September 2008 Archives

I don't buy much on Cafepress shops due to the shipping costs, but some of the US presidential stuff is very amusing and quite tempting. I know my mother or sister would get a kick out of some of these:
You can find loads more over on Cafepress

Voting in the IIA Net Visionary Awards has opened, so head on over to their site to place your votes

If you're feeling generous vote for me!!

There's an interesting selection of people on the shortlist this year, as there is every year. Of course, as usual, some names are very familiar, whereas others don't mean anything to me!

Related articles by Zemanta

• IIA Net Visionary Awards 2008 Shortlist Announced
• eircom Golden Spider Awards spamming again
• Net Visionary 2008 Nominations Closing

I'm really tired of the shenanigans involving the IEDR and the IE namespace, so I wrote this rant.

Feedback welcome (on that site :) )

Despair.com (who I mention far too much!) have released yet another tshirt that brought a smile to my face:

It was only a matter of time before the guys in tshirt hell came up with Sarah Palin tshirts...

You can choose from several - it depends on how tasteless you want to be !

Palin's love for guns and hunting gives this one:



While her daughter's pregnancy may have influenced this one:
I wonder has anyone done up masks yet...

Over the last few months there has been a lot of "doom and gloom" in the media about the Irish and global economies. There's also been a lot of talk about the prices of housing dropping.

Last week I went looking at houses and appartments to see how good (or bad) things really were.

I don't have a huge budget, as I'm single and I only started saving up for a house in the last few months.

So what is going on out there?

There are still quite a few new developments being built, though I gather from talking to an estate agent that a lot of them won't be completed as quickly as planned.

One development I was looking at last week originally carried a price tag of 230k, but that has been slashed to 175k!

Of course the flipside is that the mortgage market has changed quite a lot. Whereas my younger sister and her boyfriend were able to get a 100% mortgage (or close to it) about 18 months ago the most you can hope for now is 92%.

On a purchase price of 200k the maximum you can expect to get is 184k, which means you'll need to raise another 16k+ on your own.

While raising the 16k might not be impossible (depending on your circumstances) you'll need to factor in another few thousand euro to render a new house or flat habitable.

But is now the time to buy or not?

If I buy something now will the prices drop again by January?

What about negative equity?

The negative equity argument is a very interesting one.

At present I'm paying out nearly 10k a year in rent. While I do have a roof over my head that 10k is not doing anything for me ie. it's not paying off a mortgage or other loan, so it's basically "dead money".

If I were to buy a property for 200k now and it was to lose 20k in value over the next two years I wouldn't have made any real loss, as I'd have had to pay the 20k for somewhere to live regardless.

So what's on my todo list at present?

•  Mortgage approval - if I can sort that out in the next few weeks I'll be in a stronger position should I find somewhere that I like. While the higher price houses may not be selling the lower priced ones are, so delaying the paperwork wouldn't be a good idea
• Shop around - I need to keep shopping around and see what's available in the area. Daft.ie's RSS and email alerts definitely help
• Price the extras - I need to work out how much extra it will cost to get a place ready to live in ie. white goods, flooring etc., Being able to budget accurately will save me headaches
• Reduce my credit card bills - it kind of links into the entire mortgage approval thing, though being perfectly honest my current CC bill is quite manageable (at least that's what I keep telling myself!)

Despair.com's tshirts get better and better.

I presume the latest one is inspired by the US presidential elections (click to enlarge):

ENN chose CoolSites.ie as their web pick last week, which is really nice.

Here's what they had to say:

It seems that ENN's very own weekly web pick is no longer the only service seeking out interesting new destinations worthy of a visit. CoolSites.ie is itself a rather cool place to discover daily web picks from all corners of the internet.

I enjoy eating. Going out for dinner with friends on a Saturday night be that for a casual dinner or to celebrate an event is meant to be an enjoyable experience.

Last night, however, was far from enjoyable.

The Grill and Grape restaurant in Carlow is one of the latest additions to the town's list of eateries. Several of our staff had eaten there over the last couple of months and had mixed experiences.

On a Saturday night you need to book to get into most good restaurants in Carlow, or any other town for that matter. It's probably one of their busiest nights of the week.

So we booked a table for about 6 of us for 8. I was late arriving, as I'm usually the first to arrive and end up waiting around by myself. I was expecting to find the rest of my party happily drinking an aperitif of some kind, but discovered that although they had been sitting there for about 15 minutes nobody had bothered to take their drinks order.

Another ten minutes or more passed before a waitress appeared and took our order. I tried to order the beef carpaccio, but was told that it was no longer on the menu (odd that considering it was printed on it and nobody bothered to tell us that it was no longer available).

Between us we ordered 4 starters, a couple of beers, water and a bottle of Rioja.
The Rioja was bland. How you can even find a bland Rioja is a bit of a mystery to me, as I'd never actually had a bland Rioja before, but I was planning on trying a different wine for our second bottle. Of course that never happened for one simple reason - the waiting staff never bothered coming back to take any other drink orders!

So what about the food? The starters weren't exactly memorable and they completely forgot to serve one, which meant that Niall was left sitting there while the rest of us munched away at our bruschetta (not exactly the best rendering of that dish).

I had ordered a steak with pepper sauce, but got some other sauce instead. We'd been waiting so long for each course to be served that I just ate it anyway. For a steakhouse the meat wasn't exactly amazing.

