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.
After running on Wordpress 2.2.2 for just over a year, and having some spare time I thought it was time for an upgrade. So shellscript.co.uk is now running on the latest version of Wordpress 2.5.1 & the most recent k2 theme, hopefully this will help reduce the amount of spam comments and bogus users I get but I seriously doubt it.
The upgrade has been pretty smooth as far as upgrades go, there are a few glitches here and there but nothing I can not fix. The only real problem I’ve noticed is that IE 6 has stopped displaying some of my old floated images correctly, they just appear with out being floated left or right but only in IE 6. I’ve not tested it in 7 yet but Firefox and Safari display everything as it should be. The good news is that it’s easily fixable so I am not really that bothered by it.
While upgrading I have also change my site layout a little, I now have 3 columns instead of 2 and I have expanded the post content area by a whole 50 pixels. I know it doesn’t sound like much but I think it looks much better than it did. The only thing thats left to do is update my current theme but I think ill leave that for another time.
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
Once again it’s time to upgrade your defences, well only if your a user of IPCop. And why wouldn’t you be, its very configurable has a nice clean interface and its really simple to use. As always you can download IPCop form the usual place either as an update from previous 1.4.x versions or as a ready to go ISO for a clean install.
From the IPcop website: Some changes have been introduced since rc2 related to NTP (fix ntp user with ntpdate), Squid upgraded to 2.6.STABLE17, timezone upgraded to tzdata2007i, Snort rules permissions again.
The update has been split into two part to accommodate free space limitation related to the numerous new packages added since the recent releases. A way to recover some free spaces has been created, allowing to select one of the two ‘kernel type’ installed. Most of the work has been made on bug fixes and update interface changes.
You can read the rest of the release notes here for more information.
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.”
I don’t really login to Google’s Webmaster Tools as often as I used to after discovering Google Analytics but I did happen to login today to find that they have recently updated it with a few improvements. I am still not sure whether I like the new navigation system yet, but they did introduce a cool new feature called ‘Subscriber Stats’, which displays the number of users who have subscribed to your feeds using google services such as Google Reader, Orkut and iGoogle. If you are interested, there is more information on the update over on the google webmaster blog.
After a number of reports from a few friends with WordPress accounts and the limited amount of information I could gather from google, It seams like there’s yet another user going around registering on WordPress blogs, with the intent on either modifying or deleting them. This new user goes by the name: domi95bin4 & the email address: dominicgrebin@gmail.com. There have actually been a few of these bots over the last couple of months, two of which go by the user names: poset97qq & xdfsd45oi I actually posted somthing about them not long ago.
If any of these users register on your blog, I suggest that you remove them from your registered user list immediately and make sure you have the latest version of WordPress installed.
Today I found that some one had registered on Shellscript with the username: poset97qq & email: petersmith97@gmail.com, over the last couple of days I’ve had a massive influx in spam comments. And because the username looked a little too random, I was slightly weary of the new subscriber.
After googling the username I came across a number of blogs complaining about the very same subscriber. It seems like it could be the same bot with the username: xdfsd45oi & email: johnsmithuswe@gmail.com that tried to delete a number of blogs a while back, due to a word press bug that has since been fixed. The best thing to do if any of these users register on your blog is to delete them and make sure you have the latest version of word press installed.
Looks like its time for an update.
From the IPcop website: This release fixes some bugs, update glibc, Net::DNS and capi for security reasons. Upgraded packages are squid, snort, e100, r1000… As usual, this version can be installed as an update from previous v1.4.x versions or with a ready-to-go ISO or usb bootable images or pxe for a fresh install. Files are available on ‘IPCop’ package at Sourceforge.
Read the rest of the release for further details.
