January 2006 Archives

Matt has announced the release of Wordpress 2.0.1 ie. the first point release of the 2.* series of my favourite blogging tool. According to the announcement all the major issues have been resolved and 114 bugs have been fixed. Not bad in 30 days! Some of the highlights:

• You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
• Caching has been fixed under certain PHP enviroments.
• Permalinks have been fixed for weird enviroments as well.
• XML-RPC uploading works.
• Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
• Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
• Imports now use much less memory.
• Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.

I'd expect their download servers will be hammered for the next few days :) Well done to all involved!

I mentioned a handy little tool I came across for installing a variety of useful apps on my ubuntu laptop recently. Paul O'Malley has pointed me in the direction of an alternative called (strangely enough) Easy Ubuntu It doesn't offer as wide a selection of applications, but it probably does more than enough for most people:

Easy Ubuntu allows you to:

• Add extra repositories for installing a lot of additional software.
• Install multimedia codecs for reading all videos, musics and DVDs.
• Activate the "audio preview" feature in Nautilus.
• Install the most needed Firefox plugins: Flash, Java, Real, videos. Adds Microsoft fonts, GNOME's Firefox buttons, officials Firefox icons.
• Install archiving support for RAR and ACE.
• Install the most used peer-to-peer softwares: aMule (a clone of eMule) and Azureus (for Bittorent).
• Install the Skype voice-over-IP software. (Warning: at this time Skype is not packaged for Breezy so install don't work)
• Num lock: Active the num lock at system startup.
• Replace the GNOME foot logo with Ubuntu's logo.
• Install the NVIDIA or ATI driver for 3D support.

More information on its creator's site

A few months ago I mentioned the adsense "heat map", which is a handy graphic representation of the best performing "zones" of a website in terms or clicks. The official adsense blog carries some tips on maximising your blog's revenue potential through applying some basic techniques:

• Choose the right ad formats
• Place ads where your readers will notice
• Improve targeting
• Customize your ad colors
• Use channels to track your ads' success (or failure)

Most of this is probably "old news" to those of you who have already invested time and effort in optimising your blogs, but it's still nice to see a brief summary.

While visiting friends in Palermo I was handed a tape by Palermo group Agricantus. I'd never heard of them nor had I ever heard any of their music. I fell in love with the rich sound immediately. When I got back to Milan I scoured the record shops for CDs and was able to pick up a pretty good one of them in concert, which I seem to have misplaced somewhere. That's one of the annoying things about moving around a lot - you tend to lose track of your CDs if you aren't very careful. In any case I decided to treat myself to some replacement CDs over Christmas and Agricantus was on the top of my list. The CD finally turned up this morning, so I spent lunchtime and most of this evening listening to it. If you want to get a "feel" for their music try their official site. There are some samples in the section "Audio/Video" I'm currently listening to this album: If anyone is feeling generous it's my birthday soon :)

I was chatting to an entrepeneur early this evening who has some really interesting ideas. He knows his business area very well. He's familiar with his target market and he has managed to win recognition at various levels for his business acumen and marketing skills.

According to a post on Jason's blog (welcome to the blogosphere by the way!) Irish ISP Smart Telecom have decided to block port 25. It seems that the new policy affects all customers unless they have a static IP and specifically request that the restriction be lifted. It's an interesting and quite brave move for an Irish ISP to make and probably won't be the last one. From the point of view of hosting providers this could hail a "sea change" with regard to SMTP usage and access, as clients will be forced to use their ISP's outbound mail server. While this may cause issues for "domestic" subscribers it probably won't have any serious long-term effects on business users. EDIT: Wrong link! Well spotted

