Developing decent software is very time consuming. Software development is not only programming, but it’s also thinking, trying, testing, rejecting/reimplementing, discussing, researching, supporting, bug fixing. It’s a whole lot of work! Still, we love to give them away for free. However, as software development takes time and effort, you might want to donate some money, if you got a valuable piece of software for free.

Donate and get a backlink

Well, here’s a deal: You continue having fun with our plugins, downloading them for free, sharing and modifying them. However:

If you like our software, please consider coming back to donate some bucks via PayPal. If you do so, you will not only raise our motivation to improve our free tools, but you will also get a backlink to your website. Simply submit a donation via the form in the upper right of this page, and your will be automatically added to the donations cloud! (Please also read the information behind the link “How does it work?”.)

A big “thank you” goes to easywordpress for this simple yet fine idea, and especially for the first donation we’ve ever got for our plugin work. If you are a developer yourself, you might want to have a look at the Donations Cloud plugin for WordPress.

Dear users of my plugins,

I know I haven’t updated my plugins for a while, even though some of them desperately need updates and although I have some very cool features on my TODO list. The reason is that I’m currently involved in a very big project, and this one really consumes pretty much all of my time and coding energy. That project will be finished by mid of November, and I promise that I will then start working on my plugins again and release a bunch of new versions. I hope you understand that, and I hope you’ll have some more patience. Thank you very much (in advance)!

By the way, my site seems to have a PR of 6 now, and I owe it all to the nice people who are writing nice comments about my plugins on their blogs. Thank you very much (again)!

Tonight, Oct. 18th at about 4:15 am, the Zirona I server will be shut down because of maintanance in the data center. The work is estimated to take about three hours. During this time, no services like e-mail and web will be available. After the maintenance works, the server is supposed to start up again automatically. It is however possible that there are complications, and it is also possible that they take the entire day or even more to be solved.

Even though downtime is always unpleasant, there’s no reason to be too sad: At least this server will have run more than 373 days untill this “forced” shutdown. This is an very impressive figure, and one shouldn’t take it for granted — it’s more that there are some important aspects that allowed the server to run such a long time.

• Although the webhost Hetzner did have two severe network problems this year, the servers kept running, which is an indication that Hetzner managed to solve the power issues in the data center (ironically, a power failure was the reason for the last showdown of this server), and the hardware seems — at least in the Zirona machine — not to be as bad as it’s sometimes said of Hetzner.
• Furthermore we can be happy, that the server was not compromised a single time during it’s now two years of usage — although there were a number of attacks, luckily every single of them could be averted. This is mostly due to the Linux system (to be precise: Hardened Gentoo in our case), but also due the other server applications like Apache, Postfix, Courier, MySQL, vsFTPd, and last but not least to often critisized web applications such as WordPress, Joomla, phpBB and osCommerce. You see, security has a lot to do with clean configuration and regular upgrading (though by far not only).

Therefore: Let’s hope for successful maintenance, a healthy re-awakening of the server tomorrow morning, and for the next uptime rekord!

P.S., 18.10., 11:04: We had a little hickup after the restart due to network rearrangements, but now everything runs fine again.

Due to massive spam attacks, I had to reconfigure our e-mail serive and integrate some additional restrictions. Also, we now use the blacklist of spamhaus.org; even though this organisation called attention through rowdily and arrogant behaviour, they do offer a very good antispam service.

In case you encounter sending (legitimate ) e-mail to Zirona or other domains on our server, please notify us through our contact form. If you do so, it is important that you provide as much information as possible. In case you got an error message, please attach that message to.

WordPress 2.2 is soon to be released, and WordPress 2.3 also approaches. As functionality keeps on changing, I decided to test the InstantUpgrade-Plugin with the new versions. Result: works fine — with WP 2.2-RC1 as well as with WP 2.3-alpha (SVN Rev. 5451).

By the way, I finished moving, and I’m back at work with full power.

No, not this site, but I myself am moving. From May 1st, I’ll have a beautiful new appartment with a shiny new office. Therefore, it can be that I’m a bit hard to reach during the next days and weeks; especially via Internet, as I’m also changing my access provider. But my girfriend will provide a shelter for me and my notebook, so that I will be able to implement my current customers’ projects. However, I’m afraid I won’t be able to provide support for my free projects this next time.

The ServerSite project, which implemented a webserver with lots of additional features on a LiveCD, is discontinued.

