Ever had a user register on your blog and not really been 100% on whether they’re a real person or just another annoying spam bot? Most of the time you can tell the difference pretty easily, but every now and again you get one that looks normal but just seems a little too odd to be genuine.
Well if you’re just as paranoid as me, you could always double check them against stopforumspam.com. I’ve actually discovered that a couple of my very own subscribers were known spam bots by checking them against the stopforumspam.com website.
Remember it’s not paranoia if they really are spam bots.
I’ve been playing around with Zen Cart for a while now, and for the last couple of days I’ve been trying to get the home page layout to be completely different to the rest of the site layout. Most online shops seem to be able to do this, so I thought why not Zen Cart? After some searching and a bit of poking around I finally figure it out. the good news is that it’s really easy to do with Zen Cart.
“This is assuming that you have already created your Custom Template theme, or at least know how the Custom Template themes work in Zen Cart.”
Okay here’s how to create your custom Zen Cart homepage, starting from the base of your Zen Cart directory go to your custom made template directory “includes/templates/Your_Template/” and create a new directory inside that called: index
Next copy the tpl_main_page.php template from
“includes/templates/templates_defaults/common/” to the new index directory that you just created.
Then the last thing that you need to do is go to your custom css directory located in “includes/templates/Your_Template/css/” and copy the existing stylesheet.css to index.css
Success – Your Zen Cart home page is now completely independent from the rest of your site design, all you need to do is edit either of the the two files you just created tpl_main_page.php or index.css to make changes.
includes/templates/Your_Template/index/tpl_main_page.php
includes/templates/Your_Template/css/index.css
Published on
October 24, 2007 in
Art, Open Source, Releases and Software.
Tags: gimp, gnu, image manipulation, Linux, mac, Open Source, release, rosetti, skye, skye rosetti, skyerosetti.co.uk, update, windows.
Finally the Gimp (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) developers have released version 2.4 of the popular graphics editor. The new version has quite a few improvements over 2.2. In order to get an overview of what’s been changed since 2.2, check out the Release Notes over on the Gimp website. The Gimp site design has also been updated with a brand new look to celebrate the release, which was a bit of a shock at first. If you haven’t visited the site for a while you’ll see what I mean when you do.
The Gimp is probably one of greatest Open Source graphic design tools around and most that have used it would agree that it’s just as good Adobe Photoshop. Still it may be lacking a few features that Photoshop has, But unlike Adobe Photoshop, the Gimp is 100% free to download and use. It also works for every platform: Linux, Mac & Windows. so there’s no excuse not to use it.
To get an Idea of how powerful the Gimp can be check out some of the tutorials over on the Gimp website or better yet check out my sister’s site, skyerosetti.co.uk. Most of her art is produced with the Gimp and it looks fantastic 
The GNOME community has just announced the latest version of it’s popular desktop environment, Gnome 2.20. Released right on schedule, 2.20 is the culmination of six months effort by Gnome contributors around the world. Check out the release notes, for a full list of improvements and some pretty pictures of 2.20 in action.
From the release notes:
“The improvements in GNOME 2.20 include: Improved support for right-to-left languages; desktop search integrated into the file chooser dialog; convenient new features in the Evolution email and calendar client; enhanced browsing of image collections; simplified system preferences; efficient power management and incredibly accurate laptop battery monitoring. Developers receive more help with application development thanks to a new version of the GTK+ toolkit, improved tools, and a great new documentation web site.”
Shortly after the release of Red Hat Enterprise 5 The CentOS team is pleased to announce the availability of CentOS 5.0. Major changes in CentOS 5 compared to CentOS 4 include:
These updated software versions: Apache-2.2, php-5.1.6, kernel-2.6.18, Gnome-2.16, KDE-3.5, OpenOffice.org-2.0, Evolution-2.8, Firefox-1.5, Thunderbird-1.5, MySQL-5.0, PostgreSQL-8.1.
Better desktop support with compiz and AIGLX.
Download: i386 | x86_64
Browsing google code the other day and came across this little project.
Avant Window Navigator (Awn) is a dock-like bar for Gnome which sits at the bottom of the screen (in all its composited-goodness) tracking open windows.
There’s a lot more information on the project site http://code.google.com/p/avant-window-navigator/ & some good video footage of it in action on the developers blog.
Awn is currently under development, however you can try it out by either downloading the latest release from the downloads page or you could try downloading from the SVN.
Published on
April 8, 2007 in
Linux, Open Source, Releases and Software.
Tags: debian, etch, Linux, Open Source, release, stable, update, upgrade.
The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.
The code name for the next major Debian release after etch is lenny.
OpenOffice.Org have just released OpenOffice 2.2. Overall, version 2.2 should appear better to users thanks to its support for kerning, a technique that improves the appearance of text written in proportional fonts; kerning is now enabled by default. OpenOffice’s PDF (Portable Document Format) export function has also been enhanced with the addition of the optional creation of bookmarks feature, and with support for user-definable export of form fields. For more information on the improvements and bug fixes check out the project’s release notes.
A good friend of mine will be demonstrating “Rivendell” the open source radio broadcasting automation software, during the Hospital Broadcasting Spring Conference this weekend at the The Park Inn in Northampton. The conference starts this Friday 30th March and ends with the awards on Sunday 1st April.