Anyone who knows me well is probably aware that I have a strong dislike for badly written English and have little or no time for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. If you are selling a product or service then you need to convince people that you are a professional and take pride in the presentation of the product. The slicker and more professional the package the more likely people are to feel confident in it. These would seem to be universally accepted truths. So would you really want to spend thousands with a company that cannot even spell their main service? While browsing the web over the weekend I came across a couple of sites that were shockingly bad. If you sell "search engine optimisation" the least you could do is check the spelling of the word "optimisation". If you aren't sure there is this wonderful invention called a dictionary. Of course not everybody speaks English as their mother tongue, so you have to make allowances in some cases. But how does this affect your online marketing with search engines? I mentioned a study previously that demonstrated the value of "good English". Of course that study did not take into account the value of typos. You've seen the Google spelling correction tool? Well, have you seen its data? Quite scary! So maybe there is a place, albeit a rather strange one, for bad language online. Found via

The Swiss domain registry has announced that it will be dropping its pricing on new registrations from March 1 2006:

SWITCH, the registry for domain names ending in.ch and .li, is discontinuing the registration fee of CHF 40 as of 1 March 2006. The annual fee of CHF 35 will remain unchanged. This price reduction has been made possible through the continuing growth in the number of domain names and the introduction of the new registration application on 1 October 2005, which will reduce the extra outlay involved in registrations. "We naturally wish to pass these cost savings on to our customers", explains Urs Eppenberger, new Head of "Internet Domains" at SWITCH. For domain names that are registered up to and including 28 February 2006, SWITCH will charge the registration fee of CHF 40 that has been applicable to date.

Full story here via

I've read all the comments posted about my choice of theme and I've been left in a bit of a quandry. It's obvious that the theme I chose wasn't really "working" for a lot of readers and I wasn't overly happy with some of the features either, so I've decided to revert to the previous theme that I was using. I want a new theme for this blog, so I'll probably have to get someone to design it for me taking into account my requirements and some of the very good feedback I got from regulars.

I've added a few more blogs to planet. If you know of any blogs that carry relevant content please let me know

Darren posted a link to a useful list of revenue sharing forums (fora?). The idea is very simple. As a member you can add your adsense ID to your profile. Once you have a made a certain number of posts you can then start earning a percentage of the adsense revenue on threads where you are active. I've been toying with the idea of doing this on a couple of forums that I manage. Would people be more likely to contribute if they were getting a share of the revenues?

The IIA is organising a series of events throughout the country in 2006. One of the topics that they will be covering is blogging and they've asked me to hold the seminar. Where? Hilton Hotel, Dublin When? 8th March @ 2pm How much?EUR55 for IIA members / EUR95 for non-IIA members What exactly? A very good question :) The topics I hope to cover are:

• Wonderful World of Blogs (some introductory examples)
• What is a Blog?
• What are its uses?
• Technical Overview of what makes blogs work RSS feeds and all that stuff
• How to set up your own blog
• Blogging Pitfalls
• Commercial applications of blogging
• Can blogging win you business
• Search engines and blogs – will your content be found
• Monetizing your blog
• How to promote your blog
• Examples of how blogs can be done badly
• Excellent examples of blogs – globally and in Ireland
• Can blogging win you business
• Question and Answer session

Funnily enough someone else blogged about this before I did !!

If you are tired of waiting for books on "bleeding edge" technology to be published then the new service from O'Reilly and Safari should be of interest.

I'm not sure who first came up with the concept of the affiliate, but in the e-commerce world the master has to be Amazon. Amazon has grown to be one of the most important e-commerce portals in the world and a lot of that growth can be contributed to its gigantic affiliate base. But what about smaller businesses? Can affiliate marketing work for them? What of companies that do not have the "global reach"? I'd love to know how other people find it. From a publisher perspective the number of Irish companies offering affiliate programs has definitely mushroomed since I first looked into it back in the late 90s. However if there has been growth for some there have also been failures for others. At a global level it "must" be working, or how else would you explain the growth of cj.com and others. What kind of strategy should you adopt? What does it take to win market share through your affiliate network? How can you recruit new affiliates? When you are selling products and services that do not have the global appeal of the likes of Amazon I think it's only natural to feel mildly frustrated...

