We are pleased to announce the release of our latest shipping manifest automation extension, Royal Mail Despatch Express for Magento.

Our shipping extensions help store owners reduce the amount of time they spend shipping their orders and automatically print hundreds of labels each day. Our first automated shipping extension for Magento was UKMail, followed by our DPD and Interlink extensions which are now the only Geopost approved UK DPD and Interlink extensions for Magento.

After requests for a Royal Mail Despatch Express Magento extension, we started to develop our latest extension. Now released for public use.

Our Royal Mail Despatch Express Magento extension allows you to automatically print shipping labels to your Royal Mail label printers, retrieve tracking information back from Despatch Express into Magento and email it out to your customers automatically, using your own branded Magento email templates.

Additionally, our Royal Mail Consignment Recovery Console (screen shot below) allows you to see messages sent back from Despatch Express direct from your Magento admin panel, such as "Label printed" or "Label printer out of paper". It is also possible to cancel labels and re-print labels all from within your Magento admin panel.

Other features include: Print labels on remote networked printers, overwrite shipment weight per shipment, fully compatible with Magento's native shipping pricing matrix aswell as the most popular third party shipping price matrices.

A full list of features can be found on the extension page here and a Live Demo can be found here.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

After struggling for a while to find a Fedora driver for a Kodak ESP 7250, 7200 or any other similar series of Kodak printer, the best found was a .deb package. Running Fedora meant I would have to convert the .deb package to .rpm using alien or similar or extracting the files and installing manually. So I did that. To make it easier for others on the same mission, below is a link of the PPD file so it does not matter which brand of Linux you have, this should work for you.

Just download and extract. Copy the usr/ directory to /usr on your machine, and then install the PPD file by installing a printer manually and select Provide PPD file. Your option may not read exactally the same as this, though should be close. If you don't copy the usr/ directory first the PPD file installation will error.

Kodak ESP 5,6 and 7 series Linux driver PPD file

Enjoy

Something a web developer can not go without; a list of state codes. With that in mind, we thought we would share the list we use.

For convenience, we have provided it both in MySQL format and CSV format.

US and Canadian state codes in .CSV format
US and Canadian state codes in .SQL format

Enjoy.

GoDaddy offer a domain 'backorder' service that takes the hassle out of waiting for domains to drop or go up for sale. Around two years ago I started to watch the .com version of a .co.uk domain used for a private project that I was developing and rebranding for public use. I set a calendar appointment to remind me when the domain was due to expire, only to have a different machine 6 months later with a fresh calendar. A month or two after the expiration point I remember the domain and looked it up - it had been renewed.

The second time I looked the domain up, I did so on GoDaddy's domain search. I was offered a 'backorder' service on the domain for £12 GBP ($19 USD). The fee gets you the service for one year. I decided to give it a try for one year and after that point, give up if they domain was not in my possession.

What is included in GoDaddys Backordering Service?

At the time of purchase, my £12 got me the below.

• GoDaddy Auctions Membership
• DomainAlert(R) Pro Monitoring
• Domain Registration fee if Domain Expires

Part of me considered the above to be good value, though the cynical part of me brushed it off as mostly bulked up sales pitch. After-all, what are the changes the domain would even change let alone end up for sale on GoDaddy's very on auction listings?

A year on and I had an email from GoDaddy telling me the domain had been updated (renewed for another year + DNS updated). I deleted the mail and considered the domain lost as until now the domain had just sat dormant without even as much as a holding page.

Forward a month and I receive another email from GoDaddy telling me the domain has been added put up for auction with them and that they have automatically placed an opening bid of $10. If my bid was beaten, I would be advised. I was sent a link to the GoDaddy auction pages. Two weeks later and I get an email saying I won the auction.

Nice. Seems like a fair deal on all parties - I get the domain I had been following for two years, the previous owners get their requested openning bid on auction.

To Summerise

GoDaddy fulfilled their end of the deal; I have them £12 and they got the domain I have previously failed to get myself.

Overall, I'm happy with the service and would use it again. That being said, I do wonder if the domain was for sale elsewhere such as Sedo, would GoDaddy have picked it up from the name servers and let me know? If it had expired, would they have grabbed it for me in time?

If you have used GoDaddy's Backingordering service, or another backordering service - let us know how you found the experience. I'd be interested to know if I just hit it lucky in this case or if many of their backorders end up fulfilled.

We have a vacancy for a junior web developer to join our small team of developers based in Bristol.

Someone Like You?
Do you aspire to be an elite website ninja? Yes? Then you are probably destined to be part of the Mad Capsule Media Team. You should also be the following ....

1. Logically minded
2. An eye for detail
3. Able and ready to solve problems on your own
4. Happy to speak to customers over the phone, on email and in person in a first line support manner.
5. Your interest level in the internet rates high/unhealthy
6. A working knowledge of common web technologies such as Apache, PHP, MySQL, Ajax, XML, FTP, and so forth
7. Previous experience writing PHP. Hobby projects are enough proof for us

A Career Stepping Stone
Wow, the web development world really is competitive these days, right? Gaining access to it can be tricky, but not for a website ninja such as yourself. If you fit the profile above, give us a call - maybe we need you more than you need us.

What Does An Junior Website Ninja Do?
Code PHP, write SQL, own a problem(in both senses of the word own), search Google, learn to code better PHP, learn to write better SQL, search Google a little less, assist clients in a first line support role.

If you can do any of the following, we might employ you and pretend we know what they mean:

• Administration of Linux without a GUI. Or any LAMP experience in general. Use of common Linux editors are always handy:VI, VIM, PICO etc.
• Able to produce valid clean HTML, understanding that to make valid HTML does not require 30 different variant CSS files, or the most bizarre z-index minus percent floating inline margins known to man (although...)
• Ajax, we like the Ajax, also we've got a sneaky love for Python
• Experience of: Magento, Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress , or the next big thing (no it's not Googlewave)
• CakePHP, Zend, Symphony, any other PHP framework

Whilst we appreciate ingenuity, we don't want people claiming they can do things they can't; don't pretend, we're not as stupid as we may seem. Claiming you can turn HTML into beer will just be disappointing for all. Equally claiming you know more than you do, wont help anybody either. At the end of the day, we're after somebody full of tenacity, who's a little bit addicted to the internet, specifically web development.
If you think web development sounds cool, because you once saw a web developer driving one of those white audi A3s and a pair of cool thick rimmed glasses, then please don't bother to apply.

On the other hand, if you like the idea of getting greasy with some PHP, and perhaps bake a cake then please apply ! So....

Time To Inject Your CV into our Data Feed
Not found yourself a backdoor into our internal systems yet? It's O.K, plenty of time for that. Meanwhile, email a copy of your CV with a cover letter to jobs a~t madcapsule.co.uk (Please feel free to include commercial or hobby examples of your work and your desired salary).

Not checked your email in the last 3 minutes while you were reading this advert? This job is probably not for you.

NO AGENCIES PLEASE, WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF GARLIC & WOODEN STEAKS

AGENCIES PLEASE READ: In our previous job adverts we have requested no agencies. Clearly we are wasting our time as you seem to ignore this request. If its inevitable agencies will contact us, then fine, however please send your candidates C.V's plus their expected salaries to the email above in the same way non agency applicants would. Please do not call us or email us to arrange a chat so that we can touch base. We are have touched enough bases.