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Today was a reasonably productive day...

No day is every really as productive as I'd like it to be, but today was pretty good!

To start with I finally had a few quiet minutes to myself and was able to book my flights to Sydney for the ICANN meeting. I had tried to book it online, but I couldn't make sense of the times / dates ie. if you leave Dublin on Friday, which day would you arrive in Sydney. Solution was to just ring Trailfinders and let them worry about it. They also gave me a better rate on the ticket than I'd found online, so it was a "win win" situation. Now all I have to do is either persuade the Hilton to give me a better rate or else find a different hotel....

The other bit of progress today was that we finally launched Windows 2008 with IIS7 on our shared hosting platform. We're giving the first 100 signups for a Windows 2008 Minimus plan a massive 20 euro off, so you can get your site hosted on the latest Microsoft server platform for a mere 29.95 for the first year!! (More details here)

Now if only I could work my way through the rest of my todo list...

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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!

When I got my Nokia E71 back before Christmas I immediately fell in love with the device.
One of the options that we setup was MFE (Mail for Exchange) which was pretty functional, although a bit limited.

However while we were working on our Hosted Exchange service launch Paul came across a really nice bit of software that takes the E71 and Microsoft Exchange 2007 to a whole new level.

The software - RoadSync - is really cool and makes full use of ActiveSync on Exchange server 2007. Basically it means that you can get "email push" without having to spend a fortune on expensive addons for your Exchange server.

Configuring RoadSync is pretty easy. You just enter your login details on the device you're using and off you go.

If you're connecting into an Exchange Server 2007 setup, like we are, then you can turn the synchronisation to use ActiveSync, which means that you'll get your email on your phone almost instantly.

The other features that give RoadSync that extra "edge" are its support for HTML emails (MFE simply can't handle them) and sub-folder support. Since I get so much email every day I have a rather complex set of rules to filter emails off to different folders depending on subject lines, senders and addressees. MFE simply cannot deal with the subfolders, whereas RoadSync does a reasonable job of it.

All in all moving my business email onto my phone has made things a lot easier. I don't feel as "tied" to my desktop / laptop as before and can receive emails easily while on the move. While admittedly a lot of this would have been possible on my N95 the full keyboard on the E71 takes "possible" to "comfortable", which in my mind is a pretty important difference.

The only problem with any of the mobile email software seems to be an inability to handle multiple Exchange accounts, which is understandable. Unfortunately it means that I can't move my personal email onto our Hosted Exchange cluster, which I wouldn't mind doing ...

Sick of paying over the odds for IE domains?

How about getting them for a tenner?

Check out the latest Blacknight deal valid for 1 day only!!

Do you believe in fairies?

Do you think they live down the bottom of your garden?

If you do, then you might believe the "unlimited hosting" offer in this month's PC Live! magazine

Until someone gets round to inventing an unlimited hard drive it is pretty much impossible to offer unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth and of course anyone who tries to "take advantage" of an unlimited plan is bound to be "in breach"...

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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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

Eamon Ryan is Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources.

Now the last time I checked Communications included such things as ISPs, broadband, internet - you know, that sort of thing.

I was also under the rather naive impression that Dail ministers couldn't opt out of parts of their own portfolio. You know, ignore those bits of their portfolio that might make them actually have to deal with real and substantive issues.

As MD of Blacknight I am our representative to the Irish ISP Association (ISPAI). I'm also on the  organisation's working group for data retention.

We've been working with our members and the various government departments and Gardai on the transposition of the directive into Irish law. I won't bore you with the details of this at the moment - it would also put me in a bad mood to even think about it!

A couple of weeks ago the ISPAI sent letters to various Irish government ministers including Mr Eamon Ryan, Minister for Communications (etc)

The letters attached (pdf) are the letter from the ISPAI to Mr Ryan and his signed response.

Considering the directive itself refers specifically to communications (Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC) his reply has left me more than a little confused:

I have no function in this matter

Sorry? You're the minister for Communications. How on earth can you hope to get away by saying you have no function in this matter? The directive affects just about everything your department is in charge of.

So I have to ask dear reader, what purpose does Eamon Ryan serve?

EamonRyanispailetter.pdf

eamonryan-reply.pdf

Over the past couple of years this site has been IPv6 enabled from time to time, but it ended up losing its IPv6 some time ago.

It's now back and working again!

Thanks to Niall, who did some rejigging of DNS and network stuff yesterday to get it all working properly again!

The more content that is available over IPv6 the better.

Anyone who has a dedicated or colo server with us can get native IPv6 if they want. Simply ask!

Hosting365 have announced that they've sold Register365, which is their shared hosting and domains business to Namesco a UK provider.

So now Ireland's largest provider is no longer Irish. According to the press release Hosting365 are going to focus on their managed services.

What does that mean for the Irish hosting market?

It could be interesting times ahead, as Novara was already swallowed up by Irish Telco Digiweb earlier this year.

Are there more acquistions and sales in the pipeline?