As part of the Irish Internet Association's annual congress, we at Blacknight are sponsoring one of the afternoon sessions. The title of the session is "Can you make money out of Blogs and Podcasts", so it's pretty broad.
If you make money via your site ie. through monetisation with Adsense, Amazon or any of the other affilliate / partner solutions let me know. It would be interesting to see what people are doing.
March 2007 Archives
As part of the Irish Internet Association's annual congress, we at Blacknight are sponsoring one of the afternoon sessions. The title of the session is "Can you make money out of Blogs and Podcasts", so it's pretty broad.
If you make money via your site ie. through monetisation with Adsense, Amazon or any of the other affilliate / partner solutions let me know. It would be interesting to see what people are doing.
Niall has posted some details on setting up IPV6 on Redhat based distros.
Why do I mention it?
Well it's kind of nice to be able to get IPV6 going across all servers and services on our network. If other people's networks are capable of communication over v6 then we should be able to reciprocate (like was the case when I was in Lisbon).
Pictures speak louder than words:
I'm currently in Madrid, where I'm waiting for my connecting flight back to Dublin.
It's been a week. An incredibly hectic week. A week of meetings (both public and private), drinks, food, drinks, talk and all those other wonderful things that big industry events bring with them.
The only problem is that I am broken.
I'm physically destroyed!
It is my intention to get myself back to a nice warm bed as soon as possible, as I have some serious catching up on sleep to do.
I think my poor liver could also do with a break!
I've had a page on the ICANN Wiki for well over a year, but, as I'd never been to an ICANN meeting it was lacking the infamous caricature, so that's now been sorted out!
Here's a small version of it:
Whether it's a good likeness of me or not I'll you decide :)
Whether it's a good likeness of me or not I'll you decide :)
This afternoon's sessions includes a 4 hour session with EUrid staff which I am currently attending.
They seem to be going over some of the statistics and facts related to the EU namespace, though whether or not they stand up to closer (and possibly more cynical) scrutiny is another matter.
It should be very interesting to see if they will be this upbeat after the first round of renewals ie. after April 7th. The Belgian registry, for example, saw a massive reduction in registered domains 12 months after their free domain promotion.
Vodka.com was recently bought for several million dollars.
It currently redirects to russianstandard.com
Unfortunately the site does not work properly in Firefox, so I cannot navigate it!
There are two tutorials /sessions this afternoon covering domain aftermarket.
The first session was given by Rob Hall from Momentous.ca.
The salient point from Rob's talk being that the secondary market has become the primary market - much as is the case in real estate. Some people may not agree or approve with that sentiment, but the reality and figures speak for themselves.
Further details of his talk are here, while you can download the slides from the ICANN site
The second session is being chaired by my good friend Jothan Frakes of DomainSponsor and features Mason Cole (SnapNames), Tim Schumacher (Sedo), Tom Murphy (Name Media - owners of Afternic) and Emiliano Pasqualetti (DomainsBot).
You can download the slides of their presentations on the ICANN site.
I've spent the last few hours in ICANN meetings where the topic of discussion has been the future of WHOIS.
It's a very hot topic, though I do get the distinct feeling that:
- ICANN meetings involve a lot more discussion than decision-making
- A non-American viewpoint is not overly welcome
-
The first session of the day was discussing new gTLDs and IDN.
Some of the salient points that came out of the session is that the decision making process is long and complicated.
IDN - promote internet usage among non-English speakers (among other things)
New gTLDs - avoiding issues - reserved names.
An interesting discussion was held about the reserved names and other criteria.
Although the welcome ceremony for ICANN Lisboa isn't until tomorrow morning the venue in Lisbon's financial district, has been buzzing since yesterday.
Delegates from every corner of the globe were arriving in dribs and drabs throughout the day. A lot of the Americans had arrived early in the morning, so were quite jetlagged. Good strong coffee helps :)
Crazy one week domain offer - register or transfer a .ie with Blacknight for a mere 25 euro.
Full details here
Go to the Blacknight site to order!
I'm sitting in Dublin airport waiting to board a flight to Madrid before heading on to Lisbon.
I seem to be cursed!
Since I really did not relish the idea of getting caught on the M50 (aka the longest carpark in Ireland) I drove up last night and stayed near the airport. I don't enjoy rushing, so I left the hotel with plenty of time to get to the airport to checkin etc.
Of course I could have taken my time as the flight is, of course, delayed!
If I had been running late, of course, it would have been leaving on time
Ah well - at least I can't miss it!