John Collins linked to a report of a German court which has ordered a German ISP to destroy all non-invoice related data. Full story here  What does this mean in the context of the recent data retention debacle?

Anthony mentions a new blog focussing on the ccTLD aftermarket in domain names. No mention of IE namespace as yet though :)

The Google "referrals" scheme is far from perfect. It now transpires that it's got even worse without anybody being told.

I've been switching themes around on this blog a bit over the last few weeks. While I happen to like some elements of the current theme, I'm not 100% happy with it. I'm not sure why exactly, but it "isn't me"

Last year the spamassasin project ran a competition to design a new logo. Justin posted a link to a number of very nice versions of the logo this evening I hadn't realised that there were so many variants available for immediate use:

Are you bored with your laptop's colour? Maybe you'd like to spruce it up a bit or brand it with your corporate identity? A new Irish venture is offering bespoke laptop "skins" Interesting idea, but will it catch on? I'm almost tempted to get one with the Blacknight logo :)

We've just added asp.net 2.0 support to our windows 2003 hosting plans

I'm currently playing with a new theme, so please excuse any oddities.

Rachel Cunliffe mentions a new free tool, Blogbar,that allows you to search your blog, all the major mainstream search engines or blog specific search space.

I mentioned Microsoft / MSN / Hotmail's recent initiative SNDS a few days ago. At the time I hadn't really had the opportunity to explore it and was finding the navigation around it quite annoying (ie. I couldn't find what I was looking for easily, so I got bored and left). I've since has some time to explore the interface a bit more and, while I do believe it could be improved on, I would have to detract my previous comments (at least to some degree). Once you have successfully added your IP blocks to the system you can access some very interesting reports. Choose any day in the past 90 days to see activity on your blocks. If there hasn't been any noteworthy activity on a block no data will appear:

Please note that days where it sent less than 100 messages will be indistinguishable from days where it sent no messages at all, because neither will show up below.

So rather than being overwhelmed with data you can drill down to the important bits ie. the ones where the vast majority of mail was sent from. To make it easier to decipher they've colour coded it as follows:

• Green - less than 10% spam
• Yellow - between 10% and 90% spam
• Red - more than 90% spam

You also get information on the sending address, although in cases of a security hole (eg. a php script) the sender address may not provide a lot of useful information (dependant on your configuration) If you need to analyse the information or share it with others you can easily export data to CSV. Hopefully they'll add more information, such as sample emails, to the system in the future .........

Janine mentioned the One Million Blogs project the other day which I spotted while reading the planet. For one dollar you can get a 30x30 square! One dollar is under 90 cent, so it's less than you pay for a bad coffee. I think it's a really cool idea :)

If you want to setup a blog using Wordpress, or any of the other popular blog packages, you will probably get bored with the default template fairly quickly. However it's not that hard to find an alternative template. There are plenty of them out there to cater for most tastes.

Anthony Van Couvering posts an interesting article examining the DomainsBot study on the parts of speech found in 4304 domains sold on Afternic.

There's a lot of talk about what you should be blogging about, but what about the things you should not mention?

• Bodily functions
- and I don't meant the "I'm not feeling very well" type posts
• What you really think of your partner
- if they know you at all, they can probably read your blog
• What you really think of your boss
• Your next big idea before you've actually implemented it
• Your choice of domain name before actually registering it
• How you cheated / lied in a job interview

Anybody got any other suggestions?

For a variety of reasons I've been trying to find a simple way of converting plain HTML pages into RSS. Does anyone know of a script that can do this? It doesn't matter which platform the script runs on, as long as it isn't Apple Mac (as I dont' have access to any) Obviously I'd prefer if the script was linux based ie. php, perl or python, but I'm not adverse to using ASP if it does the job

I have finally fixed my permalink issues!! The solution was to upgrade to the latest bleeding edge code from the Wordpress nightly builds. I've probably broken something else in the process, but the permalink issue seems to have gone away, so I'm happy for the moment EDIT: Thanks to Tom for pointing out the option for increasing the edit area

Disillusioned Lefty has posted a list of the top 25 Irish blogs ranked by links to them. It makes for interesting reading. Fortunately Donncha was excluded (sorry - your blog is cool, but you do have a slight advantage over the rest of us!)

