February 2006 Archives

Why oh why oh why do people get DNS so wrong? I'm really tired of other providers' incompetence when it comes to setting up DNS entries for clients. There are two basic things you need to setup reverse DNS. Without them it simply will not work:

1. A dns server
2. Delegation

There's no point making entries unless you have delegation. This article explains it in quite simple and plain English

Although consumers may have been following the pricing of domains that they pay ie. the retail rates they should be aware of what is going on behind the scenes. A lot of the bloggers who are involved in the domain industry have been commenting in recent months about the new contracts that Verisign is getting from ICANN.

As part of our sponsorship of the inaugaral Irish Blog Awards we'd like to offer all nominees a little something. We are offering all nominees a blog hosting plan + FREE domain (com/net/org/info/biz/co.uk) for one year. The package details are as follows:

• 200 MB diskspace
• 2.5 Gb monthly transfer
• FREE domain name*
• FREE email filtering
• Choice of Wordpress or Drupal preinstalled

I'll be giving Damien a special coupon code for the nominees to use. If you already have your own domain and hosting then you can either transfer it or setup a second blog. Small print: This offer is non-transferrable and is only available to nominees. It may not be exchanged for other services to the same value and is valid for the first 12 months of hosting and domain registration (for co.uk domains the initial 2 year registration period is covered)

Ambrand mentions the WIPO decision regarding the domain cultureireland.ie The case is between Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and Odyssey Internet Portal Limited. It seems that Odyssey registered the domain after the Department had either failed to renew the domain or simply let it expire. While they had held the domain for a period up to 2004 they were no longer the holder when they setup a national agency "culture ireland" in February 2005. Of course the domain was still available at that time, so why didn't they register it? In either case they lost the WIPO case. Why? The judgement includes some interesting details: "As to the use of the name “Culture Ireland” by the agency established by the Complainant in February 2005, the Complainant asserts that the agency and its name were “widely publicized” at the time of launch and that the agency “has already gained recognition and has established a reputation in both Ireland and abroad”. Again there is little detail let alone supporting evidence. Just how widely was the agency publicized in February 2005? Why have no examples of this publicity been produced? What activities has the agency undertaken in the six month period between its launch and the filing of this Complaint to generate the claimed reputation and recognition in that relatively short period? Again the Complainant might have exhibited samples of marketing material or details of marketing spend amongst other things." So before you go running off on a big marketing campaign, you may want to protect your brand..

In preparation for my seminar for the IIA I've spent some time investigating Irish business blogs and bloggers. Strangely enough today's Sunday Business Post also carries a piece on business blogging: Firms woo the blog generation Wow! That's great. I may be able to pick up some nice bits and pieces to add to my seminar. Oh how wrong could I have been. As Damien rightly points out, there isn't a single mention of an Irish blogger. Not one. A quick search of Google would have returned several pertinent links. Would it be unfair to say this was lazy journalism? I don't think so. If it was advertorial for a particular company then it should have been labelled clearly as such. Any argument about it being "a marketing article" is rubbish. If you want to use blogs for marketing then you should at least be capable of doing a quick search to see if anyone is actually doing it already.

A very amusing post by fuzzix shows the choice of iconography by technical publisher O'Reilly when producing books related to Microsoft technologies. Comparing one of his examples (VB Script) with Perl is quite revealing: Which of the two animals looks more reassuring?

I've been playing with the beta release of IE 7 for the last couple of weeks on and off (ie. on those rare occasions that I bother booting into windows outside office hours) It was due to its stupidity that I ended up posting the last entry twice! What can I say about it? Not a whole lot I'm afraid The tabbed browsing is a nice addition, but as a Firefox user leaves me completely nonplussed. The positioning of buttons etc seems to fly in the face of logic. Why on earth did they decide to put all the "normal" buttons on the right? And why do I get this incredible sense of deja vu? Of course the anti-phishing feature is going to attract a certain amount of media attention, but I just found it annoying and disabled it. Why? Well most phishing sites are transmitted / publicised via email, so if you block them there you won't have any problems, will you?

I was sent an invite to take the beta version of Windows Messenger 8 for a test drive. The download site didn't have any issue with me logging in with Firefox, but the download button was "dead" until I logged back in with Internet Explorer (I'm trying the beta of that as well). Installation was easy and no reboot was required, which is a nice change compared to so many windows products. So what's so new and innovative? Supposedly the level of interaction with your contacts has been taken to new levels with the addition of VOIP and video chat. I won't be able to try those out unless my contacts have the same version of the software, but it sounds like every bit of software out there is slowly but surely adding this kind of functionality. One of the features that immediately caught my eye was the ability to show my contacts which music I was listening to. Unfortunately it only works with Windows Media Player (which I've never particularly liked), but it does seem to work quite well. Contact management seems to have been expanded on, or at least made more obvious. There is also a file sharing feature, though what differentiates this from the older methods of sending files to contacts is not clear.

