Sat, 07 Apr 2007 15:32:30 -0400 http://www.natewelch.com/ natewelch.com en-us http://www.natewelch.com/images/logo.gif http://www.natewelch.com/ me@natewelch.com http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=41 This is a quick little how-to for GNOME users to have a Windows-esque start menu button instead of the default "Applications/Places/System" combo, or the somewhat ambiguous icon-only "Main Menu" option. It's helpful if you want to maintain a similar environment to your Windows setup or if you or someone you know is transitioning over to Desktop Linux from Windows. Sat, 07 Apr 2007 15:32:30 -0400 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=40 PhotoGallery is an easy to use and install module for the Postnuke Content Management System. Features include batch photo processing, auto scaling of photos & thumbnails, custom gallery/photo ordering and a flexible templating system. Visit this page for a complete feature list and demo. Be sure to leave any suggestions or feedback! Edit: A .02 release was added to fix a slight bug in the search plugin, the add photo page and to make the templates validate to XHTML 1.1 specs. Sun, 21 Jan 2007 10:21:22 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=39 An update for the Enhanced Blocks Mod has been posted for use with Postnuke version .764. The Enhanced Blocks Mod allows powerful module and page-specific placement of blocks on your Postnuke website. Existing users can simply copy over their current mod files. Find out more about the EBM here and get the files in the Downloads section. Sun, 03 Dec 2006 19:49:13 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=38 It's rarely that I post something to rave about a piece of software (like, um, never), but this one serves my needs so well, I just had to shout it from the rooftops! BookmarksSynchronizer, is just what it sounds like. It is a Firefox "plug-in" (a.k.a. extension) that lets you synchronize your bookmarks across all the Firefox browsers you may be using on various operating systems and computers. I have a desktop and notebook computer at home, plus one at work, each with two OS's on each, so I'm basically working with *six* different bookmark lists! Sat, 25 Nov 2006 11:45:37 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=37 This program is a modification and addition to the nightly maintenance for the open source ad server program, phpAdsNew. This package essentially "compacts" your ad statistics table by combining the daily hourly statistical data into one record for each unique bannerid/zoneid/source for weeks that you specify. In tests and my daily use, it has shown to reduce the size and number of records in the adstats table by up to 90 percent. StatsCompactor should work with mySql versions 3.23 and up. Thu, 29 Jun 2006 09:51:08 -0400 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=36 Well, I finally got around to upgrading my Dad's website where he displays and sells his photography. He was running with a CVS version of oSC 2.x with the typical white background, three column boxes look. I'm re-posting this here because the tight-wads over at the osCommerce Forums don't like users posting websites without their "Powered by..." text on the front-end. Tue, 30 May 2006 08:40:36 -0400 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=35 A version of Dynamenu has been released for the popular, though not oft-updated, e-commerce package: osCommerce. Dynamenu is powered by the excellent PHP Layers Menu library and has been used by thousands of Postnuke users to generate various types of drop-down, fly-out, tree and plain nested menus for their CMS websites. With osCommerce, it takes slightly different form and simply generates a menu based on the category structure of the store. Thu, 11 May 2006 20:55:16 -0400 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=34 WHAT IS IT?This contribution is an alternate category box which will output your store's categories as a proper nested unordered list, instead of a collection of non-breaking spaces, quasi-bullets and break tags. What's the big deal about that you ask? With the categories now output as an unordered list, you can now more easily apply a lot of nifty CSS to turn your category list into a horizontal drop-down or vertical fly-out menu, make it a collapsible menu, easily attach bullets, add cool mouseover effects, or just about anything you can dream up! Sun, 30 Apr 2006 18:40:00 -0400 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=33 Well, Postnuke just released sort of a preview version of the long-awaited PN .8. Seems to be a lot of changes both structurally and under the hood, so it looks like some of my blocks and modules may need a rework. Sun, 16 Apr 2006 11:02:23 -0400 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=32 Welcome to the new face of NateWelch.Com! The first version was somewhat uninspired and put up just to take my mind off of other events in my life and provide demos of my Postnuke mods n' blocks! With the new design, I kinda went for a "Web 2.0" look with a minimalist interface, large type and funky color contrasts. This is a content-management website running on Postnuke, but I think it looks decidedly non-Nukey; "Nukey" websites having a traditional left/right/center column look with blocks all over. Feedback is appreciated and for you 'Nuke users who want some more detail, please read on... Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:29:39 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=31 The photo-sharing website, Flickr, has a great feature that lets you embed slideshows in your own website. I created a page to show photos tagged with the term "capecod" (that's right, no spaces in tags). Presumably, they're pictures taken of people and the scenery of my surroundings on Cape Cod. Check out the Cape Cod Photo Gallery here! 