Wordpress 2.0 is really getting on my nerves. I'm seriously regretting upgrading.

This site and server runs on open source software. I'm writing this blog entry using open source software. Our business runs predominately on open source software.

I like the idea of web standards. The concept attracts me for several reasons, which may or may not be of interest to people. I'm not a designer or developer, so what I think about it is purely academic. I may wish to voice my opinions on it, but it is not my place to judge.. .. Or should I, as a consumer, expect that design / development professionals work to certain standards? It's not an easy question to answer, so I thought I'd ask over on the search.ie webmaster forum A couple of the responses to date have been very interesting..

Designers like design. Fish like water. It's only natural. The rather lively discussion over on Creative Ireland I mentioned earlier led me to this really cool blog site: Designers Who Blog Wow! Talk about visual popcorn overload. (Alan's on there as well)

There's a lot of hype around business blogging and at times I think people tend to forget that it is not without its downfalls.

I mentioned recently that the Irish Blog Awards were open for nominations. Some of the sponsors for the event have now been announced and they include us So now I won't be able to avoid going to the event :) I look forward to meeting some fellow bloggers in real life

An industry colleague pointed out a rather intriguing thread on boards.ie to me where one of our competitors service and pricing is criticised. When the competitor in question replied with the following I nearly fell of my chair:

The Irish Domain Registry has made some changes to its price structure earlier this month in response to public pressure from our company. We will shortly be passing on these benefits.

I'm sorry, but which company did you say you were again? I've already gone into IE domain pricing more than once, but if you haven't read them my previous pieces are here, here and here (you'll find more in the archives) And don't forget.. With Blacknight our pricing is real and transparent unlike with other companies .....

Apologies to anyone currently getting apparent 404 errors on the categories: irishblogs blogging For some annoying reason the wordpress 2 way of handling permalinks is redirecting all requests for any category containing the phrase "blog" to the main page and giving an internal 404 (though apache sees it correctly as a 200 NOT a 404) I'm not alone in having problems it seems Dear Wordpress Developers - is this a bug or is the feedburner plugin causing the issue? For those of you who understand mod_rewrite better than I, my .htaccess contains the following: # BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On # Redirect FeedBurner to your own Feed RewriteBase /blog/ RewriteRule ^feedburner_346435/?$ /blog/feed/ [R,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^FeedBurner.*$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L] # These Rules redirect all feed Traffic to FeedBurner RewriteBase /blog/ RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^feed=(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/blacknight [R,L] RewriteRule ^(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/blacknight [R,L] RewriteRule ^wp-(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom).php http://feeds.feedburner.com/blacknight [R,L] # These are the standard WordPress Rules RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /blog/index.php # END WordPress If anyone can see anything obviously wrong with that please let me know

I think my phone is possessed. When Asimov spoke of the "ghost in the machine" he probably didn't have mobile phones in mind, but I'm seriously beginning to lend weight to the theory. Over the past week my Nokia seems to have taken upon itself to send completely random text messages to people of its own volition. If I was conducting an illicit affair via sms it could be very embarassing :)

Blogh An Seanchai provides an email disclaimer in the Irish language (Gaelic - gaeilge)

Bret Fausett posts a very enlightening and scary tale about a domain suspension caused by phishers abusing a host which led to the suspension of their domain (including their nameservers)

The consultation period for the Electronic Communications Miscellaneous Provisions Bill (MS Word Doc) is currently open. One of the areas that the bill mentions is the IE domain registry:

Head 12 - Regulation of the Internet .ie Domain Name by ComReg 12.1 ComReg may by Regulation provide for: • the transfer of powers, in relation to the regulation of the .ie domain name, vested in the Minister to ComReg • access by ComReg to the .ie domain name database on an ongoing basis • the creation of an offence, where the operator of the Internet .ie domain name, fails to comply with regulations introduced by ComReg. • Provide for increase of summary fine under subsection (3) of Section 31 of the above Act to €5,000. Notes 12.1 Section 31 of the Electronic Commerce Act, 2000 provides powers to the Minister to make regulations in respect of the management of the .ie domain name. To date the Minister has not made any such regulations. The purpose of this Section is to transfer the Minister’s powers to ComReg and for the creation of an offence where the operator of the .ie domain name fails to comply with regulations introduced by ComReg. The Section also intends to provide ComReg with access to the .ie domain database to ensure that the list of registered users is at all times kept up to date and functioning on the Internet.

If the IEDR were to introduce a proper registrar / registry system then they could pass a lot of this burden onto the current resellers. In some regards this could be a good opportunity for the IEDR to some maintenance of their contacts' database. In other respects some industry commentators see it as an opportunity for people to attack the IEDR. Why is it that the IE namespace has so many issues? Is it the registry's fault or the fault of some of the hypocrites reselling the domains? As of January 1st 2006 both the retail and wholesale cost of IE domain registration was cut. Why hasn't the "champion" of the IE namespace pricing cut their prices? I think we all know the answer to that one .....

In a perfect world everybody would have their own domain name and hosting account (with us of course :) ), but the reality is that for many people free email services like the one provided by Microsoft's Hotmail service are here to stay.

CDWow have announced another money off promotion. If you aren't a member already you can get a £1 Stg. voucher if you use this link. I presume the offer is also valid in Ireland, so if you want a £1 Stg voucher follow the link :)

This howto was written in order to help users of DirectAdmin install and correctly configure MailScanner with Exim.

 It is based on several years experience working with MailScanner and has been used in the installation of production servers running a variety of rpm based linux distributions including:
 RedHat 9
Fedora
Centos
WhiteBox

While every effort has been made to make this howto as comprehensive and easy to follow as possible the author welcomes feedback.

Before you start you should install vim.

On most Red Hat Enterprise clones, such as Centos, the following command should work:

yum install vim-enhanced

I would recommend creating a directory such as /home/installstuff or similar for any files / packages related to your MailScanner setup.

The next step is to install SpamAssassin.

There are a number of ways of doing this, however the developer of MailScanner has put together an easy to use package that will install all the required perl Modules for you. It can be downloaded here.

NB: As of SA 3.1 the licensing has changed for some of the plugins. You will need to enable razor etc., in the *.pre files in the /etc/mail/spamassassin directory

Now to install MailScanner.

First download the MailScanner rpm tarball from the website.

There are usually two versions available – stable and beta.
wget location of file tar -zxvf MailScanner file cd MailScanner directory ./install.sh

For example, to download and install the current beta version at time of writing the command would be:

wget http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/files/4/rpm/MailScanner-4.50.8-1.rpm.tar.gz tar -zxvf MailScanner-4.50.8-1.rpm.tar.gz cd MailScanner-4.50.8-1 ./install.sh

Relax and have a cup of coffee.

Once the install is finished you can proceed with the setup of MailScanner to work with exim.

You need to change the permissions on the MailScanner spool directory:

chown -R mail.mail /var/spool/MailScanner

MailScanner works by running two processes of the MTA.
One listens for SMTP connections (inbound mail) while the other processes outbound mail. If you think of it like this:

mail > exim > MailScanner > exim

Mail is passed from one exim process to the other via MailScanner, where all the content checks are conducted. For this reason you need to have two .conf files for exim. One for each exim process.

