August 2006 Archives

Tom's been having issues with his BlueFace VOIP .... Over the past two years umpteen people have suggested that we switch our office over to it - I'm glad we haven't! Damien's been getting abuse from defendants of spammers.. Charming! Enn have been having serious issues over the last while.. It looks like the 3rd party adserver they're using is too slow and is stopping the rest of the site from loading. Very annoying!

Just thought I'd let my blog readers know. After testing it for the last few weeks we've now made Ruby on Rails hosting available on all our linux hosting plans. Yet another first for Blacknight :)

Tired of getting phishing emails "from" Bank of Ireland? Not to fear - the phishers have moved onto a new target - Permanent TSB. As happens so often the email itself is grammatically incorrect: Note the incorrect use of the past participle. You should also note the odd capitalisation. Funnily enough the phish site includes a nice prominent link to the TSB's security warning about phishers :)

I've mentioned my dislike of reciprocal link / seo spammers more than once in the past. I still get them... I've now decided to adopt a new approach. I won't submit them to a URIBL or Spamcop. I'll simply send them my link to text link ads offering them the opportunity to advertise on the site(s) in question. I doubt if I'll see any take up though :)

I like Amazon's emails. They're usually nice and targetted and tell me about new products that I may be interested in buying. If I don't want to get them I can simply optout. So Amazon recently launched their Grocery Store on the .com site (I presume there'll be flavors (sic) for their other shopfronts at some point in the future).. and they've been pushing it hard ever since. Unfortunately they won't ship to Ireland... So why the hell are they teasing me with a $10 coupon?

If you're looking for a comprehensive review then Anil Dash from Six Apart has a very nice one - nice in a comprehensive sense :)

It seems that both the Golden Spiders and the Net Visionaries are to be held on the same night this year... Talk about bad planning! Regardless of what I may feel about the Spiders I have to recognise that they are going to attract some of the same crowd, both as nominees and attendees...

Jmcc forwarded a press release from Google earlier this morning where the search engine giant espoused its plans for hosted services. I can see quite a few google fans getting excited about this, but I seriously doubt that they'll stick around after they've encountered Google's customer (dis)service.

Ashley, who I've known since I was 12, is finally tying the knot next month down in Cork, so I'm off to his stag this evening. Since I got my new car yesterday I'll be driving down instead of having to deal with public transport!

As a member of the Sixapart Professional Network I was lucky enough to get my hands on an invite to Vox. SixApart are the people behind Typepad and Movable Type, so they know about blogging. They may not have made too many friends in the past with their licensing, but that's all changed... In any case Vox is what it's all about. So what exactly is Vox? In many ways it's Six Apart's answer to free blogging platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress.com (not to be confused with the software that powers this blog) At present membership is by invitation only so, in common with a lot of these web 2.0 type services they're taking a leaf right out of Seth Godin's book(s) and building it up using an idea virus.. Or maybe they're just getting us all to beta test it for them.. It doesn't really matter, as the service is really cool. Once you login you get to see what a slick blogging interface is all about. You can, of course, customise your public profile as much as you want. Once you select your timezone the system should reflect your choice in your settings.. I posted twice to my Vox powered blog just to see what it was like - once via the web interface and once via email (which was so easy to do that it was laughable!) If you have a look at my extremely basic blog you'll notice a number of elements that are quite different. While other blogs have "blogrolls" the paradigm is shifted to the concept of "neighbours" and extended to include "friends" and "family". You can set access levels to most elements according to your relationship with the viewer / reader. So a friend would automatically be able to see more intimate details than a complete stranger. Unfortunately at present there doesn't seem to be any way to link to a blog outside the Vox platform / network, which is a little bit annoying. Bloggers like to be able to "connect" with each other, so this limitation bugged me, but I expect they'll add that functionality later. You also have no way of adding custom HTML snippets either... At the interface level it is truly impressive. One thing that impressed me time and again was the speed of the interface. No matter what I was doing, be that uploading files from my pc or pulling in content from 3rd party services it was fast. When it comes to controlling media Vox really runs rings around the competition. For example, if you want to add a photo to a blog post you are presented with a range of options. You can choose from the "classics" ie. uploading from your computer or grabbing from your Flickr account. However the Vox team have taken it a step further. You can also grab content from other sources such as iStockPhoto and PhotoBucket. Just for a laugh I added an image to a post which I pulled in from iStockPhoto and was chosen based on a keyword search. I was then able to resize it and choose where to place it in the post - all via a nice and intuitive AJAX powered interface. As you add more media to your "collections" you can choose how to manipulate them both via the sidebar or within your posts. It's really nifty! What is quite novel about the whole thing is the permissions aspect, which I already mentioned, - you can decide who sees what and how they may interact with it. So instead of password protecting posts or closing comments etc., you can simply decide which users are allowed to view them etc., which is nice All in all it's a very nifty platform which is nice and easy to use. For someone like me, however, I'd probably get bored very easily, as I like to be able to control as much as possible. The links to Amazon and adsense ads, for example, are not configurable and so use the Vox accounts. I've no idea what they plan to do with Vox as it is rolled out, but if a "pay to use" option were available which allowed you to get the ad revenue I could see it becoming popular. However you shouldn't forget that Vox is currently in development. I was lucky enough to get to play with a preview of what is going to be a really tasty and extremely powerful platform. Watch out Wordpress - Sixapart is back!

