Recently in blogging Category

Yes I'll admit it. I am more than a little passionate about domain names.
So when I had the opportunity to acquire the domain michele.me I leaped at it.
(If you look at whois you'll see it's still in transit)
So now I've updated this site to use michele.me instead of mneylon.me or mneylon.com, though the other domains all point here as well.

Why michele.me?
Because .me is a cool domain extension and Michele is my first name!

Want a .me domain name? Check out our latest offers here (hint - they're really good value!)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Have You Got Your .EU? (blacknight.com)

I've always been a very strong believer in "eating my own dog food", so when we started offering .tel domain names I got one for myself and started using it. I've had a few .me domains since the launch, but apart from using a couple for work, I hadn't moved any of my personal sites over to .me

That, as you can see in your browser's address bar, has now changed.

Mneylon.com will still resolve, but you'll be moved to mneylon.me

I was half thinking of using micheleneylon.me, but it's a bit long.. What do you think?

In any case this site is now residing under mneylon.me

And if you want to get a .me domain for your own blog or project head over to the only Irish registrar for .me domains - Blacknight and grab one now

Remember the Irish Blog Awards?

Well nominations have been open for the last couple of weeks BUT they are closing this afternoon.

So if you haven't had a chance to nominate your favourite Irish blogs (and bloggers) now is the time to do it under one of the many categories.

The event will be held later this year in Galway.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Irish Blog Awards - Nominate Your Favourite Blogs Today (blacknight.com)
• Irish Blog Awards: Nominations closing (sluggerotoole.com)

July / August are odd months ..

While for many they are associated with holiday and relaxation, for me they're the ramp up to the autumn season, so they're actually busier than other times of the year in many respects.

Over the last few weeks and those to come I've been working on a number of projects that will hopefully bear fruit in the next few weeks and months ..

One that has finally "gone live" is a new blog - New TLD Guide, which has been setup to help people come to grips with the new domain extensions... Hopefully people will engage with us and we'll all be able to learn something new.

I've also been working on more screencasts for the Blacknight video channel, but have been having massive issues with audio - it's probably something simple, but I haven't found a solution as yet ...

And then there's the biggest distraction of them all - my new Xbox 360 (thanks Microsoft!). I've become quite addicted to Call of Duty 4 ! (more on that at a later stage..)

I've also become quite addicted to Lee Child - I picked up one novel when I was down in Cork recently and have become totally hooked!

I have odd ideas during the middle of the night...

The other night while chatting with a couple of people about social media "experts" and other snake oil types I went checking domains ... SocialMediaExpert.ie was available (as were a few other extensions), so I grabbed it.

James from Forbairt Media did a wonderful job on the design and layout (if you don't like it blame my taste, not his skills!)

And the first couple of posts went up yesterday.

What's it all about?

My first post explains some of it

A few months ago Stewart mentioned Sweetcron as a "lifestream" solution (You can see his here).

A "lifestream" basically acts as an aggregator of all your online activities, as many of the online services that people use, such as Twitter, Flickr etc., publish your activity via RSS.

I'd already been experimenting with Movable Type's Motion, which is a pretty cool addition to an existing MT powered site, however having a separate, standalone, solution was not without its attractions. I registered michele.ie a few months ago, but apart from using it to test our Exchange mail hosting I hadn't really done anything with it.

So last night (and very early this morning) I decided to setup Sweetcron on one of our shared hosting plans. Our hosting system allows you to split your domain up across multiple hosting plans and platforms, so while the main site is now on a Linux web server the email is still on Microsoft Exchange.

I chose to setup the webspace to use PHP5, since PHP4 is defunct. In terms of the database I opted for MySQL5, since it's also the more recent version.

I'll have to admit that I hadn't used FTP for a long time. I have a habit of just doing things from the command line, but once I'd got over that it was easy enough to setup.

The documentation for Sweetcron is a bit sparse, but the basic install is easy enough. On our system you just need to remember that the MySQL database server is NOT "localhost", as the basic configuration file assumes that you're running everything on a single server.

The one step that isn't documented clearly is how to setup a simple cronjob to automate it for you. Fortunately someone else had done that already, so adding the cronjob via the hosting control panel was fine.
You just need to execute the following command every few minutes (or hours):

curl http://your/true-cron/url

You can find the actual URL in the Sweetcron admin panel. So just set that command to run via the cronjob manager and off you go.


The basic install ships with two themes, but there are several other themes available which range from the very simple to the incredibly complex. I still haven't settled on which one I actually want to use, as they all handle parts of your "stream" differently. In order to avoid duplication issues I think I'll stick with a theme that doesn't pull in the full content from blog posts and just provides a link to the original source.

So if you're bored and want to know what I'm up to you can head over to my new personal space and see!

I've made another couple of minor changes to the RSS feed from this site, so any feedback would be appreciated.

What's changed?

I've added a daily delicious bookmarks thing as well as my Flickr feed.

If you think these shouldn't be there let me know and I'll remove them

I love these broad sweeping generalisations.

They're sort of fun ...

According to a Ryanair spokesperson "bloggers are idiots"

Lovely!

At least they are consistent in their approach

The idiot in this instance is Jason and anyone else who mentioned his post (I presume we're all guilty by association .. )

This year's Oscars were dominated by Slumdog Millionaire.

I liveblogged the evening / night over on FilmReviews and lost track of how many awards Slumdog picked up - was it eight?

Jason spotted a glitch on the Ryanair website earlier today and posted about it.

It's a glitch. Most large complex websites have them at some point or another.

It's not the end of the world (Aer Lingus still use the browser language setting to "work out" where you're based)

What is amazing is the tone and total lack of professionalism of the comments from the Ryanair staff members. Check out Jason's post to see them.

Don't they realise what a bad reflection on their employer they're giving?

Seriously - if you want to post rude or offensive comments online don't do it from a corporate netblock. Anyone with half a clue can trace it back to your employer.