Ireland's crudest, funniest and consistently best blogger, Twenty Major, has signed a book deal.
I just wonder will the "c" word be used to punctuate each and every paragraph! I can see it getting an "R" rating or similar (if such a rating existed for books....)
Congratulations!
More coverage on ENN
I've been using a Microsoft Natural keyboard for the last couple of years both at home and in the office.
The time has come for me to replace the keyboard at home, as it's beginning to have issues with certain keys etc.,
So what kind of keyboard should I get?
I've looked at some of the really cool projector style ones, but they're totally impractical.
I've got quite large hands and hate small keyboards
I don't mind noisy keys, but the quieter the better
I've been in contact with several people who are going to Lisbon for the ICANN meeting, but several others won't be able to make it this time which is a pity.
If anyone is going that I haven't been in touch with let me know :)
I was looking forward to it, but since a few people have confirmed that they will be there I feel a lot better.
The only thing I'm trying to work out now is whether I'll be able to make it into the centre of Madrid and out again on the way over (without missing my flight).
It didn't take too much to find the flipside to the latest adsense addition.
Pay per action (beta) is where it's at.
Until people gain access to the beta program we can only guess what will be inside, but the concept of only paying for specific user actions is definitely attractive.
More on the official blog
Darren mentions that Google have launched the beta of a new addition to Adsense - AdSense referrals (beta)
Unlike "normal" adsense, you don't get paid per impression or per click. You only get paid based on actions defined by the advertiser (where's the adwords end of this to see what the setup is?)
Hopefully this won't become one of those endless betas like the Adsense for RSS / Feeds that seems to have vanished, as it could be a very interesting addition to people's arsenal.
EDIT: There's also a post on the official Adsense blog
Over the last few months we've all been hearing about the PlayStation 3. First there was expectation, but then that turned to disappointment as the European launch was postponed until March.
So with the launch only a few days away what do you think?
Have you booked yours?
Do you even care?
Personally I won't be buying one, as I don't like consoles, though I know a lot of people who are going to jump at the chance, but the price is more than a little offputting.
At over 600 euro a pop it would have to be truly impressive!
Krystian, who is back in Ireland again, wants to see what the Irish think of the Poles and what the Poles think of the Irish.
Hopefully people will take the time to engage with him.
This site gets quite a lot of traffic from certain keyphrases. As a result of this I am constantly having to cull marketing junk from the comments. And no these aren't the usual spam ones. The last one I culled was from a sales rep based in a small Irish town.
So if you to abuse my comments I will let you. In return for a fee.
How big is the fee?
That depends on me.
It's a lot cheaper to simply contact me in advance and ask me politely to help you / promote your services or whatever. I may still ask you to pay, but I can assure you it will be a LOT cheaper and less embarassing
Firestats 1.17 has been released.
It's a bug fix, so no need to get worried :)
I only spotted this today, but it's still open for another few days, so get on there!
Dell Linux Survey
It would be great if Dell offered people the option of choosing a linux distro preinstalled on desktops and laptops. I'm getting rather tired of having to reformat them and others are wasting a lot of time trying to get refunds for an OS they have no intention of using.
As I mentioned yesterday, I was having some "interesting" issues getting Ubuntu to play nice with my new graphics card (GeForce 7900GS).
You can get a full spec of the card on the Nvidia site. It's a pretty powerful card:
Graphics Bus Technology PCI Express
Memory 256MB
Memory Interface 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 42.2
Fill Rate (Billion pixels/sec) 9
Vertices/Second 822.5 Million
Pixels per clock (peak) 20
RAMDACs (MHz) 400
While it will work without the extra power cable plugged in the nVidia control centre will give you a warning as soon as you boot into Windows.
Under Ubuntu the opposite is the case.
If you try to install Ubuntu with the card's power cable plugged in you will end up bashing your head against your keyboard (at least I did!), as the installer doesn't have the correct drivers to handle it.
Solution - unplug the power lead.
Install Ubuntu as normal.
Once you've done that you can pop over to Alberto Milone's site and grab the .deb that you need.
Run the following command as root (use sudo if you're that way inclined):
dpkg -i envy_0.9.1-0ubuntu3_all.deb
It will probably whine about a load of dependencies being missing - ignore that for the moment.
You can then run:
apt-get install -f
Which basically tells it to download any required packages and install the .deb
Once installed you'll find that you've now got a new icon under Application > System Tools
Run "envy" and you will be prompted for your admin password.