Darren "Problogger" Rowse has just launched a job board specifically aimed at bloggers and companies looking for their services.

I got an email earlier this week, which was followed by a comment on one of my earlier posts, to let me know that Scrudu is now online (sort of) It's still very much a work in progress from what I can see... At the moment the interface is minimal - you just have a search box. It's a pity that the blog which Roger was running isn't linked to, as that gave you some information as to what they were planning. On the plus side it is nice and fast ... Problems that I've noticed: Duplicate content - it seems to be indexing multiple copies of websites ie. if there are 5 domain aliases for a site it can't recognise that and you end up with 5 separate sets of data Filtering - there is no "adult" or "mature content" filter, so you can end up with some very interesting results try these two to get you started: one two Geo specific results - for a site that carries the title "search ireland" it seems to be returning a lot of non-Irish results It will be interesting to see how it develops over time ....

While browsing this evening I stumbled upon a couple of rather unique posters from LA Pop Art. I arrived on their site after looking for more information on their Scarface and Reservoir Dogs posters, as they contain the full script. The poster that caught my eye, however, is the Marijuana leaf which was created using the official list of 647 slang names for Marijuana Can you imagine that on a tshirt? :)

Over the last couple of months I haven't been making that many changes to any of the Wordpress powered blogs that I manage. For the most part I've got the functionality that I need, so I haven't bothered doing anything new. One thing that I have been doing, however, is updating some of the older ones to get more functionality and to fix incompatibilities that crept in over time. However I have added a couple of new ones:

Full details here

Earlier this year I mentioned the Microsoft /MSN initiative to help ISPs track their users' spam. Since I last logged in they've added several new features including the possibility of adding your entire AS number. Excellent! No more worrying about network segments. I'd simply throw in any AS we manage and be covered! WRONG! MS, in their wisdom, haven't set up their system properly. Instead of running: whois ASxxxx -h whois.ripe.net - or whatever the windows equivalent is, they are querying ARIN so the only contact returned is abuse@ripe.net! Gah!

Darren linked to this service and it amused me :) So here's mine: From their site:

In common with a lot of other bloggers I tend to blog about things that catch my attention. In some instances this could be a new gadget or maybe a news story. In other instances it might be something that is of interest to me because it affects the industry I work in. I've probably posted quite a few things that some people do not agree with, but I don't think anyone could ever realistically accuse me of "hiding behind my blog". Let's consider that accusation for a moment. If you look at it from any angle it can only lead to one possible, and quite ridiculous interpretation. My name is on this blog, as is my photo, my affiliations and my contact details. How can I possibly hide??

Dear Google Please stop making life easy for spammers... Thanks to your rather inane redirector spammers are able to send us all links to URIs that blacklists would otherwise block And you wonder why gmail is constantly blacklisted?

John Breslin, who is heavily involved with Boards.ie, a popular Irish forum, posted a few days ago about MCD's legal threats against the company that owns the site. He has followed up that post with another quoting another Boards' director Tom Murphy's announcement to Boards.ie users. It seems that MCD's concert / festival Oxegen came under some criticism from users of the forum and that rather than engaging in dialogue with the forum maintainers Oxegen "went legal". Over the years since Boards was setup I know they have received legal threats from a number of companies, but they're obviously getting more of them now than they were before. Only a few weeks ago they got similar treatment from a UK hosting company I didn't see the MCD threads, so I've no idea what people were saying, but surely consumers have a right to criticise suppliers? Wouldn't it be better for all parties concerned if the suppliers were to respond to the criticism, rather than reacting to it? A response could have led to a positive "spin", whereas this sort of reaction will leave nasty taste in many people's mouths. I keep an eye on what people are saying about Blacknight in the "blogosphere" and while I'd love to see only positive comments I know that that will not always be the case (try a search on technorati or similar and you'll see what I mean). I have to accept the criticism for what it is - criticism. As long as nobody is making any personal attacks against me or my staff I am more than happy to read the comments and see if there is any way that the issue can be addressed for future clients. It may not always be possible, but I'd rather know when we were making mistakes than be ignorant of them. That's one of the reasons why blogs and other forms of "self publication" can be very positive for companies. It gives them a place where they can interact more directly with their customers and clients.

