How to install Prestashop on mysql 5.7 or newer

TL;DR version: here’s how you can solve the Prestashop installation error “SQL error on query Invalid default value for ‘last_connection_date’”. If you are installing a Prestashop CMS for your e-commerce needs on a server that is configured with a mysql backend with version numbers 5.7, or any of its newer versions, you might get stuck

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Ahrefs bots are eating your bandwidth ? Here’s how to block them

The site ahrefs.com can purportedly tell any site owner, for prices starting from 99$ / month, who links to them from where, and also provide site owners with other seemingly significant and meaningful data about visitor activity. The problem is, they use software bots to crawl sites, and THOSE BOTS CLICK ON LINKS in your site,

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Smarty template tricks for OG:tags with international charsets

TL;DR version: if you use opencart or prestashop and your shares on facebook don’t look good, you have product images missing or product descriptions missing, read the article completely, to learn how to properly og: tag your templates. – Some of my Prestashop and Opencart customers, especially French and eastern-europeans use in their product and

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Trick to use against idiots who try to hack your site

TL:DR version: some examples of how some lifewaster hacker-wannabes try to gain unauthorised access to sites and blogs and how you can simply and effectively block them — Obviously, some people have too much time on their hands, and don’t appreciate life enough in order to do something useful with theirs, so they spend hours

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Getting more exposure for your articles from already existing visitors

One of the challenges of every blogger is obviously, bringing traffic to the blog, but most bloggers using the “generally accepted” methods for doing that, forget that there are simple, policy-compliant, easy-to-implement, and easy to overlook solutions. While some of the social media sharing specialists like addit, sharethis, and others, do offer some form of

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How to add a feedburner subscription popup to your blogger blog

The Blogger platform, operated by internet giant Google, is actually a quite complete blogging solution, and currently millions of bloggers use it to publish anything from poetry to rants to tech news ans gossip, basically, if any topic is decent and useful, you can probably find a .blogspot blog about that topic. But even though

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Revert to older version of Yahoo Mail

If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of unhappy Yahoo Mail users who believe that the new interface forcefully implemented and forced on users by Yahoo, is much more of a hinderence in the way of accomplishing anything meaningful via e-mail, then an improvement, you’ve probably tried to change how the interface looks, googled

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Automate your blogging tasks with free online services – part III. – You have set up a feed with feedburner. Now what ?

You have set up a feed with feedburner. Now what ? In the previous post in this multipost series (see part I and part II. here) I have presented the challenges of automating some of the repetitive blogging tasks that any serious or professional blogger is faced with, and in today’s post, I’ll try to

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Automating your blogging activities with free online services – Part II – using feedburner to automate your blogging activities

In my previous post about automating your online blogging activities, I’ve highlighted some of the challenges that any blogger that loves efficiency is faced with, and given a general description of what are some of the tools that can be used to automate some of the repetitive tasks, such as twitter, facebook, feedburner, networkedblogs, google

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