You can then choose how you want to install it.
I went with the autoinstall.
Once the autoinstall is run it may prompt you to reboot your PC. Don't.
Shutdown your PC completely.
Once it is safely shutdown plug the graphics card power cable back into the PC and restart.
If X still crashes on boot, then unplug the power again.
Boot into recovery mode, login as root (if you have it enabled) and then run:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
If you don't have root enabled simply run the command as:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
The driver you need is "nvidia".
Follow the reconfiguration wizard all the way through and remember to set the screen resolutions you want to use. Use the spacebar to select them.
Shut down the PC again and plug the power cable back into the graphics card.
It should boot properly and X should work
This worked for me and I'm currently running at 1280*1024 (I may up that - just need to check what the monitor will support).
Your mileage may vary and I may have left out a stage - I wasn't documenting this as I was doing it.
I have a nice legal copy of Windows XP Pro. Unfortunately it predates any of the service packs, so when I went to install my new PC I ran into an interesting issue.
The intel motherboard I'm using is from Intel® 946 Express Chipset Family. Of course it comes with all the drivers required on CD.
Unfortunately Intel work on the basis that whoever is installing XP will be using a new disk. I'm not. I keep moving the install from PC to PC. I think it's installed on the 3rd or 4th set of hardware since I first got it. I'm probably not alone.
Normally I'd download any extra drivers that I need, but the one driver that you need is required for the LAN card to work ie. no driver == no net connection. (Of course this isn't an issue under Ubuntu where it all just works out of the box (apart from the graphics card, but that's a different story))
Solution?
Grab the required file from someone else's pc and drop it onto the desktop (as it's required for USB to work properly a USB key won't work - I tried)
The file, which is tiny by the way, is called usbehci.sys and you can read all about the MS patches / updates in their knowledgebase
And for those of you who don't feel like wasting aeons looking for the damn thing you can download it here
When I read about this I thought it was a joke and had to check the date to be sure:
Colorado Woman Sues To Hold Web Crawlers To Contracts
So basically she has a public website but does not want spiders to crawl it even though she hasn't denied them access using robots.txt ?
I've just installed this PC and have run into some interesting issues with the graphics drivers.
Which nvidia drivers should I be using?
If I try "nvidia" and change the resolution settings X crashs completely, so I'm stuck with a really low resolution which is making me miserable :(
Any suggestions?
The make sure you're detecting if the browser supports it.
I just installed Ubuntu on this pc, so I don't have any extra plugins yet.
It being a Saturday and St. Patrick's Day, I wanted to check which shops are open and until when.
Browsing the Dunnes Stores website is nigh on impossible without Flash and the developers, who were probably paid a small fortune, haven't even bothered checking to see if users have Flash.
Well done guys!
You're brilliant.
What OSS software do you recommend for windows, apart from the obvious ones like Firefox and Thunderbird.
Are there any other essential tools that you use on a regular basis?
I've started a thread on this over here
Years ago when I got my first server I remember installing some scripts to check its integrity and warn me about attacks. I was amazed and quite frightened by the number of SSH attempts. I soon learnt, however, that this was quite normal. It maybe worrying, but it's normal.
Put a server on a public IP and people will try to crack it.
There's no avoiding that. Well, there is, but it's a bit impractical to disconnect a web server from the internet :)
So what can you do?
One of the solutions is to use iptables to block the IPs of failed login attempts. If someone (or something) makes more than X connection attempts from a particular IP then you block it.
Of course that's easy if you can program. I can't!
Luckily I don't have to, as there are solutions like the rather excellent Fail2Ban available:
Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that makes too many password failures. It updates firewall rules to reject the IP address.So not only can you block SSH attacks, you can also use it to defend yourself from other bruteforce attempts. There are debian / Ubuntu versions available, so all you need to do (as root) is run:
apt-get install fail2ban
This will install the daemon and its basic config, which is to silently block SSH attacks.
You can easily customise the configuration by editing /etc/fail2ban.conf
The developers have left nice clear comments in the file, so even I was able to make the necessary changes, including whitelisting my own IPs ie. you don't want to lock yourself out just because you've forgotten your login details.
There's also a nice writeup here which goes into some depth about the various options available.
I have normal vision.
I do wear glasses, but I could get away without wearing them most of the time. Admittedly I only started wearing my glasses on a regular basis when I walked straight past my girlfriend without spotting her (this was about ten years ago), but I wouldn't be considered blind.
