August 2008 Archives

I have an annoying habit of grabbing domain names on whim and then promptly forgetting why I bought them.

Coolsites.ie was one of those domain names that I grabbed  a few months ago, as I knew instinctively that I would find a good use for it, I just wasn't 100% sure what...

Months later I came across a very tasty MT template called "Mid Century", which has been released under the GPL.

It's a simply gorgeous template and combines a lot of features that I felt were ideal for a site like CoolSites.ie, so I'd have been rather silly not to make use of it.

It's now live!

I plan on posting a site every day if I can, so if you know of any nice, cool or simply interesting sites that I should mention please let me know via email to submissions@coolsites.ie. I'd strongly recommend that you use the subject line "coolsites.ie submission", as it will get lost in my inbox otherwise.

(Please bear in mind that I do not use Windows, so if a site requires IE6 or 7 to render properly I won't be able to see it)

I'll also be asking a few other people to do guest posts, as I think spreading the subjectivity might not be a bad idea! (If that makes any sense)

It's amazing how quickly time flies. 11 years ago today Princess Diana died in the tunnel in Paris.

I was living in Madrid at the time and remember following the story on TVE as the day progressed.

While I remember her marriage to Prince Charles quite clearly, even though I was very young at the time, I don't remember a lot about the woman after that. It was only in the period after her death that I came to realise how much work she'd been doing in the realm of human rights.

I guess we'll never really know all the facts of what went on in the lead up to her death.

Getting your site listed in Google is one thing, getting traffic to your site is another.

What's the difference?

Well basically Google pretty much lists every single webpage on the planet, so getting listed or included isn't really that big a deal.

What you really want is people to go to your site and buy your product or service (or take whatever action you want / need).

Now this is where it gets interesting and complicated.

If someone does a search in Google for my name they'll probably end up here pretty quickly. This has very little to do with SEO. It's basically because I have an odd first name and a rather uncommon surname, so most of the results in Google will refer to me.

With me so far?

Ok, so that shows that searching for something very specific is probably going to take you to it. It might not, but it's more likely.

But what if you are running an online business?

Are people going to look for your business by name?

While that might happen eventually it's highly unlikely that it's going to happen when your site first goes live, or even after that.
What's a lot more likely to happen is that people are going to look for a solution to a problem.

For example, if I want to read a review of the Babylon AD (a film released this week) I have a couple of options.
I could go to a site such as entertainment.ie, filmreviews.ie or movies.ie to see if they've got any reviews OR I could simply do a search on Google for "babylon ad". Since I'm interested in a review of the film I might append that to my search query, so it becomes "babylon ad review".

This isn't rocket science.

However if you deal with small business owners on a regular basis you soon realise one thing. A lot of them don't really understand how to use search engines.
They don't understand the difference between their browser's navigation bar and Google.

What this means in practical terms is that people can get duped by promises of "rapid inclusion" or "top ranking" etc., etc.

If someone promises you "free traffic" how are you meant to understand that?

Will you know that the only traffic you can possibly get from Google from a new site is going to be a spider ie. a bit of computer software that isn't going to buy anything

The devil is in the details, though anyone dealing with small business should be very clear about what exactly they are offering.

Damien wrote up a nice piece covering some of this based on what was being discussed on the Enterprise Ireland Ebusiness mailing list. It's worth reading the comments by the way!

James took the entire fluffy link / Google rapid submission tool idea and threw a quick site together

It all gets quite inane yet amusing, doesn't it?

It really irks me to see organisations like the IIA (the Irish Internet Association) knowingly setting all links in comments on its blog to be "nofollow.

The "nofollow" attribute sucks. Sure, there are *some* circumstances where it can be useful eg. linking to a competitor for example, but if you moderate comments on a blog then nofollow is just inane and dumb.

This blog quite happily "follows" people who take the time to share their opinion via a comment. In fact all the blogs I run or post to use the normal link attributes.

So what the hell is up with the IIA?

They're supposed to be promoting the internet sector in Ireland etc., etc.,

After an extended period of downtime, while it was moved onto the Google infrastructure, Jaiku is back online.

Ciaran was following the migration's progress over on Jaiku Invites.

They seem to have opened up the invitations, presumably because they're on a much bigger platform than before and can manage the load, but whether the service will "take off" or not is hard to say.

Twitter, even if it has a horrible UI, is still a lot more popular.

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Apple's marketing team have always like to upsell the virtues of their products, which is only to be expected. What may have come as a surprise to them was when one of their adverts was banned by the UK advertising watchdog for making misleading claims.

Full story on the Guardian site

IrishBlogs.info is currently offline, as it has developed a rather annoying bug ie. the main page won't load and just gives me an unhelpful MySQL error.

Hopefully I'll be able to get it up and running again soon, but I thought it best to take it offline for the moment...

Please don't ask me when it will be back online, as I honestly don't know. The best answer I can give you is a rather vague "as soon as I can fix it"

Its sister site, IrishBlogs.com, is still online, though it obviously doesn't do the same thing.