The main reason for this is that I don’t have the time to manage the project in an appropriate manner. The intentions of ServerSite were to provide a stable and widely running LiveCD with very recent packages based on Gentoo Linux as well as providing special features such as saving settings and contents on a USB stick – and these intentions can not be satisfied with a too short time budget.

Whoever might be interested in the build scripts or other stuff created during the ServerSite development, is welcome to contact me.

You might wonder how you got from contutto.com to this site.

This is because I have moved all software and documentation as well as nearly all blog posts and comments to zirona.com and now have a redirection to this very site. The reason for this is that I started to use Contutto as a development platform for my WordPress related work, while Contutto is actually only a platform for dynamic PDF applications. Of course, the ContuttoPDF and the Advanced Search plugins would fit there, but there also are other plugins, and I don’t want to host them on two different locations.

Zirona is the base for all Open Source related work projects. This is why I decided to make a cut and from now have all past and future software, downloads, documentation and discussion at this site. I hope you understand this and enjoy being here. If you encounter 404 errors or other quirks or inconveniences, please drop a comment here. I’m thankful for any hint.

Mit der Zirona OpenCompilation erhalten Sie eine CD voller wertvoller Software, darunter nahmhafte Produkte und preisgekrönte Programme. Sie dürfen die Software ohne Einschränkung benutzen und sogar an Freunde, Bekannte und Arbeitskollegen weitergeben.

Die Zirona OpenCompilation ist eine von Zirona herausgegebene Sammlung aktueller OpenSource-Programme für Windows auf einer CD. Das sicherlich bekannteste Programm ist das freie Office-Paket OpenOffice, das eine (mindestens) gleichwertige Alternative zu Microsoft Office darstellt. Ebenfalls schon fast ein Klassiker ist Firefox — die schnelle, sichere und komfortable Alternative zum Websurfen.

Alle enthaltenen Programme im Überblick (Links führen zur Projektseite):

• OpenOffice – umfangreiches Office-Paket
• Firefox – Schneller und sicherer Browser
• Thunderbird – Sicheres und komfortabeles Mail-Programm
• The Gimp – Alternative zu Photoshop
• FileZilla – FTP-Programm
• Gaim – Chat-Programm für IRC, MSN, AIM, ICQ
• 7-zip – Programm zum Entpacken von Archiven und gepackten Dateien
• VLC – sicherer und leichtgewichtiger Video-Spieler
• Notepad++ – komfortabler Editor für Textdateien
• CDex – Programm zum Rippen und Enkodieren von Musik-CDs (bitte beachten Sie das Urheberrecht!)
• WinPT – Programm zum Verschlüsseln und Signieren von E-Mails und Dateien
• XAMPP – kompletter Webserver mit Apache, MySQL und PHP
• LBreakout – kuzweiliges Arcade-Spiel
• Frozen Bubble – Arcade-Spiel mit Suchtfaktor

Verwendung

Um die Software benutzen zu können, folgen Sie bitte fünf einfachen Schritten:

1. Laden Sie die ISO-Abbilddatei von unserem Server herunter: zoc-2.0.iso (Größe: ca. 204 MB).
2. Brennen Sie die ISO-Datei als Abbild auf eine leere CD-R.
3. Wenn das Brennen abgeschlossen ist, entnehmen Sie die CD und schreiben Sie mit einem wasserfesten Filzstift “Zirona OpenCompilation v2.0″ auf die obere Seite.
4. Legen Sie die CD wieder in das Laufwerk und schließen Sie dieses. Wenn Windows fragt, was Sie mit der CD machen möchten, antworten Sie “Mit Explorer öffnen”. Wenn nichts passiert, öffnen Sie selbst den Windows Explorer und klicken Sie auf das Symbol des Laufwerks, in das Sie die CD eingelegt haben.
5. Klicken Sie auf die Datei start bzw. start.html. Es wird der CD-Inhalt angezeigt, und Sie können nun Programme installieren!

Wenn Sie, anstatt die ganze CD herunter zu laden, nur einzelne Programme installieren möchten, besuchen Sie bitte die Webseiten des jeweiligen Projektes.

Am kommenden Mittwoch, dem 10.05., werden wir das System unseres Hauptservers aktualisieren. Dabei wird ein aktueller Linux-Kernel eingespielt, daher muss anschließend der Server neu gestartet werden. Das Neustart wird gegen 18:00 sein; wenn alles gut geht, ist der Server nur 5 Minuten nicht erreichbar.

Wir werden Sie an dieser Stelle informieren, wenn die Aktualisierung abgeschlossen ist.