December 2006 Archives

Ennio Morricone is to be awarded with an Oscar for his achievements. Although he was nominated 5 times he never actually won an Oscar!

The Tiger Style Admin plugin for Wordpress was updated not so long ago. The latest version is simply beautiful and elegant. If you are using a CSS2 capable browser I would urge you to grab a copy of the plugin immediately - you won't regret it. Why? When WP Tiger was first introduced the Wordpress UI wasn't that attractive or intuitive, so WP Tiger did a lot to improve that. Almost 2 years later Wordpress has evolved and its interface is a lot more user friendly, however it still lacks the polish that WP Admin brings to it. Once you activate WP Tiger you are presented with an array of attractive and intuitive icons to click on while the entire user interface is wrapped in a warm set of colours and tones. The plugin doesn't bring any extra functionality but it does make it a lot more pleasant to work with the existing functions.

Happy Christmas to everyone whereever you are! We've just done the "present thing" and I'll be heading over to Crosshaven shortly to collect a couple of people for Christmas dinner...

I was chatting with a blogger earlier today who was having issues with comment spam. I guess anyone who runs a blog for a while will run into the issue of comment spam and unfortunately there is no perfect solution unless you resort to using captcha on your comments. So what does work? Bad Behavior (sic) is pretty effective at stopping the junk before it hits your comment moderation list. The only downside is that some UserAgents that aren't actually evil may get stopped. This happened to me recently when I was playing with AlertSite's services. The simplest solution in that instance was to completely disable the plugin while I was testing the service. Akismet comes with Wordpress, but is also available for a lot of other software these days (including Gossamer Threads' Glinks!). It's pretty good, though you do need to check the spam queue from time to time, as I keep finding legitimate comments being marked as spam. Why does this happen? I've no idea and I haven't had the energy or the inclination to find out. Other tricks people have tried include using .htaccess to deny access to their blogs, but in a lot of cases they are simply duplicating the work of Bad Behavior. What would be better would be to combine one of the antispam tools available with iptables, so you could completely block the HTTP request before it hit apache and thus take the load off the server completely. Of course that would be impossible on a shared server.. but why would that bother me? :)

Cormac came across this site. For anyone involved in the hosting business it's worth bookmarking. For anyone who is tired of marketing junk from hosting companies this might bring a smile to your faces

The OED is on special offer until the end of January. You can get the 20 volume set for a "mere" £499 Stg until the end of January. They describe it as: I'm almost tempted to grab a copy, though, with my LA trip coming up I can't really afford to be splurging ....

The weather today has been mucky. It didn't start off too bad, but as the day progressed the weather got progressively muckier... The entire area seems to be covered in a blanket of damp and mucky fog with visibility reduced to a few metres. It reminds me a bit of Veneto - where you had to contend with freezing fog on narrow mountain roads - lots of fun for all the family!

I think I need a "weird" category for this kind of thing... Via the open list comes mention of the "BlueScreen Screen Saver (3.2)" .... The screen saver details are quite disturbing: At least someone in Microsoft has a sense of humour :)

I've been asked by website owners about displaying previews / screencaps on browse.ie in the past, but I couldn't find an alternative to thumbshots et al which are a bit limited in their range of site previews. A lot of smaller sites aren't available, so it isn't overly helpful to use their service. The other day, however, I came across a free service that seems to rectify the situation - Snap Preview Anywhere. The service works by giving you a thumbnail when you hover over a link to an external site (click to view larger image):

I've put it on a couple of directory sites I run, so I'll see if there's any feedback from users. I can't see this service being of much use to blogs targetting the more technical users, but I can see it being very useful for those targetting the less technically minded who might find the extra bit of "eye candy" to be useful.

As some readers of this blog know, I'm heading off to LA at the end of January for a holiday. I've timed my trip to coincide with Domain Fest 2007, so I'll be able to combine a bit of work with pleasure. I'm currently working my way through a mental checklist ... as I'm sure I'll forget something essential if I don't Let's see... Flight booked Hotel booked Domain Fest booked Guidebook bought The Rough Guide to Los Angeles (Rough Guide Travel Guides) I'm still trying to see if there is anything special going on in LA while I'm there, but so far, apart from David Copperfield, there doesn't seem to be anything on that week! No matter - I intend to have a good time

IrishDev must think we're all American. Their latest email newsletter is cluttered with American date format references. Either they think we're all American OR whoever did the newsletter messed up .....