Somehow.. Not sure how exactly, but I just managed to lose a blog post I was writing! Damn that is annoying

We've relaunched Irish ISP Test, the site we run for broadband users in Ireland to test their speed.

Anyone wishing to draw comparisons between the IEDR and the Spanish domain registry probably needs to get their head examined: - the site's SSL seems to be self-signed - there is no whois server - the web based whois uses captcha

The latest version of the VOIP software Skype supports video calls on the windows version. Screenshots and further details are available on their site

A few bloggers have picked up on a vague rumour that Adsense maybe introducing much more advanced and refined geotargetting later this year. From a publisher's point of view this may be good news, but from an Irish advertiser's perspective it won't make any difference. More refined geotargetting may work in other countries but in the Irish market it is technically impossible unless you are interested in the very small ISP's clients.

Apologies to any bloggers or readers using the IrishBlogs.info planet. I turned off email notifications the other day (I was getting tired of deleting them) so when it all stopped working for the first time since launching the site I wasn't even aware. Thanks to Damien / Iced Coffee for pointing it out

I was contacted earlier this evening by a prominent Irish podcaster who was interested in my thoughts on podcast hosting. While I would normally have replied to them directly via email I thought it worthwhile to share some of my (random) thoughts in public. When a number of the Irish podcasters got together late last year to discuss setting up a podcasting body I signed up also. Why? Well it's the kind of thing I am interested in. I don't podcast and I may never do so, but I do like to keep abreast of technologies and especially those that are in my "circle" I've looked at podcast hosting and it could be a growth area in the future if you "do it right". Like so many other niches in hosting there is a demand out there for it, but it also comes with certain caveats. Apart from a small group of business podcasters the bulk of podcasts are run by hobbyists, so you cannot apply the same pricing models as you would to say music streams for commercial music groups. Under current Irish legislation it would be all too easy for a podcast host to run afoul of IRMA if a podcaster were to abuse (knowingly or otherwise) an artist's copyright. Of course that's a risk you run with "normal" hosting, but it might be worse with podcasts. I have been mulling over the idea of podcast hosting, but trying to come up with a workable business model for the Irish market is not an easy feat. Hosting, like many businesses, is a numbers game. If you have enough subscribers to a service you can oversell happily as only a small percentage of the userbase is going to use their allocation. Combine that with cheap and plentiful bandwidth and it can be viable. Some people have issues with the concept of overselling, but it's the cornerstone of so many business models. Airlines oversell, hotels oversell - they just call it by a different name. It's only an issue when you oversubscribe If you oversubscribe a number of things can happen. First off, as a provider, you could end up with your costs exceeding your income by a factor in excess of what you may consider acceptable. If that happens then continuing to provide the service may no longer be financially viable. From a technical point of view this may lead to capping, which would, obviously have a tangible effect on your subscribers (unlimited bandwidth is a figment of a marketer's imagination) Either of these would lead to unhappy clients. Unhappy clients lead to not only a loss of existing business, but can also hit both your recurring revenue and new business. For example, many Irish users would have subscribed to a "no limits" service some years ago. Many of us actually used the service to its fulll extent, but then found that the provider had labelled us as "abusers". The resulting uproar led to the formation of a pressure group for Irish broadband / internet users, but I digress. The point being that any such service if badly served would have a very negative impact on the provider. Is that the case in the Irish market? Hard to say, but from what I've seen the number of active Irish podcasters is quite small compared to that of "traditional" bloggers. At present we're treating it all on a very ad-hoc basis. Tom Raftery, for example, has been podcasting for several months, so we offered him space and bandwidth on one of our servers. He can podcast to his heart's content and not have to worry about bandwidth costs. It's probably an area that will have to be investigated further and I am, as always, open to suggestions and feedback from podcasters.

While talking to a friend last night the conversation swung round to that of analogies and how best to explain "our" world to the non-technical. Using an analogy can help, as for some people the concept of websites, hosting and domains is far too intangible and abstract for them to comprehend. Hosting companies sell or rent online real estate (space). They can help mark out your plots of land (domains) before you bring in architects (designers?) and engineers (developers?) to build your house or office Now how far can I take the analogy? :)

Apple users love to tell the rest of us how secure and user-friendly Apple computers are. However this may soon change, as Apples have been hit with the second security issue in the last week. OSX/Leap-A was, according to some reports, the first virus designed specifically to target OSX. It has now been followed OSX.Inqtana.A which is a bluetooth worm.

