Ninja pendisk site update

Recently I've began playing more often with Wordpress and it has become a good tool to deploy new websites.

So, I picked a small popular site that would be easy to play with - ninja - because it is the right tool for simplicity sake and the website should also be made as simple as possible.


One of the advantages that I like the most at wordpress is the integrated plugin system. Very neat. You simply look for plugins with particular features and click to install.

On the ninja site, I've decided to replace the old plain html pages with a wordpress CMS. The transition went smoothly and took less than a day to complete.

The biggest obstacle was finding a proper new visual theme and then adding back the text present on the old pages. One sad thing that could not be ported are the posts that were made on the old forum system.

I've decided to use the integrated forum simple:press inside the CMS to ensure that everything fall well together. This new forum system also brings some other neat features that might help make it more appealing for other ninja users.

For example, it's not necessary to register on the forums as it is using OpenID, people on participate on a given topic get email warnings whenever someone replies to their threads and so on.

Also, this is a good homework practice for larger projects. My next goal is to also port the http://nunobrito.eu from the e107 CMS onto wordpress.

Next would be turn of http://winbuilder.net and this would complete the round of site conversions. Why converting to wordpress?

Well, the main reason is flexibility to change things around. With e107 or static html pages is a real bothersome to add changes on the website or make it look exactly as you want.

Besides, the available plugins are really cool and I'm just scratching the surface.

I don't really like the fact that it's dependent to MySQL but for the moment there is still no other alternative.

If you have the time, don't forget to visit the new ninja site at http://nunobrito.eu/ninja and tell me what you think.

:)

ninja pendisk 1.6

A new version of ninja pendisk was made available today.

It contains most of the requests and bugfixes that users have requested and I think that it has finally reached a more mature state.

Ninja Pendisk WebSite: http://nunobrito.eu/ninja/


Here is the log of changes:

[added] title to tray icon
[added] timer to result window
[added] ninja.txt option to disable tray menu and avoid closing ninja ([options] --> Evil_Ninja=1)
[added] ninja.txt option to change the timer on the result window ([options] --> Result_Timer=8)
[added] when clicking on option "Add to Shortcut" will create the shortcut by default to All Users
[modified] automatic clean option is now selected by default
[modified] filesize of ninja.exe reduced by 30% to ~700kb
[fixed] Popmenu on system tray is now hiding properly when user clicks outside the popmenu

Just left out two requests:

1 - Use a compressed format (7z) when downloading a new updated version from the web to save bandwidth.

2 - Encrypt or add a password to allow changing configuration. (using ninja.txt at this moment)



And here are the reasons why they weren't included:

1 - Would be excellent to use compression but would also require to have 7z.exe or 7z.dll on the machine, maybe using cab compression this could help but the compression ratio is not so good. To make the exe slimmer I've used UPX to compress from 1200kb to ~700Kb

2 - Could be done. I could encrypt a second file called option.txt and ask for a password to unlock it, but I don't know how many people would really use this feature. If more requests are made then it will surely be included.

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I've also been busy with a few other projects so I'm trying my best to keep ninja as updated as possible, thank you for all the feedback provided so far. I'm really happy to see this tool is really helping others.

:)