Use .htaccess to block an IP address

So the other day, one of the websites that I oversee was getting card slammed. Card slamming is when a "hacker" repeatedly tries credit cards on an e-commerce site until they find one that works. This particular person was trying about 80 different credit card. Some of the transactions were going through but I canceled the orders and voided the transactions with the merchant processor. Luckily, Zen Cart can tell you who's on your store and their IP address. So I was able to block the IP addresses of the person or persons card slamming my store.

Add this to your .htacces

order allow,deny
deny from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
deny from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
allow from all

That's it! You can do 1 IP address or 2 or 3 or more. Just to test it, I put my IP address in there and sure enough I wasn't able to access the site. Now of course the "hacker" was using a proxy server to access my website but if you notice the attack and react quickly the "hacker" will probably get discouraged and move on to some other website.

Simple 301 redirect in .htaccess for apache

As a webmaster looking at my "Not Found" links under Web Crawls section of Google's Webmaster Tools I noticed there were dead links. I had already gone through my entire site to make sure there weren't any dead links but for some reason Google was finding dead links. Then it struck me, this was a domain that we purchased from someone else. The dead links were incoming links to pages that no longer existed. I want those incoming links but don't want to have to contact the webmasters of the websites with the incoming links and tell them to change their links. Even if I did, they may not change the links anyway (and what if its an old blog post from some long gone user)?

A "301" redirect is telling search engines that a page or file has permanently moved. This is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

In comes your .htaccess file. A simple 301 redirect telling the browser, robot, spider or whatever that page A is now page B. Here is how:

Add a line in your .htaccess file like this:
Redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.WEBSITE.com/newpage.html

Thats: "Redirect" [space] "301" [space] "/" (directory)"File"(old page thet you want to redirect) [space] "New File" (the new destination page)

This makes it so that when some goes to WEBSITE.com/oldpage.htm they are redirected WEBSITE.com/newpage.html.

You get to keep that incoming link without having to ask someone else to update their code or having to create a page with that exact page name then do a meta refresh (I don't like those anyway).

Zen Cart - The Art or E-commerce

So if you want to sell things online you should probably check out Zen Cart www.zencart.com. Its an open source shopping cart (that means its free). You can run pretty much a whole business with Zen Cart. The only setback is that you would need to have a decent amount of knowledge in regards to php, mysql, css, and file management. If you don't want to deal with setting it up, let me know and ill do it for you (for a small fee of course)!
Her are some examples of stores that run on zencart:
Hypnosis.org
BanyanHypnosisMall.com
Or you can look at the Zen Cart Showcase where they have a bunch of examples of websites that run on Zen Cart.
Now another problem with Zen Cart is that since its free, there inst any instant support if something goes wrong. I recommend signing up for the Zen Cart forum. You can search for your problem and chances are somebody ran into the problem and fixed it. There are a few administrators to the forum and I think they are the developer behind Zen Cart so watch out for posts by Ajeh, DrByte, Kim and Kobra. There are many more helpers in the forums. Everyone tries to help one another.
I have done a couple of installations of Zen Cart on a a few different hosts so if you need help, let me know!