I'm not a designer, nor would I ever claim to be one, but, in common with a lot of people, I can probably recognise nice design when I see it.
Unfortunately some blogs are simply painful to look at directly.
When I say "painful" I mean that it literally hurts your eyes to look at the horrendous clashes of colours and annoying highlighting. Just because the XHTML validates does not mean that your eyes won't hurt! Maybe some blog designers think they are being clever while they torture the rest of us - I honestly don't know.
Blogs (and websites in general) are all about content. Tasteful presentation of the aforementioned content goes a long way, but the content itself is the key differentiator.
Thank God for RSS!
Without it we'd all miss out on good content that is buried beneath horrific designs.
The pricing of IE domains is always a topic that seems to excite people. The funny thing is when people take their own marketing too seriously.
A couple of years ago I mentioned a rather silly set of statements made by a certain Irish hosting company.
Why did I mention it?
Well, as I said then and I say now, they don't exactly have a good track record in terms of pricing.
While the rest of us were doing our best to attract business with pricing etc., they were charging a high rate. In a free market they're entitled to do so BUT when they started making crazy hypocritical claims about pricing I wasn't going to stand idly by.
So what the hell is this all about?
So they're matching someone else's prices? Why? What is the point? It's not as if they even have good pricing... €69 for a .ie is about €40 more expensive than the lowest price in the market at present, so it's hardly innovative pricing ...
Surely they'd be better off trying to grow their own business?
So they're matching someone else's prices? Why? What is the point? It's not as if they even have good pricing... €69 for a .ie is about €40 more expensive than the lowest price in the market at present, so it's hardly innovative pricing ...
Surely they'd be better off trying to grow their own business?
RedHat have released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
From what I've heard and seen this could be a really exciting release, as they have placed a lot of emphasis on virtualisation
Of course Centos has already started work on a 5.* release, with a beta currently available.
I'll be interested to see what kind of things people can do with this new shiny toy :)
Since there is a slight difference in release dates of the latest James Bond on DVD my US order actually arrived two days ago. It won't be released in Ireland for another couple of days.
In any case, if you do get the two disc edition the documentaries are well worth watching.
Daniel Craig comes across as a really nice unassuming guy.
I'm never too sure how seriously I should take any of the comments on DVDs. You know damn well that the studio is behind the production, so it's not as if they're going to say anything negative about each other. Even if the director hated working with Daniel Craig he couldn't very well say so...
Pity there isn't more focus on Eva Green, though she might get more in the Bond girls section that I haven't watched yet.
It's also fascinating to see how they put the entire production together, but as Damien already pointed out, I'm fascinated by some of the odder things, such as special edition soundtracks...
Every time I install Ubuntu I end up struggling with changing the default editor to use vi or vim.
If only I'd found this page before!
So simple!
All you have to do is run (as root):
update-alternatives --config editor
I'm really sick of all these web 2.0 fanboys.
It's like the dotcom boom with slightly older people, or something.
Don't get me wrong. Some of the web applications and services are really cool AND useful.
They may even have a business plan behind them so that they'll actually be around in 6 months time ....
Twitter (it doesn't even deserve a link!) simply isn't.
It's probably the biggest waste of time I've come across in years.
Does anyone really give a damn what other people are doing all the time.
"I just got up"
"I made coffee"
"My girlfriend is having morning sickness"
- stop the lights!! Headline news!
Most people's daily lives are boring.
While we may all do interesting things a lot of what we do is incredibly boring.
This is why I own a DVD player, a TV, books etc.,
Someone telling the world that they are sitting on a bus isn't going to improve my life. If I wanted to know where someone was I could ring them, email them, IM them .. you get the idea..
If I want to know what you are planning to do I can check your calendar / diary (if you have a public one)
Do we really need twitter?
I don't think so.
Others tend to agree
Though all the little fanboys think it's so "cool" Guys - reality check please.
Just because it's got a "web 2.0" stamp on it does not make it "cool" "useful" or anything else.
If it was "hip" to jump of cliffs would you all do it?
Which site(s) would people recommend when looking for a hotel?
I've used a couple but I may be missing out on good deals!
Last weekend I must have been bored or simply crazy, as I bought several domains and complete websites.
The main acquisition was this discussion forum which took my fancy partially because it had a reasonably good domain name, a nice enough custom skin and vbseo preinstalled (saving me on license costs).