Which browsers are being used and which OS is popular? I'm always interested in this kind of information, but finding a good source for it is far from easy. For my own amusement I thought I'd compare two sites I manage for the year to date. The sites I choose were this one and search.ie and the results are hardly surprising: Mneylon.com Browsers: Mneylon.com Operating Systems Mneylon.com Connection Speed Compare that to: Search.ie Browsers Search.ie Operating Systems Search.ie Connection Speed As could be expected this site attracts "geekier" types, so they're predominantly on broadband and using alternatives to Internet Explorer. A large number of them don't use windows as their OS. Search.ie, on the other hand, is dominated by Windows users who use Internet Explorer and are on dialup. What use is this info? Not a that much use really, but I could use it to tweak search.ie so that it was more 56k friendly, while I could work on the assumption that anybody who made it here won't notice if I've posted a couple of photos, or whatever :)

Like so many other bloggers it looks like I'm going to be going down the interview route a bit as well.... In my case I'd like to talk to people whose work fits in with my own particular set of interests, so the first person I've asked to give an interview is Julian Field, who is the developer of MailScanner I won't be podcasting this particular interview, as it will be conducted via email and I still haven't quite got my mic working on Ubuntu :) So, if anyone has any questions that they'd like to ask Julian please let me know via the comments

I mentioned armchair.ie a couple of times over the last couple of weeks. Maybe people were being polite about it, but the design wasn't exactly amazing. That's all changed now, thank to Alan "SpoiltChild" O'Rourke, who presented me with some new graphics for the site, as he felt it coule be "improved" - polite designer speak for made look attractive. The new header graphics really transform the site's look and feel and I am absolutely delighted! Thanks Alan!

Just posted this on the company blog

I keep on coming across sites selling ebooks, videos and software that are horrendous looking. Quite a few of them sell goods and services that A-list bloggers and SEOs seem to hold in high regard, so obviously people are buying from them. So, is a winning formula to produce really ugly websites and start selling ebooks?

I've never been overly impressed by online marketers who "guaranteed" results or "promised" "top ranking". While I was sifting through the splogs, "under contructions" and other junk that gets submitted to search.ie this morning I came across yet another submission from an Irish SEO company. Like so many of their previous submissions this one was full of keyword loading, marketing speak and so on. What really annoyed me was that when I clicked through to review the site manually - as I do with all the other submissions (except the splogs !) all I found was a holding page with meaningless meta content. A couple of things about this annoy me: The last point is probably the most important in many respects. Most human edited directories rely on a small number of volunteers to sift through all the submissions. Editors get tired of dealing with the same junk from the same people over and over again. Ultimately the only real loser are the seo agencies' clients

I'm not sure why the Amazon.com associate team chose such an odd name for them, but in any case they've now enabled "Omakase Links" for their associates. On this side of the Atlantic the link units are known as "Self-Optimising Links", which is a lot easier to understand. Funnily enough Amazon has no issue with people running their link units alongside Adsense, but Google consider them to be contextual and so won't let you run them... Pity, as they may have worked well in some situations

Most of the Google services have some form of blog to accompany them. The quality of the information / tips tends to vary quite a bit across them, but that's only natural when you consider that they are produced by a wide variety of people. The Adsense blog has proven itself time and again to be a fantastic resource, as it combines tips "from the horse's mouth" with valuable insights that publishers' feedback have supplied. Today's post is really fantastic, as it focusses on an area that a lot of us probably forget - striking the balance between your needs as a publisher (earn money) and your readers' needs (enjoy the content or service). The introductory paragraph sums it all up: A classic "catch 22" scenario! The first part of the post covers "User Behavior" (sic) and provides some interesting tips into ad placement based on how users interact and view webpages. The second part takes into consideration how readers / users react - which is probably easy to overlook. Definitely a post for your bookmarks!

I really like the way Debian and Ubuntu handle Apache 2 modules and virtual host configurations. By using symlinks between the installed modules and the directory for the active ones, you can easily turn them on and off. It couldn't be easier, or could it? Well it can actually! There are a number of binaries available that can handle all of this even more gracefully (at least they appear to): a2enmod a2ensite a2dismod a2dissite a2enmod enables modules, while a2dismod disables them. The other two have a similar function with regard to virtual sites (vhosts). Nifty! Of course they may have a downside as well.. I'm yet to experiment that much with them

For the last few days I've been having issues with Firefox on Ubuntu.
Browser windows / tabs become unresponsive for no obvious reason until I end up having to restart it... Flock, on the other hand, is quite fast and responsive.
Is this a common issue or do I have a buggy or memory hogging plugin installed?
 I think I'll be removing all the plugins this evening to see what happens, but one thing is for sure Flock is becoming more and more attractive!