Thanks are due to our beloved government for ensuring that a monopoly continues in the health insurance market. Well done! You must be all so proud! Bupa are pulling out of the Irish market...

I've mentioned the price of .ie domains several times in the past...... Earlier today we were given the official prices for 2007 from the IEDR. What struck me as rather amusing is that it will now be cheaper to register .ie domains directly with the IEDR than through some of their more prominent resellers. The IEDR will be dropping their retail rate to €69, so unless some of our competitors follow suit they will be more expensive than the IEDR!! Sidenote - we'll probably be running a special on .ie domains in the New Year.. so watch this space

Original and catchy marketing ideas always grab my attention. The latest one to do so is that of Marketing Pilgrim where they are giving away an iPod to an RSS subscriber It's a really nice idea for boosting their readerships stats

I don't pay much attention to Alexa ranking, but I know other people do... Anyhow I see that the Irish webmaster forum is in the top 100 for Ireland, which is more than can be said for a number of Irish sites that seem to think that Alexa actually matters....

If people cannot access online services due to accessibility issues, then it would be fairly safe to say that egovernment is not succeeding - it's probably failing. Richard Hearne has done a fascinating analysis of over 40 Irish government and political party websites with a view to assessing their accessibility and the results are quite worrying: You can read the full report on Richard's site

Trailers of the next Harry Potter film are now available Looks like it's being released in mid-July as a summer hit, rather than a Christmas one .... So what's happening about the next book?

Web services can be a really handy way of integrating various affiliate programs with your website and customising them to meet your requirements and taste. In most cases you need to get a developer key to access the services. In most cases the key is a text string of anything from 4 or 5 characters to 10. Not so with cj.com! Their developer key is a massive 260 characters!!! I'd hate to have to memorise that!

Seems the budget reports have attracted a lot of online viewers and listeners today... End result being a new high in traffic over INEX - just over 1.3 gigabits

Coca Cola are a huge company. They have an equally huge advertising budget (think of any of their Christmas ads and you'll see what I'm talking about) However they also seem to have a bit of common sense and pragmatism in their marketing department. Over the Christmas period they are going to be giving designated drivers plenty of free non-alcholic drinks: Full details and list of participating pubs can be found on their site (via Anthony on the OPEN list)

AIB's online business banking will soon be accessible by Firefox users and linux users: From their site:

Google has got itself into hot water several times over the past few months. Its self-service pay per click advertising system, adwords, was hit with a number of legal actions due to trademark issues. Basically competitors were placing bids on keywords and phrases related to products and / or services from rivals. I've seen this happen in the Irish hosting market as well. As several of our competitors were running pay per click ad campaigns targetting certain key phrases I decided to lodge a complaint with Google through their official trademark complaint office. Although it took them several months to deal with my complaint it was upheld and the rivals' ad campaigns have now been stopped :)

It's only X days until Christmas. The value of X will change depending on when you read this. Christmas is one of those events that I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand I love it, whereas on the other I can remember so many squabbles and arguments with family members that I can really hate it. But the big issue with Christmas, for me at least, is what to get people. My mother and sister both maintain Amazon wishlists, as do I. However, in the case of my sister, Amazon may not be off much help to her now that she is at University, as she needs textbooks more than anything else, so a standard book token might be more useful. So what's the issue? If you give someone a gift token (aff), be it for Amazon, your corner shop or wherever the recipient will know how much you have spent. I hate that in some ways, though if I get sent a token or voucher I still appreciate it. It's a catch 22 I guess. What do other people do with the "awkward" people in your life?

I probably should have been aware of Below Zero, but I wasn't until I read about it in today's Sunday Business Post. If you remember the party in the Die Another Day, then you may get the idea of a bar built completely out of ice: Sounds em - cool :)

Why oh why do people in ENN simply publish companies' press releases as if they were gospel? It just so happens that I have a conflicting set of results... Odd that, isn't it? Note the inclusion of actual figures ie. you can see how many emails were involved, as opposed to a vague and unscientific statement with no actual figures to support its conclusions (they may have the data, but it never makes it into the press releases)