Moving it from the previous host to one of my servers didn't take that much work, though I have come to hate cpanel backups with a passion! While they do a good job of maintaining the important files they also include a lot of junk that isn't much use on a vanilla server (ie. one without any form of control panel). I'm a lot happier using scp, rsync and vim :)
I also finished getting the last of the important content off palermo. Niall was heading up to the data centres this afternoon, so he was good enough to move my "baby" into its new home in Interxion. It's been reinstalled with the latest release of Ubuntu (I owe that man pints!) and is currently sitting there doing very little.. that will change!
While I was at DomainFest in LA I got to meet a lot of interesting people in the domain / hosting / internet / online business, so going to ICANN Lisbon was a natural followup.
Unfortunately I've been rather busy over the last few weeks, though that's probably a good complaint to have as well :)
In any case I only got round to booking my flights this evening.
Trying to find reasonably priced flights to Lisbon isn't as easy as it should be - thank God for sites like Expedia.it (the English version kept on giving me pricing in dollars, so I opted for the Italian version) and Sky Scanner!
So my flights are booked and now all I have to do is find a hotel.
I've ended up taking quite a circuitous route, flying Dublin - Madrid - Lisbon (it could have been worse if I'd ended up with Lufthansa!), so depending on how the times work out I may even get to pop into Madrid for a couple of hours.
I haven't been to Lisbon for about 10 years. I was there twice in the 90's with my girlfriend at the time. We were poverty-stricken students. We were in love. It was romantic. Though the hotels were far from it! I swore the last time I was there that if I ever went back I would stay in a semi-decent hotel, though I never imagined it would take me practically ten years to get back there!
I get cold calls from sales people on a regular basis. Some of the callers are very nice and charming etc., and we have pleasant conversations.
Others should really choose another field of work
Really - they are not suited to direct selling.
If you ring me up and try to sell me advertising you need to tell me why I should do it.
This afternoon a very nervous sales person rang trying to sell me advertising in a new magazine. Or maybe it wasn't a new magazine.. He couldn't really make up his mind. Questioning him about this upset him
When he told me that we should advertise in it because we "made websites" I naturally corrected him and asked him what he thought we did.. and why hadn't he even looked at our website.
He had hung up.
How mature
So if you get a call from a rather nervous guy selling advertising in a publication that might be new or might not be (he may have decided by the time he calls you) then watch out!
I mentioned a post about prolific bloggers a while back.
It seems I'm in that top 100 for the moment :)
I wouldn't expect to be there for long - there are a lot of very prolific bloggers out there!
Realex have won a very tasty contract - the online payments for one of the largest online shops in Europe - CDWow!
While I've known about this for several months I had promised their CEO, Colm Lyon, not to blog about it until they'd officially announced it, which I see they've now done.
I'm delighted for Colm. He deserves every success.
While I may not like some of the websites that get submitted to the various directories I manage I can appreciate that not everyone can design (I can't!). However one of my pet hates are the image only sites. You know the ones I mean.
Instead of pages of text they are one big ugly image. No text. No links. Nothing clickable or spiderable.
You'd need to use OCR technology to get any content or meaning from them.
Why do people do that?
And what's more worrying ....
Are they actually paying for it?
There are so many issues with image only sites that it's hard to choose one to start with:
- Lack of text
- "Text" is not scalable
- Text cannot be spidered
- Screenreaders won't see anything
- 56k dialup users will probably have to wait forever to see it (if they are patient enough to actually wait)
Although I missed HeadRambles' (aka Grandad) 5 minutes of fame on RTE the other evening it is available to view online.
If you are going to watch it you will need patience.
Not with the bloggers or the interviewer, but with the RTE stream. Bandwidth is no longer an issue (they're on INEX), but whatever way they have the stream setup it makes for a really painful experience (which also forced Firefox to restart!)
As I work for a hosting company that monitors a LOT of network traffic data it's only natural that my own DSL line is being "watched" (it makes talking to our ISP a lot more interesting!)
If you look at the screenshot below you will see a very big difference in the connection from around lunchtime today:
So what changed?
The only thing that changed was the firmware on the Linksys WRT54G.
Nothing else has changed in my setup.
I'm not complaining, but the difference is startling.
If only I had known :)
So what changed?
The only thing that changed was the firmware on the Linksys WRT54G.
Nothing else has changed in my setup.
I'm not complaining, but the difference is startling.
If only I had known :)
Over the past few days a Coleraine based company, Lotus Chinese Medical Services, have been systematically spamming a LOT of Irish companies.
While spam may be annoying and I'm no stranger to it, what makes this spam a little different and more annoying is the payload.