The shortlist for the Irish Blog Awards has been announced I've been nominated under two categories, which is more than a little surprising, but considering who I am up against I don't expect to win. It's nice being shortlisted though: Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere - Sponsored by Firstpartners.net John Breslin - PlanetOfTheBlogs Roger Galligan - IrishBlogs.ie Bernard Goldbach - Irish Eyes Donncha O'Caoimh - Wordpress Michele Neylon - IrishBlogs.info Best Technology Blog/Blogger - Sponsored by Bitbuzz Dave's Rants Eirepreneur Irish Eyes Michele Neylon Tom Raftery

Although I've had a Palm (Tungsten T2) for quite some time I haven't really been using it actively. However I've found recently that I need something that falls between my mobile phone and my laptop in terms of mobility and power, so it's been dusted off and is coming back into use. By default the Palm comes with software to integrate with Windows and Mac, but there doesn't seem to be any sign of official support for linux. Since I use Ubuntu as my desktop on both my laptop and my non-work pc I needed to find a solution to allow syncing of files etc., While the Ubuntu forums and wiki are usually helpful they weren't overly so on this occasion, as they took quite a convuluted approach to a relatively simple issue (at least in my view) The simplest solution was to install kpilot, which is a KDE replacement for the palm desktop. From what I can see it does an admirable job and is pretty much idiot proof (ie. I got it working in less than 5 minutes). Installation is simple a matter of running: sudo apt-get install kpilot The application should end up under: Applications > Accessories > Kpilot The first time you run it you will be asked to configure it for your Palm, so make sure that it is sitting in its cradle and is connected to your PC. Once you've done the initial setup you may want to tweak your settings a bit. To install software onto your Palm (which is one of the reasons I wanted the software) simply open Kpilot and click on "File Installer" and then "Add file" to add file(s) to be installed. To complete the installation depress the hotsync button on the Palm's cradle. For some reason I always get an error about /dev/tty/USB0 not existing, but the hotsync works perfectly, so I would presume that the error is not important.

The fourth milestone CD released as part of the Dapper development cycle is now available. Although the CD images are not production ready, they are described as being "reasonably free of showstopper CD-build or installer bugs" More information on the developments and changes here, while downloads of the isos are available here, here and here

Guinness have setup a blog run by their marketing team. But before you click on the link to go and have a look you better stop for a second. If you are not in the UK you cannot view the blog (or at least they don't want you to view it) They've put up a "nice" barrier page that stops you accessing the site unless you provide your age and state that you are in England, Scotland or Wales. Supposedly they are concerned about the legal issues of making the content available. From a marketing point of view I see a number of issues with this. Unless they are going to give me very valuable content why would I bother filling out the form? If they are forcing everyone to fill it out have they set it up so that the search engine spiders can get in directly? The age and country check is laughable. I was blocked the first time when I told the truth, but by simply using my browser's back button and changing my country I was able to get in. It's also more than a bit insulting that Irish citizens cannot view a blog about one of the quintessential Irish products. (Yes I know the company isn't Irish anymore) Other people have also been commenting on the new blog...

Unless you have a real problem! One of our clients was sent over 53 thousand spams today. Puts it into perspective, doesn't it?

Interesting to see that the European ApacheCon will be held in Dublin this year from June 26th to June 30th in the Burlington. More information will probably be available over the next few days / weeks

Some books worth reading if you want to learn about marketing methods: The Guerilla Marketing Handbook Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers Unleashing the Ideavirus

I wonder if someone screwed up or was emmyawards.com simply never held by them ?

One of the more common misconceptions regarding international domains (com/net/org/info/biz) is that the expiry date is meaningful. While it is indicative of the domain's renewal date it bears little relation to the domain's actual expiry date and its subsequent release. Mike Davidson provides a fairly clear explanation as he works his way through the entire process of picking up an expired domain Well worth reading

In common with my peers I buy quite a bit online. Yesterday, for example, I bought two cds, while the day before I bought a book for a work related matter. Living in a provincial Irish town means that I have to buy certain items online, while other items are either more convenient or appeal to the "click to buy" mentality (impulse buying tied to my credit card) Rymus made me think about online vs offline transactions a bit this morning when talking about delivery times:

€150 locally with a 2/3 day wait or around €100 from the other side of the world with a guaranteed 3 day delivery.

