2009 June » Jasny · web development

Hide Gnome Panel

Jun 182009

Since a few months I’ve done away with using the Gnome main menu. Instead I use Gnome Do. I removed the bottom toolbar long ago, because always use alt-tab.

I’m not using the top toolbar much either. It was just taking up valuable screen space. I contains only the notification area and a logout button. I was looking at a way to remove it completely. The answer came in the Compiz widget layer. By placing it on the widget layer, fullsize windows actually fill the full screen, but the notification area is still available for applications who need it.

To move Gnome panel to the Widget layer, open ‘CompizConfig Settings Manager’ and enable ‘Widget Layer’. Go to tab ‘Behaviour’ and add the following text for the ‘Widget Windows’ field:

(class=Gnome-panel & type=Dock)

The desktop will now be completely clean:

With we can display the widget layer, where the panel is found:

PS. The widgets you see on the widget layer are screenlets. Ubuntu has the screenlets package in the universe repository.

How I PHP: How to take a website offline.

PHP, Ubuntu 11 Responses »

Jun 172009

I’ve seen a lot of methods used to take a website temporarily off-line for maintenance. Most involve a using PHP to disable the site or renaming the index file. There is however a far better method of doing this, by placing the following in the vhost file or in an .htaccess file in the document root:

Header always set Retry-After "Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:00:00 +0200"
Redirect 503 /

This way you are sure no part of the site is used. Also by returning a 503 http response, search-engine crawlers will not reindex your site right at the moment it is down. You can use ‘ErrorDocument’ to place a different text than the apache default.