Back in January I added a webmaster discussion forum to search.ie. Over the last few months the number of visitors and general level of activity has grown, but it was still a bit on the quiet side.. After talking to a few people about ways to boost the site I've spun it off onto its own domain - with proper branding to follow as soon as I can get a logo done. The kind of topics you can discuss are pretty broad and cover all facets of online design, development, marketing, seo and monetisation.. Drop by and make yourself heard :)

Armchair.ie is ENN's site of the week! I setup the armchair.ie set to be a searchable directory of Irish ecommerce sites ie. Irish online shops. There was an armchair.ie a couple of years ago, but it was defunct and the domain had expired, so I re-registered it. I've no idea how big or popular the site will become over time, but it was really nice to see it on a site like Enn. As the ENN reviewer said: If you run an Irish ecommerce site, then get it listed!

According to an article on the BBC site today unemployment figures in Poland have dropped quite drastically. Unfortunately, the reason for the drop is not domestic job creation but the mass exodus: If you're wondering where they've gone to, then you obviously haven't been paying too much attention to what's going on around you. Ireland now has more than 150 thousand Polish immigrants! Krystian has mentioned some of the issues that they face on his English blog over the last few months, but one of his more recent posts is really distressing: For those of us over 30 this probably all sounds too familiar. It wasn't that long ago that we were leaving Ireland in our thousands to seek work abroad rather than face the desperation of the ever-growing dole queues. If you want to worry yourself a bit about our future, then David McWilliams' recent article should give you plenty of food for thought.

The Dead Trolls are hilarious... Their latest offering is "ipod baseball" -> warning this may upset ipod owners!

You may have to excuse the meandering nature of this post, as it's more of a stream of thought late at night than anything vaguely coherent

I have a love hate relationship with technology. From speaking to other entrepeneurs who work in the IT field I get the feeling that I am not alone...

One of the things that I love about technology is that it constantly changes and evolves. Of course this facet of the business is also one that I hate in some regards :)
No sooner have you become accustomed to a technology than you find that it has been surpassed by something else.

So what is the next big thing going to be?

Over the last year or so php5 has become accepted as "stable", although it's not stable enough for a lot of "shared" hosting clients.

Microsoft have been pushing MS SQL Server 2005 really hard, but I still see a huge demand for MS SQL 2000.

Apple now offer Intel based hardware, so you can get the best of both worlds (supposedly) - sleek design and a choice of OS.

An offshoot of Debian has captured the hearts and minds of techies the world over and Ruby on Rails seems to be the big buzz.

So what is next?

I don't have a magic looking glass but I can see some technologies and, more importantly, their uses / implementations, becoming more and more central.

powered by performancing firefox

How many Irish business bloggers / entrepeneurial bloggers are there out there? I don't mean the casual bloggers - I'm talking the serial, serious bloggers who post on a regular basis (not necessarily frequently) I would check my Thunderbird feeds, but they're on my other PC, but I think there's about a half dozen or so who I would read on a regular basis.

The MSN adcenter (sic) should be usable in Firefox as of August 5th. MSN is a business, so they obviously realised that they couldn't alienate users. It still isn't of much use to advertisers interested in targetting Irish MSN users though ....

The IIA blog mentions that there is a draft Accessible Procurement Toolkit currently available for comment

Last Monday I spent the afternoon sorting out a few administrative tasks that I had been putting off for ages, as I had been dreading them. First of all I had to renew my passport and then I had to renew my driving license. I expected both operations to be awkward and time consuming, but I was happily mistaken! The Gardai were very helpful in filling out the forms for the passport and I chose to use the Passport Express service. They say it takes up to 10 working days, but I actually received my new passport yesterday - less than 5 working days later. I was told that a driving license should take about a week to process, but it had already been processed and was waiting for me when I got back from Cork on Sunday evening. Now that is great service :) Pity they can't do the same with driving tests .......

Julian has just released the August version of MailScanner and, as usual, has made a great bit of software even better. One of the things that has always been awkward to track were changes in the config ie. our custom changes vs. Julian's default settings. You can now see this easily by running: MailScanner --changed which will output a table of values that have been changed. For example: Table of Changed Values: Option Name Default Current Value =============================================================================== allowpasswordprotectedarchives no yes alwaysincludespamassassinreport no yes alwayslookeduplast no FUNCTION:MailWatchLogging Other changes and full details are documented in the change log.