The idiots are sending out a rather large PDF attachment with each and every email!
The file is about 2 megabytes in size, so with encoding etc., it can put quite a "nice" strain on your DSL line. Imagine a sales@ or info@ address that sends the same email to multiple people in an office. You end up with the same stupid mail being downloaded by ten or twenty people at once. End result being that your office network gets really really slow as a result.
So what can you do?
Report them to their ISP AOL and spamcop and anyone else who cares to listen.
I've already reported them to AOL and spamcop a couple of times this week, as they keep hitting my personal domains one by one, which suggests that they've built themselves a "nice" little database of Irish domains.
Unfortunately they don't have a website, so you can't get that taken down or blacklisted in a URI blacklist, which is a pity, but you can ring them and yell at them :)
Another option would be to report them to the data privacy commissioner. While this may not offer much protection for businesses they've also been hitting personal email addresses (including the one tied to this site). Of course as they are not actually based within the republic that may not help.
Anyone with suggestions let me know
As I mentioned before, I have been using a number of different linux firmware versions on my LinkSys WRT54G.
For the last few weeks I was using SveaSoft's firmware, as the previous firmware had caused me headaches. The Sveasoft solution worked quite well, but I had some crazy routing issues which left me rather confused. It was as if certain blocks of the internet simply ceased to exist!
In any case I decided to dump SveaSoft for OpenWRT. The routing issues seem to have vanished and I can visit sites that were "banned" again!!
Hopefully the connection issues will also have been resolved, though I won't know for sure for a few hours.
As I mentioned a few days ago, MailScanner's Julian Field is currently in hospital where he is in a serious condition. According to a posting today from one of Julian's colleagues he is on the mend:
Hi again, Today's news is that Jules is very awake and alert, and is drinking tea. Those who know him well know he gets through a fair few gallons of tea, so this is a good sign :) Also the doctors are wanting to get him out of intensive care as soon as a bed in another ward becomes free, another good sign. Let's hope the recovery continues. It may be hard to keep him offline before long! I'll ramp down the reporting frequency a bit now unless there's anything significant to say. Please do keep cards coming, I'm sure they'll continue to be very well received. Tim
First there was HeadRambles, now his wife has started a blog.
What's going to happen next?
Is my mother going to start a blog?
Though I think it's really cool that an older generation is getting online. Maybe there is hope after all :)
A couple of days ago I came across a post on Ken's blog about the new Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann website. It seems that it's now being talked about in other places.
I'm not a designer, so I won't get into the entire debacle about whether Irish designers are "good enough", though you won't find me using non-Irish designers anytime soon...
What does rile me however are a couple of other things about the new site:
- It's not hosted in Ireland
- The .ie and .com are aliased not redirects, so it's splitting on the search results
blacknight@siracusa:~$ geoiplookup www.comhaltas.com
GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States
Irish tax payers money funds organisations like Comhaltas and the GAA (who obviously don't think Ireland is good enough for them either)
Back in the 1990s I would have understood why companies and organisations chose to host their websites outside Ireland. My first few sites were hosted in the USA in the late 1990s simply because there was so little choice available in the Irish market, and what was available was expensive and lacking in features (ie. no php, mysql or anything else).
It's 2007. Hosting in Ireland has come a very long way, with most of the larger Irish hosting providers actually running their own networks etc.,
Just take a look at the membership list of INEX these days!
Anyone who works with me learns very quickly that I am a coffee addict. I can go for hours without a cigarette, but if I can't get decent coffee I get quite upset.
While discussing how much people were paying for clicks recently a new service, HitTail, was mentioned by one of the regulars.
So, as my curiosity was piqued I signed up for an account last night. Then another. And another. And another. Anyone notice a pattern emerging? :)
So what is Hit Tail?
According to themselves:
HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site. It's that simple.They forgot to mention that it's highly addictive!
Signing up for an account only takes a couple of seconds, after which you are presented with the single line of Javascript you need to add to your site. You need to make sure that it loads on every single page view, so if you're using a template system of some kind adding it to the footer would make sense. Once logged in you are presented with the following screen:
Over time each section is populated with the search queries so that you can easily see what is driving traffic to your site.
What makes it interesting is that it doesn't bore you with unnecessary details.
You get keywords / phrases and you can easily see which search engines are driving them to your site.
Forget about all the other details. If you want those look at something else.
The documentation on their site explains this very clearly!
This is an area that so many other log analysis services / software fall down on.
