done save me prolly 50-60 hours of work.  The price for 
the 6 hours he spent writing the complex calculations? $0  (Hurray for me)

>On top of that, my impression is that many Minivenders are
>consultants or hosting companies who use Minvend to add value to their
>services, hence their knowledge is their value.

Well, I won't voice my opinion on consultants (nor will I prolly get much 
help after this post), but as for the hosting companies, if I thought 
that I might need to use a hosting company because the software was too 
difficult or because the lack of support for it by the users of it 
(especially free software), I would go BUY a commercial package before I 
ever hired a consultant or used a hosting company, remember this is all 
my opinion, and not a personal attack on anyone...

>There is a hokey thing called the Golden Rule and I think it is at the
>heart of the Free in Free Software.

I don't think so, NetBSD mac68k by no means has a large userbase IMO, 
however of the 350 or so people that are on the mailing list for it, I 
have never failed to get an adequate response or step by step 
instructions on how to do something that I have needed to know how to do, 
as an example on one of my old macintosh LCII's running NetBSD, the 
ethernet card just would not work, one of the people on the list took the 
time to work on writing custom drivers for my particular card 
(unsuccessfully, but that's not the point), we corresponded via email 
(cc'ed to the list) for quite sometime, and eventually after repeated 
failures, he had me call the card manufacturer, since I wasn't sure what 
information I was looking for, I gave him the phone number and he called, 
and then went back to work, for 1 person's needs, all this on top of his 
regular full-time job, and he was pumping test drivers out to me 
sometimes as often as once per hour, now that is what I call support :)


Now, in closing I will say that the responses I have gotten from this 
list and the people on it who have mailed me directly have been excellent 
and I would like to see it remain that way.  At the same time I think 
that the docs need to be in as close to 'layman's terms' as possible, and 
I would love to see code examples posted to the list as well.

This is just my $.02, take it as you will...

Greg
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