Always create backups!

cp /etc/exim.conf /etc/exim.back

Make a copy to handle outbound mail:
 
cp /etc/exim.conf /etc/exim_send.conf

Edit the exim.conf file:
 
vim /etc/exim.conf

and add the following lines in the main part of the configuration:
#Added for MailScanner mail queues and logging
spool_directory = /var/spool/exim.in queue_only = true
queue_only_override = false
log_file_path = /var/spool/exim/msglog/%slog

 MailScanner comes with its own startup script, so you can safely get rid of the original one:

 #cd /etc/init.d/ cp exim exim.orig;chmod -x exim.orig rm exim

However, DirectAdmin will check for the exim file, so we create a symlink to fool it:

ln -s MailScanner exim

NB: You may need to do this again if a DirectAdmin update installs a new exim init script

Create the following directories:
mkdir /var/spool/exim.in
mkdir /var/spool/exim.in/input
mkdir /var/spool/exim.in/data
mkdir /var/spool/exim.in/db

then fix the ownership:

chown -R mail.mail /var/spool/exim.in/

Now you need to customise your MailScanner.conf both for your particular server and to let it know that it is running exim:
Open MailScanner.conf in vim as follows:

vim /etc/MailScanner/MailScanner.conf

The file is very well documented. Please read it!

You should edit the following settings:

%org-name% = servername
%org-long-name% = Your Company Name .
%web-site% = www.yourwebaddress.tld

Now to tell it about your exim configuration.

Find the following lines in MailScanner.conf and edit as indicated:
#Run As User = mail
#Run As User = postfix
Run As User = mail # Group to run as (not normally used for sendmail)
#Run As Group = mail
#Run As Group = postfix
Run As Group = mail
Incoming Queue Dir = /var/spool/exim.in/input
Outgoing Queue Dir = /var/spool/exim/input
Sendmail = /usr/sbin/exim -C /etc/exim.conf
Sendmail2 = /usr/sbin/exim -C /etc/exim_send.conf
MTA = exim (as opposed to sendmail)

You can further tweak your MailScanner settings later on.

Some more changes are needed to finalise your setup.

MailScanner should autodetect exim, but you need to make a number of changes to /etc/sysconfig/MailScanner do the following:

mkdir /usr/local/exim/
mkdir /usr/local/exim/bin

make the following symlinks:

ln -s /etc/exim_send.conf /usr/local/exim/exim_send.conf
ln -s /etc/exim.conf /usr/local/exim/configure
ln -s /usr/sbin/exim /usr/local/exim/exim
ln -s /usr/sbin/exim /usr/local/exim/bin/exim

To test if it is working properly or not issue the following command:

/etc/init.d/MailScanner restart;tail -f /var/log/maillog

You should see something like the following:

Shutting down MailScanner daemons: MailScanner: [ OK ]
incoming exim: [ OK ]
outgoing exim: [ OK ]
Starting MailScanner daemons:
incoming exim: [ OK ]
outgoing exim: [ OK ]
MailScanner: [ OK ]

Keep an eye on the logs for a few minutes. If anything is wrong you should see an error in them.

In order to increase your setup's effectiveness against spam and viruses you can now tweak your settings.

As I already mentioned, the MailScanner.conf file is very well commented, so read what the configuration options are doing before you actually change them on a production system.

This method of setting up MailScanner has been tried and tested.

It works for us, however any feedback is always appreciated.

That seems to have gone relatively smoothly :) If anybody notices anything weird please let me know I've probably forgotten something really important

If the blog explodes or becomes unusable over the next few minutes it's due to me upgrading and breaking stuff in the process

It's been a while since I've mentioned MailScanner, partly because it "just works" :) However, Julian (who should have a blog!) has been making quite a few changes "under the hood" over the last few weeks, which culminated in a new beta release this afternoon.

Wordpress 2.0 has been out for nearly a month, but as I mentioned previously, I did not want to upgrade until I was 100% sure that all the plugins I use worked perfectly.

Several weeks ago I posted about email marketing techniques and how some marketers do it better than others. I would not like to be considered a hypocrite, so I decided to apply some of their techniques in a newsletter.