Instead of using plain English they get caught up in confusing jargon.
If I wanted to read jargon without actually learning how something worked I'd read "man" pages from the command line - thanks!
So what can I say about Hit Tail...
On the plus side:
It's really cool! Though it's so damned addictive that I can easily while away several hours just exploring what weird queries people are using to end up on sites I manage. So far I've learnt that people are arriving on this site while searching for some really obscure things, while others were looking for more mainstream topics that I hadn't realised that I ranked well for.
On the negative side:
The UI isn't that great. It's functional, but some of the colours contrast badly rendering some sections almost impossible to view. A prime example of this is the delete button:
Light pink on a yellow background?
Was the designer on crack?
Was there even a designer?
The other thing that is maddening is that you have to signup for a new account for each site you want to track.
While a single account may suit someone with only one site this tool is not really aimed at them.
It's going to prove a lot more useful / popular with online marketers who manage multiple sites and campaigns.
And we all have enough usernames and passwords to remember already, thank you very much!
Most of the issues related to the UI could be fixed quite easily. There are plenty of very talented people out there who would be able to help them get it "right", because it's the kind of thing that can make the difference between a success and a failure.
Although the service is currently in "beta" (maybe as a fashion statement, who knows?) it seems to work well and there is some mention of a premium service. If the pricing on the premium service isn't crazy I'd probably pay for it, though I'd have to actually act on its suggestions etc., for that to be worth my while.
I love reading marketing material.
Sometimes you learn something new.
Sometimes you giggle.
Sometimes you giggle so much you fall off your chair.
According Amas' latest report:
Almost two-thirds of businesses, or 64%, had websites in 2006, a rise of four percentage points on the previous year.Wow! Are they talking about the same country I live and work in? Oh wait.. there's an explanatory footer:
Sources: Central Statistics Office: Information Society and Telecommunications 2006, survey of 12,219 companies employing 10 or more(my emphasis) So what does that mean? Do companies with fewer than 10 staff not count? I doubt if their owners would be overly impressed to find out that they're not actually counted.. Or is it simply a "clever" ploy to make people feel that we're doing so much better online than other countries? A very large proportion of Irish businesses still do not have websites. They *may* have a domain, but all you have to do is take a walk through any Irish town to see how many are still using free hotmail.com (and similar) email addresses. A holding page does not a website make. I don't know, but it sounds like pointless headline grabbing if you ask me. Of course any report that suggests that meta content is as important as theirs does would make me worry.. Everyone else has been saying the opposite for ages ... Maybe they've rehashed a report from a few years ago when it did actually matter as much as they claim. Don't get me wrong, meta content is important, but whereas a few years ago the meta tags, such as "description" and "keywords" were essential that is no longer the case, as so many online marketers were gaming the search engines. In some respects what really bugs me about the report is the way they talk in absolutes, as if their "findings" were "gospel". Press releases can be amusing, but they can also backfire badly when someone examines them a little bit more closely. A recent example of that being Captivate's press release that was covered by ENN, then slated by RedCardinal and ENN's blog! The moral of the story, if there is one, be sure that you can actually lead by example of know what you are talking about before trying to grab a couple of column inches .... Then again, who actually pays any attention to any of these press releases? Are we all producing press releases to keep ourselves happy or simply to provide sales leads for publications' marketing departments? (I always get offered plenty of ad space when we run an ad in a national paper and get plenty of useless sales calls after a press release from people selling to me NOT buying - obviously!)
I use a linksys WRT54G on my home network. It was running the standard Linksys firmware at one point, but I've been running a variety of Linux variants on it over the last few months.
This evening, while looking for information on OpenWRT I stumbled across HotSpotSystem.com.
While several of the alternative firmwares offer hotspot functionality this is the first one I've come across that offers a builtin revenue stream.
I'm not sure how the revenue share works with the commercial offerings from Bitbuzz, Eircom, BT etc., but this alternative does look very appealing.
Pity I don't live somewhere where I could actually make use of it :)
I just saw a post about someone looking for the most prolific bloggers (via).