'Course I uncovered a slight bug with Dynamenu in that it appears behind IFRAME content - DOH! Sun, 05 Mar 2006 19:06:25 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=30 The downloads just topped 15,000 yesterday, and DynaMenu now has over 5,000. Whew, that's a lot! Don't know what I have planned next for releases, I think I'll just slide a while. Thanks to all my visitors, and be sure to drop a buck or two in the till if you find my software useful. Sat, 04 Mar 2006 15:21:16 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=29 Lately, I've been taking an interest in AJAX with respect to web development (see article bottom if you don't know what that is). My first dabblings are with my own contact form right here on this site. While you are typing in comment text, the form comes back with some wise-cracks, and upon submit it will validate whether you put in a name, email and comments and/or if the email is a valid format, then it mails the form stuff to me and shows a "Thank You" message, all without refreshing the page! Tue, 28 Feb 2006 09:00:00 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=28 As you may be aware, Postnuke recently had a minor update to several of its files, to version .762. Many of the block files were affected by this update as well, so an updated version of the Enhanced Blocks Mod is now available for PN .762. Sat, 25 Feb 2006 10:28:50 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=27 The original PayPalCart just crossed the 2,000 download mark! I'm surprised so many are still getting it for their older Postnuke versions; although Postnuke is one of those systems that needs some "tweakin'" to get it just so, which often precludes any opportunities for a convenient upgrade ;-) Sat, 25 Feb 2006 10:17:07 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=26 PayPalCart 1.5.4 has been released for the Xaraya Content Management System. Xaraya is a fork of the Postnuke project started by one of its founder's John Cox. The module is a fully Xaraya API compliant and templated port of the popular PayPalCart module, which lets you run a simple PayPal store on your Xaraya website. More information about PayPalCart can be found here, and downloads are are available in the downloads section (duh!). Wed, 18 Jan 2006 19:11:21 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=25 Wow! Already one thousand downloads for my latest block, the "Tabbed Blocks Block". Hope all who've downloaded it are finding it useful - if you have any feedback, or particularly interesting usage examples, be sure to drop me a line! Tue, 10 Jan 2006 08:59:39 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=24 A slightly updated package for PayPalCart has been uploaded to remove a redundant newline-to-break filter in the userapi, which was causing double-breaks to be output for each newline in product descriptions. You can update your module manually by removing the nl2br() from around the trim($desc) in line 117 of userapi.php. Fri, 06 Jan 2006 19:51:52 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=20 An astute EBM user pointed out I forgot to include the "placement" field in a couple queries of the pnBlocks.php file in the EBM for .760 v 2.2 package. (In case you were having difficulty getting it to work!) The updated package has been posted. Current .760 users can simply replace the includes/pnBlocks.php file. EBM .761 users are unaffected - thanks for the nudge, Detlev! Sun, 11 Dec 2005 11:41:36 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=19 This is the update to PayPalCart to support Postnuke versions .760+. PayPalCart is a FREE shopping cart module which allows you to easily and quickly set up a store on your website that works with PayPal's Shopping Cart feature, allowing you to process secure payments and accept credit cards. Updates include: Updated to full pnAPI compliancy Uses pnRender templating for easier customization Includes support for hooks on items and categories Output now validates to XHTML 1.1 standard Logic streamlining and code formatting cleanup Support for longer item and category names (127 vs. 64 characters) Sun, 04 Dec 2005 10:56:48 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=18 Before I get all fat and loagy from turkey, I thought I'd upload this quick update to the Tabbed Blocks Block (v1.01). ALT tags were added to the tab icons so the tabbed block would validate to HTML 4.01 transitional. Existing tabbed block users need only overwrite the tabblock.php file. Check out the demo and get it in the Downloads area. Happy Thanksgiving, America! Thu, 24 Nov 2005 08:54:58 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=17 You like me! You reeealy reeealy like me! The downloads just crossed the 10,000 mark, hope they're workin' out for ya. If you haven't already, consider donating a small amount to me for this holiday season. C'mon - do it for the children... Sun, 20 Nov 2005 17:33:13 -0500 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=16 The official release version of the Tabbed Blocks Block has been released! Just had to do some further testing with Xanthia and the tab's stylesheets. Stylesheets were tweaked slighly with "!important" added to some of the declarations to prevent the theme's stylesheet from cascading down into the tab's stylesheet and messing up the rendering for the tabs. Check out the demo and get it in the Downloads area. The official release to appear on blocks.postnuke.com follows: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 10:43:24 -0400 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=15 I think after the tabbed block is released (see previous stories), I'll do a leisurely update to the world-famous PayPalCart module. Some fixes are needed to make it "truly" pnAPI compatible (those of you using PN .760+ may have noticed status text, "function blah returned", in your PPC page footers) and I may take a poke at converting it to pnRender output for easier customization of output. Feedback requested: I had started working on a 2.0 version of PPC some while back, attempting to integrate some nifty hacks to get around some of the PayPal Shopping Cart's limitations (more info). Thu, 20 Oct 2005 15:04:21 -0400 http://www.natewelch.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=14 Another version of the Tabbed Block Block is available for download. This will probably be the last "feature-oriented" release before the 1.0 version is released (though I may work in a simple Javascript image pre-loader to avoid loading delays when mousing over tabs w/icons). Significant changes for the .98 Version include: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 12:30:52 -0400