Customising osCommerce

by admin-bay Posted on February 24, 2012

Finished customising the osCommerce webshop in about an hour.

Honestly, I am not good with Web programming, so I was quite at a lost when I was reading and editing the required files. That was quite a good experience of trying to recall my web programming knowledge on the likes of HTML, CSS, etc.

Changes to my osCommerce webshop:

  • Added two products into the catalog.
  • Added in an extra header to the page so that users who come by the shop would know that the shop is a fake shop.
  • After meddling around with the code (and feeling unsatisfied with what I did), in the end I went to search for simple template or theme. With the help of my friend, I found some free themes and downloaded a simple blue look. Credits to Yusrin Omar for helping me out.

Throughout this assignment, it shows that I certainly need to brush up my web programming skills. Now that I identify my weakness, now is the time to address it :)

You can check my webshop by clicking here.

Cheers and Stay Tune,
Bob

 

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Installing osCommerce

by admin-bay Posted on February 15, 2012

The task was pretty much straightforward, I didn’t have much problem installing it.

Done in about than 15 minutes. :)

One thing to note is that, there’s this part where it says it can write to some files in the catalog directory, so all that is in need of doing is to chmod -w the configure.php file. This removes the ‘write’ permission, and the note is gone :)

The site to the e-commerce ‘fake’ shop is as follows: http://users.aber.ac.uk/bay/webshop/catalog/index.php

NOTE: Please please please don’t place any orders on the fake shop, it’s part of a task for the module that I am currently taking.

Cheers and Stay tune,
Bob

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Corning: A Shiny Glass Future

by admin-bay Posted on February 10, 2012

For my first actual post for this blog, I like to bring your attention to these beautiful videos by a company called Corning.

Corning is a company that is responsible for the current Gorilla Glass technology being applied to many smartphones today. It was confirmed as well that Corning will collaborate together with Samsung to bring a new kind of glass – Lotus Glass, to Samsung’s smartphones.

Personally, I’d love to see this technology in the near future. Currently there are touch screens and those glass stoves being incorporated to our lives today. I think its possible to bring these innovation into reality, we just need to be patient.

Thoughts? Leave them in the comment box below.

Source

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Customising WordPress

by admin-bay Posted on February 8, 2012

TADA!

Welcome to the new look and feel of my blog. The current theme is Brunelleschi 1.5.4 by Kit MacAllister. I’ve decided on this theme to express simplicity and clean look. To me, ease of reading is important and this way contents will pretty much standout.

I’ve also installed a couple of plugins (as instructed and to compliment the blog) as below:

  1. AkismetThis is a recommended plugin that was available to me when I first configure WordPress. Who wouldn’t want a plugin that can keep those spammers away?
  2. Slick Social Share Buttons- by Less ChestnuttA plugin that can share automatically your blog to the readers’ social media? Sweet. Basically all the reader has to do is click the “Share” button floating at the Top Left of the Screen and share to where they want to: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, you name it.

    Find out more about this plugin by clicking here.

  3. Add Link to Facebook - by Marcel BorkhostThis plugin allow auto-share to my Facebook. I decided to give this one a go as it gives so many choices and customisations. I’m still exploring this plugin, in fact, let’s see if this post will link to my Facebook  it works!

    Find out more about this plugin by clicking here.

  4. PulseMaps - by Aito Software Inc.This plugin is awesome! It has a widget that shows the number of hits I get for this blog in numbers and the area they are from in terms of heatwaves on a map. Installing this one was pretty much straightforward.

    Find out more about this plugin by clicking here.

  5. TeledirWidgets - by teledirA plugin that displays what country you are browsing from, what browser you’re in, your operating system, and your ip address.Found this plugin through the search option in the WordPress plugins page.
  6. WP-Spotify - by David HermanssonI intended to have some kind of player that connects from my Spotify playlists / tracks to this blog, but I couldn’t get it to work yet. There was a widget but it wasn’t really customisable. Until I find a proper plugin, I’ll keep this one deactivated for the time being.

    The reason I decided to use a Spotify plugin/player instead of using a normal player is that the other plugins I found requires me to upload the song files into the server. This will take up space. I’d like to find other alternatives, for example, allow the player to link to another website or database and stream from there. Since Spotify is a famous application that allow users to stream music, so I gave it a go.

    Find out more about this plugin by clicking here.

Overall, I took my time to carefully read what the plugin do and configuring them. I’m still pretty new to WordPress after all, but it’s all great so far.

Cheers and Stay tune,
Bob

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