I took delivery of my Tag Heuer watch earlier today.

Here's a photo:

After posting about my issues with Adsense < > Feedburner issues I finally found the Google group for Feedburner.

While the old Feedburner forums used to be active and Feedburner staff used to regularly post replies to people's queries the opposite seems to be the case now.

While there are plenty of people posting about their issues there seems to be a deathly silence from the Google / Feedburner side of the house.

I've been critical of Google's total lack of customer service in the past, but in that instance I was addressing a free service.

Feedburner does have a revenue stream for Google. I've no idea of course how big that revenue stream is in the grand scheme of things, but can any company afford to totally ignore their clients in this manner?

If they didn't want to provide any avenues for customer support it would be one thing, but what is the point of providing an avenue of support if you have no intention of actually engaging with the users?

I've had a feedburner account for a long time. I've also had an adsense account since shortly after Google launched it.

When Google finally announced that RSS ads were going to be available to Feedburner users I was quite excited. If nothing else I wanted to try it out. If it didn't work out as well as I'd have liked I could easily drop the ads.

Unfortunately things weren't quite that simple.

My Adsense account is a Google Account, whereas my existing Feedburner account isn't, so I basically had to transfer or merge stuff together to get it working.

Now I may have made a mistake when I added a completely new feed into Adsense... I'm not 100% sure.

In any case I've now ended up with the rather annoying situation of having two feedburner accounts and no way of transferring feeds between them, as the "key" is coming back as invalid, while the confirmation email contains a link to the wrong place. Basically I cannot log in to Feedburner via the main page for my new account.

Kind of frustrating!

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Since I live in Ireland I'm used to waiting several days (or longer) for my Amazon orders.

It's not an issue.

Yesterday morning I ordered a few DVDs, but since some of them weren't due out for another week or so I wasn't expecting to receive anything immediately.

So I nearly fell of my chair when I took delivery of a DVD boxset this morning. They'd managed to get it to me in approximately 24 hours! And no, I hadn't opted for express delivery or anything like that - I'd chosen the normal options with a total postage cost of £2.99.

Here's the part of the email:

Delivery estimate: 29 Aug 2008 - 4 Sep 2008
Dispatch estimate for these items: 26 Aug 2008

Wow!

I am truly impressed!

I really should not be allowed operate electronic equipment at the weekend!

I discovered a short time ago that I had managed to remove my RSS feed entirely!

Now that takes some doing.

I'm almost impressed with myself...

It's back again now, but I really do need to put aside some time to work out what I've managed to accidentally nuke.

On a side note, I have to say I am impressed with the widgets in MT. They're finally making sense to me, so I won't be editing the main templates as much moving forward - widgets are the way to go!

I've made a minor change to my comment policy.

As of today comments will remain open on posts for 300 days.

It was previously set at 180 days.

According to the media reports Carlow is flooded.

Odd that.

I live in Carlow!

Yes  - part of the town is flooded, but only a small part. Most of the town is unaffected.

When I was playing around with Firefox 3 several months ago one of the biggest annoyances for me was the "autocomplete".

As you type a URL Firefox suggests links from your browser history.

While that might be useful the way they've implemented it is incredibly obtrusive and, therefore, really really annoying.

As I mentioned previously I couldn't upgrade to Firefox 3 as my main browser for a number of silly reasons. Since then those issues have been resolved, so I've started using FF3 on my home desktop.

So what about the annoying auto-complete?

Well it's easy enough to disable if you know how.

Luckily somebody out there did!

Like so many Firefox settings it can be configured via the advanced configuration menu, which now comes with a health warning!

In your location (address) bar simply type "about:config" (no quotes).
The variable / setting you need to change is found under:

browser.urlbar.maxRichResults

I've set mine to "1", as I really don't need more. I can always change it later if I really want to.

Restart Firefox and finally sanity is restored!

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Today is Madonna's birthday. I don't keep track of these things, but the Brittanica daily newsletter told me - honest!

What's truly amazing about the woman is that not only is today her birthday, but she's actually celebrating her 50th birthday!
When I was a teenager Madonna was one of the hottest stars on the planet. The crazy thing is that she's still out there pumping out new albums and hits - more than 20 years later.

When I was 14 years old I think I had a crush on her, or maybe it wasn't a crush. I honestly don't know. I got to see her live in concert in Roundhay Park in Leeds. Over 20 years later and I still remember it as being one of the best live gigs that I've ever been to.

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It's that time of the year again.

Web awards season is now open.

So what do we have this year?

Well if you're into commercially run awards ceremonies that require an entrance fee for nominations AND attendance, then there's the Golden Spiders. I've said enough about them in the past, so I won't bother wasting energy on them this year. Suffice to say that charging 150 euro for a nomination and another 290 per seat at an event that is sponsored is sickening.

