My Web Design Blog

FCEU, one of the best Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulators is now available on Puppy Linux. I simply stole it from Debian and created a simple frontend for it to make it easier to use.

This version includes netplay and OpenGL support.

Download FCEU now

Puppy Arcade, the free emulation live CD that comes packed full of emulators for all the most popular retro gaming platforms, has been downloaded nearly 5,000 times from all sources since its creation around Nov 09.

Puppy Arcade 7 is now available as a live CD - just download, burn and boot - no hard drive or installation required. Puppy Arcade 7 plays games from loads of classic arcade and console gaming systems.

Update (28th Feb, 2010): Download a small bugfix for pdf and bittorrent

I've been checking out Google auto-suggest, to see what people are looking for and what Google suggest people should know. It turns out some strange results.

So, if you've never used Google auto-suggest, you should, if you want to know what other people apparently don't.

More Google Fails

Here's my own 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' game that I made 'back in the day'. There's now much better alternatives to this, but back then it's all we had. The questions are random - they don't get harder, phone a friend is useless and worst of all, you can't actually win any money.

Play 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' Now.

There's now a much improved homepage in the admin panel of my CMS websites.

The simple homepage has been replaced with a 'dashboard' showing all the latest and most important activity on your site.

On the dashboard, you can manage your site more efficiently by clicking on any item shown to see a list of important tasks for that item, which link straight to the other managers in your admin panel.

The dashboard includes the following items: Recently updated, most viewed, recent comments, newest users, most commented and top rated.

All websites built using my CMS software now have a simpler but more powerful way of handling default CSS styles - which can be applied to your site, regardless of which theme (or stylesheet) you or your users have selected.

This is useful to apply fixed stylings to your page elements - so they don't change, even when a new theme is applied. For example, you want an image to be aligned to the right, no matter what, so you just add the style in your default stylesheet, using the Site Manager in the admin panel.

When adding stuff to your site using your admin panel, you can choose who sees it - 'everyone', 'members', 'guests' or 'administrators'.

Members only - everyone sees the content block, but only users who are logged in see the main description - guests will see a signup link.

Guests only - the whole content block will be hidden once a user has logged in, which is very useful for removing adverts, nags, etc.

Administrators only - only you will see the content block, so you can publish a 'rough draft' - then check it, before publishing to 'everyone'.

Puppy Arcade, the retro gaming platform, has another shining review - this time from the excellent Open Bytes. Here is a short quote:

"Excellent work, simply excellent. The idea of a distro aimed at the emulation user is one I champion fully... the results speak for themselves.  If emulation is an interest of yours, I would encourage you to get involved, support or donate to Scotts work.  It's a really great project... Highly recommended!"

Here is the full review at Open Bytes.

Puppy Arcade, my videogame emulation live CD, has been given a nice review over at TechExposures.com. Here's a summary:

"Puppy Arcade is fast and light on its feet... If you're a fan of 80’s style arcade games, Puppy Arcade is probably the best platform for you. Running your games in RAM, without ever touching a hard drive, is a cinch with the ease of Puppy Linux."

For the full review, visit TechExposures.com

Here is a screenshot of the VICE emulator now available on Puppy Arcade. It runs nearly all Commodore roms, games and music and works very well indeed. Other versions of Puppy Linux may not have the required libs, such as SDL.

Download the .pet file of Vice, for Puppy Linux, here

Here is an new theme, called 'clouds'. Creating themes is easy and your users can even choose their favourite.

View this website in the clouds theme by using the 'Change Theme' list on the left.

A demo version of my website is now available online at http://demo.scottjarvis.com. The admin login details are already filled out for you, so just click here to test the demo

With this demo you can test out all features of the website and its admin panel:

• Manage site details
• Manage plugins, layouts and themes
• Create, edit and delete pages, content and forms
  
• Create, edit, contact and delete users and comments
  
• Backup and restore the website
  
• And much, much more
  

Add simple image galleries with nice popup lightboxes, like this one, to your site with user-friendly image gallery plugin. The image on the left shows the options available when adding a gallery to your site, in the Content Manager.

Below is a simple example of this plugin, showing a few images that can help you add your own image galleries into your site, using the image gallery plugin, available on all my sites.

CMS websites are going to be more and more important as they readily meet the changing needs of online business and marketing, by propogating a websites content through various methods like news feeds, social, email, etc.