The dessert menu is uninspiring and is dominated by ice cream, though they also had a chocolate cake available, which a couple of us opted for topped with a hot chocolate sauce.

I ordered a post dinner Calypso coffee, but of course this never materialised and was completely forgotten by the waiting staff. One of the others ordered a tea but had to change the order as they didn't have that particular tea in stock!

The service in the Grill and Grape was truly dire. Although they seem to have plenty of staff floating around the place they seem incapable of providing a reasonable level of service.

How any restaurant can possibly survive when a party of 6 only runs up a bill of about 40 euro / head but takes up a table for 3 hours is beyond me.

If you're heading to Carlow and want a good meal there are plenty of places you can go - The Grill and Grape isn't one of them.

I recently acquired a webmaster discussion forum that had been semi-dormant for a period of time ie. it was like a wild garden where the weeds had been left unattended.

Looking back over the archives you can see that it once was quite a vibrant community, but that after the founder left to move onto other projects, or possibly a more demanding dayjob, the quality of the site declined.

Rebuilding a community on a site like that is not an easy job and I don't expect to see tangible results for quite some time.

Over the last year or so the forum had been attacked by a lot of spammers who were posting content that drove away potentially valuable members of the community.

After moving the site and its contents to a server I controlled the first job was upgrading the forum software to the most recent version. While Vbulletin has a pretty good security track record I wouldn't like to leave an old version "in the wild" for too long, as there are plenty of nasty little hacks that people can try.

The next thing was to install VBSeo, which is a very nice plugin for vbulletin. It helps with making "pretty" URLs and rejigs a lot of the other parts of a site's display to make it that bit more attractive to search engine spiders.

Over the next few weeks I expect there will be quite a bit of work to be done in trying to attract new members and retain them, but it can be worth the effort. (At least I hope so!)

Another thing that will be addressed, of course, is the site's look and feel.

Personally I can't stand graphic heavy forums with loads of flashing icons etc., I'm much happier with a clean and simple look and feel. James from ForbairtMedia has been working on tweaking the site's layout and design and given it a nice new logo - nothing crazy, but something quite simple and elegant.

The next big job is to see about regaining the search engines' trust of the site. The amount of spammy junk that was there would have led to the site being heavily penalised and judging by the lack of longtail referrals my suspicions are that the site wasn't being taken seriously by the likes of Google et al.

If anyone has any experience of rebuilding a community and would like to lend a hand please let me know :)

I have no idea how I got sent a link to this, but it did amuse me.

If you want to access this particular site you will need to solve this mathematical problem first:

The launch of Cuil, which was a self-proclaimed "Google killer", got a lot of PR. Of course not all of the PR was as positive as the company's spin doctors would have liked.

I was planning on posting about Cuil around the time of the launch, but between one thing and another it got put on the back burner. That was until I saw a post today over on TechCrunch where several webmasters were complaining about Cuil's spider / bot. In common with most search engines, Cuil uses a bit of software to index pages.

Unfortunately, if the Techcrunch post is anything to go by, Cuil's bot isn't the sharpest tool in the shed and has been misbehaving. What that translates to in real terms is that it seems to be downloading the same content over and over and over again, which can affect website performance and bandwidth costs.

Of course this isn't the first time a search engine's software has had a negative impact on website owners. Microsoft's own search engine bot used to behave in an equally annoying and damaging way when it was in its infancy.

However the key difference for website owners is that Cuil simply fails to deliver.

While they may be able to rectify some of their early mistakes the audacity of Cuil's founders' claims is bound to leave a bad taste in many people's mouths. If you make big promises you need to deliver.

One of the things that I can see Cuil having serious issues with is its use of images.
When you do a search on Cuil you will see images displayed beside search results.
The company's FAQ claims that:

We know from our research that people can make better and quicker decisions about relevance and quality when they can see an image from the website. We do our best to take images from Web pages that accurately reflect the content of the website. Many websites are full of images, so we use advanced algorithms to determine the best image to show the user.

That sounds fine, and if anyone remembers the entire adsense + image placement debacle a couple of years ago, it probably rings true. But, and here's the kicker, which images are they actually displaying?

Doing a few vanity search queries for my own name I can't really complain, as it's showing photos of me for several, but things change quite dramatically when I try to search for keyphrases related to my business.

A search for "irish hosting" is currently displaying a UK ISPA badge beside a link to our company site. We're not members of the UK ISPA, so I don't think they'd really appreciate anyone inferring  a relationship.

It gets worse!

A search for "register irish domains" shows one of our competitor's logos linked to our site!

See below:
I know for a fact that Irish Domains have trademarked both their name and logo, so this kind of usage could lead to issues for all parties concerned.

When I conducted similar search queries a few weeks ago I was seeing our logo displayed as a link to a competitor's site!

And what about the search results that Cuil produces?

To say that they are completely random is to be diplomatic.

A search for "Carlow" turns up a university in the US as the 1st result (I guess you could use Cuil to find random websites that you might never have discovered?)

Darren Rowse should be happy. A search for blogs returns a photo of him, though it doesn't link to his site!

And if you want to check out porn stars Cuil is NOT the place to try. Choosing a few well known adult stars' names at random led to very little (cue jokes about all IT people being obsessed with porn - I know!)

Maybe it will get better over time. Maybe it won't. I don't think anyone is going to notice for quite some time.