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
Image by Kovis via Flickr
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!
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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…
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Image by bill barber (back Sunday) via Flickr
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?
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Despair.com’s tshirts get better and better.
I presume the latest one is inspired by the US presidential elections (click to enlarge):
Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the saying goes, so I wasn’t expecting immediate results. However a pleasant surprise is always a good thing, so I was delighted to see how quickly some of the issues were getting resolved.
The most obvious area that needed attention was the forum’s content itself. There was a LOT of spammy junk, which caused two problems:
I’d love to say that I’ve managed to remove all the spam posts, but I know there are probably plenty of them still lurking (though searching for certain keywords isn’t turning up much these days).
Vbulletin’s plugin and permissions allows you to customise a site to your heart’s content, so I’ve added a few plugins and settings that mitigate spammer activity. For example, users cannot post external links until they’ve got a post count of 15. The same kind of logic is applied to signatures ie. the links / tagline below someone’s post.
Another thing that needed to be addressed was the site’s visible focus, so some of the sections have been either removed entirely or moved around a bit ie. topics that are not related to the site’s core topic have been moved to the “off topic” area.
VBSeo‘s tools definitely help in deciding which areas of content you want to optimise and which areas you want to “devalue”, so ignoring the “member profile” pages seems to be a good idea (some of the member names are barely “safe for work” at the moment!)
Measuring progress isn’t that easy, but there are a few tools that help. So I’ve spending a lot of time poring over the Google Webmaster Tools console, as well as checking Analytics.
What is interesting to see is the significant jump in GoogleBot activity (click to enlarge):
While bot activity can be quite meaningless in isolation, when you compare it with the previous levels it’s very interesting. (To me at least, I wouldn’t expect everyone else to be this fascinated by it!). One of the conclusions I’ve drawn, which may or may not be realistic, is that the site’s new hosting helps ie. it’s the only site on that particular server and the server itself has very good connectivity.
Unfortunately I don’t have enough web statistics data to work with as yet, but I did notice that the site now has a Google Page Rank score, which it didn’t have a short time ago.
James, from the excellent Forbairt Media , has been tweaking the site’s layout, so it’s now a lot simpler to look at and hopefully more pleasing to the eye.
Of course it’s very early days yet, so I expect it will take a lot longer to see any real jump in visitor levels and member activity. Thankfully several people who read my original post on this have been kind enough to join and “get the ball rolling”, which is fantastic and is much appreciated.
Let’s see how it goes from here …
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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.
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