At the opposite extreme Damien Mulley has launched The Irish Web Awards
Unlike the Golden Spiders you don't have to pay to nominate someone and the tickets for the event are a nominal 30 euro a pop. nor do you have to pay to attend. Yes - there are sponsors, but they're the ones covering the costs. Imagine that!

And then, somewhere in between, lie the IIA Net Visionary Awards. It's free to nominate people, but you have to pay to attend.

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I've got a few Zohan tshirts to give away over on Film Reviews

All you have to do is answer a simple question!

(Tshirts courtesy of WayToBlue, who do the studio's pr)

It looks like Amazon is jumping on the Green bandwagon as well...

I don't blame them. If I could push the "green" aspects of our new hosting solution more and it led to sales I would without hesitation.

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Over the past few years I've used several of the open source webmail solutions to access my mail when I've been on the move. Squirrelmail, for example, is quite functional, but the size of my personal mailbox has grown so big that it took forever for it to load.

A few months ago the Atmail team announced an open source version of their webmail solution. I was interested in trying it out, but I was expecting the install process to be awkward and complex.

It wasn't

A couple of minutes after downloading the software I had a fully functional webmail client up and running and it's able to handle my mailbox without any issues.

The open source version of Atmail is a lot faster than Squirrelmail ever was and has some pretty slick features. You can right click on a message to delete it, or mark it as read / unread. Of course if you just want to delete the mail you can do so, but dragging it into the "trash" is kind of fun too!

The only thing that it seems to be missing, based on playing with atmail for a few minutes, is a method of selecting multiple emails to delete at once.

It's the kind of software that I can see people making use of if they want a functional webmail client and are sick of some of the uglier alternatives.

What are the differences between the open source version and the commercial one?

For most people the differences probably won't make much difference, as they're more for larger organisations and businesses that want to integrate with other systems, but you can see a full comparison chart on the site.

I've always been a strong believer of using the products and services that we sell, so it's only apt that I'd start using Atmail now, as we've just rolled out the full commercial version as part of our new hosting solution. Though I think our clients are getting a lot more features than I am!

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As I've mentioned before, I really like eBay. The range of items you can find on eBay at any given time is simply amazing. Of course that's also a source of frustration.

I currently own a Swatch watch. I've had it for about 6 years, as I was given it for my birthday by a very lovely Italian girl.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, the watch is showing signs of usage, as I have worn it every single day for the last 6 years. The face of the watch is showing signs of wear and tear, while humidity leads to a "lovely" fogginess on the fascia ie. the seals are pretty much gone.
That the watch has lasted this long is pretty amazing - all of its predecessors met with unhappy ends much faster than it has done, so it shows that buying a reasonably good watch does pay off.

Of course now the time has come to get a replacement. I'd prefer to get a replacement now, while my faithful Swatch is behaving, rather than wait until it dies completely and I'm forced to get a cheap replacement to tide me over.

So what kind of watch should I get?

While I was in Paris a few weeks ago a friend was showing off his Rolex. He'd had it for over 10 years and it was practically new, even though he wears it every single day. The problem with a Rolex is, of course, the price tag. You could easily spend several thousand euro on one and that is not something that I am willing to do.

Other brands that have caught my eye are Tag Heuer and Omega.

While the Tag Heuer pieces seem to cost a lot less than Rolex the prices vary a lot.

My main problem and source of frustration is that I have no idea of how much I should be spending on a timepiece. It's not a question of budget. If I decided to spend 300 or 500 euro on a watch that would last me 10 or 20 years I'd see that as money well spent. If you put it in perspective, of course.

Perusing the listings on eBay I can find fantastic looking Tag Heuer watches going for prices varying from a 2 or 3 hundred euro upwards, but I honestly don't know if that is the correct price to be paying for them.

I'm really outside my "comfort zone"!

Hotshots is silly, but it's a wonderfully enjoyable film all the same.

After months and months of pain suffering, pulling of teeth (and hair) we've finally put our new hosting plans "live".

At the moment you can access them via our development site. We'll be switching the domain across at some point tomorrow.

I suspect there are errors, omissions, typos and all that on the site, so if you spot anything please do let us know

What's new?

Why don't you head on over and see for yourself!!!

Hopefully people won't be disappointed

When you own "odd" domains you become accustomed to getting rather odd emails. Some of the emails are genuine. Some are simply weird.

Armchair.ie has nothing to do with furniture. You don't need to be a genius to realise what the site is all about, yet every single day for the last two weeks I have got an email from a company in China offering me furniture. It's not random furniture either. Each email has included a photo of the piece of furniture in question and they've all been some form of armchair.

Of course with some of the other domains that I own the emails are even more bizarre.

People seem to have issues typing email addresses, so I get emails destined for variants of the domains that I hold. (I usually let them know they've made a mistake)

The oddest one to date has been about an outstanding invoice for condoms! Since they wouldn't accept that I had nothing to do with the domain's former owner I ended up disabling all email for that domain.