Monthly Archives: November 2009

I am now Microsoft Free at home

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LaptopUbuntuOver the weekend I decided to reinstall a new operating system on my home laptop. This was because windows xp had started to grind to a very slow speed and it was taking an age just to start firefox and my email. It got to the point were I just did not turn my computer off in order to save time. So I decided to do a Matt Cutts and try and run my home office Microsoft free.

I chose Ubuntu as my operating system and downloaded Ubuntu 9.10 as an ISO file which could be burned. I had to do this on another computer as my CD drive was knackered. This posed a problem with installing as I had no CD drive. So I had the option of taking the hard drive out and installing into a laptop with a working CD. But luckily my father in law has the same laptop and I just swapped the drives around.

Now for some reason 9.10 would not install as it caused the installation procedure to crash and remain incomplete. So I started again with Ubuntu version 8.04 which has long term support. This installed cleaning without any problems.

Once configured I installed the following apps to get me into a developer ready mode.

  • Wine for installing windows 32 apps.
  • Open Office for Microsoft Office
  • GIMP for photoshop
  • Filezilla
  • Heidi over WINE
  • Notepad++ over WINE
  • gphpedit

I also use syncplicity on windows to keep my password database syncronised between home and the office. Ubuntu provide their own app call Ubuntu One which gives you 2GB free space. But the do not have a Windows client for the office. Also Syncplicity uses .net 3.0 framework, which cannot be installed over wine. So I will be know on the look for a windows/linux client for file syncing.

All this took me a good part of Sunday to complete. But the final result is a very fast old laptop with all the features I need to carry on developing.

Fulltone OCD – The power of Google product Search

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FULLTONEOCD-01Zone 1 Creative recently went live with a new online store built in X-Cart call the Guitar Amps & Pedal Co. GAPco.co.uk.

The site replaced audiotoyz.co.uk and guitars-amps-uk.co.uk and so had instance traffic from these already indexed sites. One of the first things that I did was to install the XML Sitemaps module from magenticONE and also upload the froogle file to Google base so the products were searchable via Google Product search.

As usual google took it time to index the site, and after about two weeks we started to appear. However I was suprised with the amount of traffic we had generated from Google product Search. Our best clicked through product was the ‘Fulltone OCD‘ and we even made a sale on the first day it wen t live. Not had that for a while.

It goes to show how import this tool is for e-commerce owners, and it is also important to tweak the feed file as much as possible. One essential tweak that I made to xcart core build was to automatically add the manufactuer name to the beginning of the product name. So instead of being OCD it now read Fulltone OCD.

FREE Social Media Icon Pack

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komodo-logoKomodo Media is a tiny web design studio and blog created, inspired by and maintained by Rogie King. I specialize in illustration, identity design, jQuery, JavaScript and am somewhat of a CSS/xHTML freak. I’m pretty good with databases, PHP and Flash, but my heart loves and lives in the design and front-end scripting world.

They have released a social media icon pack available under a creative license.

komodo

Zone1 Creative Ecommerce sites make featured listing

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X-Cart Featured StoresZone1 Creative have now been using X-Cart as it main ecommerce package for over a year now. Since moving away from EROL and its lack of online management features we have built some nice sites that break the concept of X-Cart sites look too similiar.

X-Cart themselves have seen the work we have done and have listed our sites as featured examples at http://www.x-cart.com/featured_clients.html?cat=15.

We have three new sites about to go live before the new year so will keep you informed until then.

Making money from wearing sponsored T-Shirts

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bg_indexJason Sadler came up with a plan for wearing a different T-shirt everyday for 365 days. He was sponsored $1 for each day by a company that wanted their logo on his chest.

That make $365 dollars for the year. It was so successful that he has now teamed up with a friend and over two time zones. The 2010 calendar is now 244 days booked out of 365.

Check out the site and if you want to sponsor him.

Page loading times and Google

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Fast-Loading-WebsiteIn a recent interview Matt Cutts said that your sites loading speed will be a huge factor towards the way google ranks it. Google and many people at google believe the web/internet should be fast and so they should reward sites that load quicker and are optimised through reuse of code and parrallel loading.

According to Cutts, speed hasn’t played a role in rankings in the past, but that may very well change. Watch the video for more details about Caffeine and Google’s resources for helping webmasters improve site speed.

So tools such as Yslow! and firebug will show you a waterfall chart of how you page loads and what is holding it back. These can be used to improve the speed and ensure that pages are cached more efficiently.

Coding a Web Design for Speed and Quality

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The beauty of being a web designer is creating a detailed, creative, and original web design in Photoshop, without having to (for the most part) think about how it will be coded.

During the design phase, it’s all about the look, and either the coding can be taken care of later, or be outsourced to a developer.

Either way, not thinking about the development usability or functionality is a great way for a designer to not feel limited in the design process.

This is a great way of thinking, and can lead to the best designs. However, once it does need to be coded, we as designers are in a tricky spot.

In this article, you’ll find a few simple tips that can help designers learn basic XHTML/CSS conversion efficiently for a quick-loading website that is accurate to the original PSD.

See the full article at http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/11/coding-a-web-design-for-speed-and-quality/

Fix your Windows XP problems from 1 Application

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qfx1There are a lot of excellent free Windows comprehensive repairing and fixing tools around the internet.
But there are times when you want just one quick fix for example when you are under a virus attack and you just want to enable the Task Manager or the Registry Editor so you can fight the virus back, or when some new installation changed your XP behavior and My Documents opens on every start up.
This is the right time to draw XP Quick Fix Plus with 40 common Windows XP problems fixes, only 0.58mb, portable, small and fast, a must have on every computer and with a small extra, a command line utility to fix 6 common problems directly from command line !

Download