While bespoke designs are great, depending on the developer, for many they're prohibitively expensive and offer little in the way of managing a site. A CMS usually includes a number of features and tools to help you manage your site.

The commenting system on all my sites is now even better, after getting a number of improvements in order to more closely mirror blogging sites.

Each page and even each post (or content block) can have its own comments feed - simply enable the comments in either the Page or Content Managers.

Page comments are added and/or listed at the bottom of pages, while content comments are added and viewed on a separate, specially-built page.

Each comment feed offers your users options to subscribe via RSS or be updated by email when someone else comments, a la facebook.

Page headers can now be added more easily than before - when adding or editing stuff in the Content Manager, just tick the 'Use as Page Header' box (see main image) and your content will be added to the top of the page, as a stylish heading.

You can still easily select your page header in the Page Manager as before, but now have an easy way to make new content the page header, without the need to return to the Page Manager after it is created.

Use the Menu Manager to build menus for your site with a step-by-step approach, adding the same menu on all pages, or unique menus on each page.

But if you never want to update any menus, my websites can automatically generate a self-updating menu - add it once and you're done forever!

However, creating custom menus is now even easier. To add different menus to each page, just select unique menus for each page, in the Site Manager.

If you only need some unique menus, you can save time by adding any menus you've already created to any other pages, in the Page Manager (see main image).

The Plugin Manager, found in the admin panel of all my websites, has recently been improved further, now allowing you to add plugins to page content and to menu items without any restrictions. 

Plugins can also be created, with their own custom options, more easily than before, while unused plugins options are now automatically deleted. Plugin options allow you to re-use the same plugin repeatedly with different options.

For example: You can make as many different image galleries as you like, with a single image gallery plugin - you simply select different images each time it's added, through either the Menu or Content Managers, in the admin panel.

All my websites now have better custom error pages.

This means if anyone gets lost or tries to view a protected area, they will be redirected to a nice looking page that offers lots of options to keep them browsing your site.

Your site will never display an ugly error message, just user friendly pages showing your visitors a number of places to go next, keeping people at your site longer.

All pages on my websites create their own RSS news feeds so once your visitors are subscribed to your pages, they're informed automatically when you update your pages - you don't have to lift a finger.

I've just added an option in the Content Manager to include or exclude content from your news feeds. This is useful if you want to hide any articles or content that you don't want to be included in your feeds.

A sitemap shows all pages on your site in one convenient place. Sitemaps are really useful for users and search engines. All my websites generate a sitemap automatically, including all news feeds.

The sitemaps generated on my sites have been improved and now automatically exclude any pages that aren't suitable for general browsing, such as payment completion pages and reviews forms.

Click the title to see the sitemap of this website.

The tag feature on my websites has been recently improved, so you can now link to and from your main pages and the specialised 'tag' page seamlessly.

For search engines, a new page is created for each keyword added! This allows search engines and also visitors to quickly browse your blog or website by keyword.

Each post has its own title, for example the title of this post is called "More Intelligent Titles". Each title is a link to somewhere and you can now choose the URL very easily in your admin panels Content Manager.

Simply select a page, then a post, and save - see the attached image. Your posts title will then link straight to your chosen location - very useful for blog-style sites with large articles on their own pages.

Click "More Intelligent Titles" above, to see where it goes.

I've added a new theme, or stylesheet, to all websites sold on this site, even the free version. This css style exactly mimics the style at facebook.com, giving your site a very well known and comfortable feel.

Please click on the image on the left to see a larger example, showing the 'user account' plugin, which is available with all bought website plans.

Every website I build, except the free website, features a powerful form builder and manager that lets you add various PayPal forms to your site, including 'buy now' and 'recurring subscriptions' payments.

The form manager, in the website admin panel has been upgraded to allow even more kinds of subscriptions, with separate trial periods so you can charge setup fees, offer discounts and more on all your payment subscriptions.

Get a free website and build free web pages! A free version of my new content management system, PetchCMS, is gonna be available to download very soon.

The free version is similar to the full version but features such as PayPal ecommerce and plugins will be replaced by a link to help (or nag) you to upgrade your site. If you don't want to wait, you can always check out the free demo of the full version.

You'll soon have a version of my CMS software (aka PetchCMS) to try out online. The demo gives you a chance to test out the admin panel and really get a feel for managing a website with PetchCMS.

The demo will be available to all, and a secure, safe website that is reset hourly, so you can make changes, add pages, update content, check out  payment forms and generally try all the features of this great CMS.