The criteria they're using is quite simple:
1. It must be a blog. 2. It must be a legitimate blog...that adds content, any kind, to the blogosphere. 3. There must be 1,000 or more posts at ONE blog, not a total of 1,000 at two, three or more different blogs.1 - That's easy enough 2 - It depends on your definition of legitimate and possibly your definition of "content". It might have been better if there was some form of quality rating. A lot of blogs, both Irish and international, do not really produce much original content and when they do it's really boring. Yes, yes, yes there are exceptions to that, but in percentage terms they are very small. 3 - 1000 or more posts on one blog. That strikes me as a rather silly restriction. Someone like Darren Rowse is prolific and posts to several blogs regularly. I haven't done an actual post count, but I am probably more prolific in terms of post count than a lot of others if I count the other blogs that I manage. This blog alone has close to 1200 posts! But is quantity the only barometer? It's not the size of the tractor, it's how you plough the field (though the context for that was quite different *cough*)
Maman Poulet has posted the list of winners from last night's blog awards.
Nice to see that Damien Mulley finally got an award! Bernie gave him the "best contribution" award, which was a lovely gesture.
Bernie also won the best technology blog, which is good to hear.
Unfortunately I didn't make it this year - I was meant be doing a lot of things over the last couple of weeks, but I've been incredibly busy. George was there, so I don't feel that bad :)
Mod_rewrite is an incredibly powerful tool and a lot of us would be very lost without it!
A couple of quick "tricks" using mod_rewrite - partially to help myself find them again in the future:
Redirecting domain.tld to www.domain.tld
This can be put in a .htaccess in the website's root.
It will match any HTTP request that is NOT for www.domain.tld and rewrite it to www.domain.tld
Changing File Extensions
If you have changed file extensions on a site, for example moving all files from being ".htm" to ".php" then this line of code will save you a lot of hassle.
Not only will it help with any inbound links, but also for any internal links that you need to edit, but haven't:
the first file extension in the line is the one you are replacing, while the second is the replacement.
A couple of quick "tricks" using mod_rewrite - partially to help myself find them again in the future:
Redirecting domain.tld to www.domain.tld
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.tld/$1 [L,R=301]This can be put in a .htaccess in the website's root.
It will match any HTTP request that is NOT for www.domain.tld and rewrite it to www.domain.tld
Changing File Extensions
If you have changed file extensions on a site, for example moving all files from being ".htm" to ".php" then this line of code will save you a lot of hassle.
Not only will it help with any inbound links, but also for any internal links that you need to edit, but haven't:
RewriteRule ^(.*).htm$ $1.php [R=301]
the first file extension in the line is the one you are replacing, while the second is the replacement.
Wordpress is beginning to become a little like phpbb2 - a security nightmare.
Last night I got a "heads up" from one of our sysadmins that there was another security release, as the Wordpress download servers had been cracked!
Lovely!
I upgraded this install as soon as I heard, but of course I forgot to update some permissions etc., which is why it was a wee bit broken until a few minutes ago.
Running around patching and upgrading blogs every few days is not my idea of fun. If it was only once every six months it would be one thing, but the number of holes that Wordpress seems to be developing of late may force me to rethink my choice of software in the future.
Movable Type is looking more and more attractive every day!
Full story here
Spelling and basic grammar and punctuation drive me mad.
This is due in no little part to my grandmother, may she rest in peace, who was a language "nazi". She had zero tolerance for bad spelling, punctuation, grammar and pronunciation. Since I spent so much time in her company as a child it was only inevitable that it would rub off on me to some degree.
Other members of the family seem to have inherited the same "problem", if you can call it that.
Why do I bring this up?
Well it's due to a recent post on Richard's blog. While the issues people seem to have with spelling words might be annoying it's crazy to think that companies that actually print calendars get it wrong.
I suppose I shouldn't be overly surprised by this, but I still find it amazing.
Spelling and grammar are not the most important things in life, but they are damn important!
If you look at a seemingly slick website for a company that is offering you a product or service, do you think twice about buying if they can't even spell common words correctly?
I know I do!
Yet the number of sites, both professional and personal, that have serious issues with spelling and silly grammatical and punctuation mistakes never ceases to amaze me.
From an online marketing / SEO point of view I mentioned the issues some time ago.
Of course, if you are doing online marketing you should be aware of typos.
It doesn't hurt to bid on typos of your target keywords - while google will offer the correct spelling it can't hurt to try and get the initial search result, can it?
An Post will be issuing a set of 4 stamps featuring Irish castles on 9th March 2007.
The castles featured are:
- Portumna Castle, Co Galway
- Dunluce Castle, Co Antrim
- Trim Castle, Co Meath
- Lismore Castle, Co Waterford
AIB has redone their site a small bit making the navigation that bit simpler.
What's really nice is that they've made the online banking links really prominent on the top left of the navigation bar.
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