Getting started with Organise - Creating an order, generating the invoice / delivery note

Here's how to enter the details of an order into Organise and generate paperwork in just a few clicks.

The process is very similar if using the 'checkout' (point of sale) interface.

1. Click the 'New Order' button or use File > New > Order or cmd-N

2. Add a title and select a status

3. Click the 'Billing' tab.  For an existing customer (or if you're not sure whether it's an existing customer) click 'Select Contact' and search for their name, postcode, whatever.  For a new customer, click 'New Contact' and paste in their details.  You can use the 'Paste' button to paste the whole name and address into the separate fields.

4. If the delivery address is the same as the billing one, skip to 5.  Otherwise repeat 3 in the Delivery tab.

5. If the items ordered are already in your inventory ('Items') then select them using the 'Select from Items' button.  Otherwise you can add an item 'Adhoc'. (which will not add the item to your Items list).

6. Click through to the 'Financial details' tab. Press the 'Calculate' button to add up the total of the order.   Enter a shipping amount if applicable. If the full amount has been paid, click 'Tender full amount'.  You can enter a part-payment using 'Add payment'

7. Choose a template (you may like to customise the templates first - use 'Edit Templates'). Click 'Generate' to put the Order details into the chosen Template.  You can print this or save as pdf for emailing or to keep a copy. If you press the 'Save PDF' button, the pdf will be attached to the order, find it by clicking back to the 'Details' tab.

8. Use other templates (you can create your own) to generate other paperwork - delivery note for example.

Press release - OSX productivity app receives facelift

I'd like to introduce you to Clipassist.

It's not a clipboard history but easy access to frequently-used bits of text, which it handles as plain-text.

I wrote it for my own productivity. While using any other app I can simply hit an F key and cmd-V and in two keystrokes I've pasted a block of frequently-used text with no formatting issues.

It's been available to everyone else for a while for free. I've recently given it a facelift as well as some useful new features (eg searchbox, New from clipboard) and released version 3.2 to the web (still free) and to the App Store (a mere 1.99)

Using canonical href to exclude duplicates from your xml sitemap

Here's the problem. Scrutiny is finding the same page on your site twice, each with a different url, and including both in your sitemap.

Duplicates in your xml sitemap may not be such a problem according to Google.

However, the same article explains that Google like to know which version of your url they should rank and which page they shouldn't.

The canonical href is the answer. Here is the explanation from Google, but in short, you need to insert a meta tag like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://peacockmedia.co.uk" />

This line means 'this is the url I'd like you to rank for this content'. (The page at the url given should obviously have the same content.)

From version 4.3, Scrutiny will pick up this canonical href. You'll find it listed in the SEO table but the column may be way over to the right, or you may need to switch it on in Preferences > Views. Note (as with any of the columns in Scrutiny)  if you're interested in this column you can move it by dragging:

 You can see in the screenshot above that the index page in this example now has the canonical href. After re-crawling the site, the problem at the start of this article has gone away. Scrutiny's Sitemap tab now only excludes pages where canonical (if present) doesn't match the url of the page. When I export my XML sitemap, only the http://peacockmedia.co.uk  version will be included.

Note that Scrutiny will exclude pages according to canonical href in version 4.3.1 and higher

Find duplicate content (same content, different url) in your website using Scrutiny

[updated 24 Jun 2019]

Duplicate content on your website is sometimes said to harm your search engine optimisation. It may not be such a serious problem as this article explains.

Here's how to check for duplicate content on your site using Scrutiny.  Integrity Pro also has this functionality and will look much the same.

1. First scan your site. If your site isn't already in the sites list, press 'New' and type your starting url. Press 'Next' to see the default settings, press 'Next' again to accept those settings. Press 'Go' beside 'Check for broken links'.

2. When the crawl has finished, switch to the SEO tab

3. Switch the 'Filter' to 'Pages with possible duplicates'

You'll now see possible duplicates in the main view. To see a list of the pages that Scrutiny thinks are duplicates for a particular url, double-click it to open the page inspector.

In this example, the problem has arisen because scrutiny has found links to the same page in two different forms - peacockmedia.co.uk/clipassist  and peacockmedia.co.uk/clipassist/index.html

Dealing with duplicates

If you want to deal with this problem, use canonical meta tag in your pages

Categorising your items in Organise

Organise v7.1 adds categories to Items. Items can be in one or more categories, or none. If you don't need to use categories then just ignore the categories box and all will work as before.

1. Categorising your items

You can type a category into individual items. For more than one category, separate using a comma:  

Alternatively, you can set the category for more than one item by selecting them (hold down shift to select more than one item in the table, use the search box to find your items, ctrl-click or right-click to call this context menu): 

Note that you can  remove multiple items from a category using the same method. To remove a category completely, choose it from the Filter box, select all items in the list and use the Remove menu item.

2. Using categories

The filter drop-down box will contain all the categories that you have entered. Simply select a category to see all items in that category. Alternatively you can type the category into the search box:

When adding an Item to an Order, you can type a category into the search box:

Reports that work on your inventory can now be tweaked to select items from a category:

Productivity improvements in Integrity and Scrutiny

Over the years the web crawling engine that's shared by Integrity and Scrutiny has become faster, more efficient, more accurate and free of problems. It does what it does really well.

But the interface hasn't kept up; it displays its results and then you're on your own. Support calls have been about what people want to do next:

"Where is this link that it's reporting?"

"I only want to copy that URL but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do it"

I hope that the new version 4.2 will help with such tasks. Useful functions such as 'Copy URL', 'Visit', 'Highlight' and the exciting new 'Locate' function can be found via context menus, buttons, keyboard shortcuts and menus.

First of all, the 'by link' view is an expandable view, meaning that the list of pages that the link appears on can more intuitively be seen from that view without having to open the link inspector:

The link inspector is improved. You can still double-click in its table to either visit or highlight (according to your preferences) but you can now also pop up a context menu with a number of options, or use the new buttons to visit, highlight or locate:

The Locate function is a big help in those situations where you're not quite sure how the crawler has found a certain page - maybe it's an old page you thought you'd orphaned. Previously it was possible to trace the path but it was time-consuming. Now you can call up a list of the clicks required from your starting point to the link in question:

These useful functions are available from context menus - right-click or command-click the link or page to pop up a menu:

The new versions of Integrity and Scrutiny containing these features are available for download:

http://peacockmedia.co.uk/scrutiny/

http://peacockmedia.co.uk/integrity/

And on the Mac App Store shortly.

Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors

I've just seen this wonderful graphic showing the factors which influence your search engine ranking with an indication of how each is weighted (and which ones work against you).

For the large version complete with lots of explanation.

Scrutiny will be able to help you with many of these things.