We recently bought something from a vendor in Hong Kong that made its way half way round the globe in 3 days. A local vendor would have taken more than a week to get the item in. In some areas online vendors, such as Amazon, can run rings around your local offline vendor. However you should evaluate all the factors before dismissing the local shop. Most online vendors cannot match the personal service / expertise.

One of the downsides to search engine dominance is the quality of search results. If you go looking for quality results (ie. useful sites) in certain topic areas you are more likely to find highly optimised crud than anything useful. So how can you get past the junk to the content you want to find? It's not easy. You can try honing your search phrases or you can ask for a recommendation from a colleague or friend. Another alternative is to use other people's bookmarks instead. Enter del.icio.us Admittedly I was inspired by this post on Rachel's blog :)

Over the last few months there has been a certain degree of debate in some circles with regard to the IEDR's pricing and other policies. Some people called for a reduction in pricing, although they did little to pass on any saving to the public. In other quarters there were mutterings about the future of the IE namespace with both the advent of EU looming on the horizon coupled with the likelihood of greater government involvement in the day to day running of the registry. What has the IEDR done about this? On the pricing front there was a significant reduction on both the wholesale and retail rate from 1st January this year. While some people are displeased with this, their displeasure would appear to be tainted by their previous complaints about the high pricing. Prior to January the pricing structure for IE resellers was anything but simple. There were pricing tiers based on the number of domains "held" by a billing contact. Once you got past a particular threshold you qualified for a rebate - not a price reduction - which was given to you quarterly. This obviously benefited some of the larger resellers who were billing for several thousand domains, but even for them this "pay now get moneyback later" scheme must have been quite cumbersome. The new pricing scheme is much simpler for all parties concerned. Instead of tiers you have a nice and simple uniform price, which per unit means that even the larger players do not pay more per unit than they did previously. However, as is so common in Irish business, there are those who are not happy with this pricing structure and would wish to cast doubts on the integrity of companies who have passed on savings to their clients. What ever happened to free market economics? Surely it is up to each company to chose their own business model? Why should taking a gutsy approach be greeted with an attack on a company's integrity or viability? However it is not for me, as a business owner, to make these decisions. Ultimately competitors are free to choose how they wish to react to our marketing tactics as in reality we do not market or sell to them, so their views of us do not really matter. Having said that the IEDR's own policies and procedures should be reviewed, or at least discussed. There are certain apparent inconsistencies between what they claim on the one hand and what they do on the other. What exactly do they mean by a "managed registry"? Which facets of the IE namespace, apart form the zonefiles, are they actually managing? Is it merely a matter of them applying rote to the processes and procedures that have been in place since the IE namespace was moved under the management of the IEDR, or should they be doing more to promote it and defend it from squatters and spammers? While it is possible for an individual to discuss these matters directly with IEDR management surely a more proactive approach is needed? Other registries, such as Nominet, actively encourage feedback from members. While the case of Nominet is hardly a good example to choose, due to the very size of the operation etc., it is also a good role model to follow in some cases.

As part of my preparation for the IIA seminar on blogging next month I would like to put together a couple of examples of Irish business blogs. If you or your company has had any experiences with blogging - both positive and negative - I would love to hear from you. Either post a comment or email me: michele@mneylon.com

If, like me, you subscribe to several feeds from separate blogs as well as aggregators, that collect blog feeds either by topic or region, you may notice certain trends. For example, last Sunday night Damien Mulley announced the opening of votes for the Irish blog awards online. Although the press picked up on the story over the following days, the "blogosphere" had already covered it in depth within a couple of short hours of his announcement. The blog awards would naturally be of interest to bloggers, but what of other stories? What about events in areas where traditional media have limited presence or resources to provide coverage? With the incorporation of blogs in the search results on some of the main news websites the difference between bloggers and journalists is becoming increasingly blurred. While a "net savvy" user may be able to tell the difference between an authorative and reliable source and one that is totally unreliable a casual browser probably cannot.

It may seem like an odd question to pose, however a recent post over on the search.ie forum made me think about it.

There are a lot of myths and "old wives tales" surrounding the registration of IE domains. A lot of them may have held some truth in the past, however the current reality is very different.

I was doing some minor maintenance on the Irish Blogs site this morning and was pleasantly surprised by the number of blogs currently listed. There are now just under 200 blogs listed! I'd love to see that number double, so if you haven't listed your blog yet what are you waiting for? :)

I forgot to mention that I was recently interviewed by HostInterview, which is a new venture from Irish entrepeneur Fergal Crawley.

There's been a lot of talk about the power of RSS over the last few months. In recent times it has not been unheard of for some evangelists to posit that RSS will kill email. I would disagree. Tom O'Leary has written a nice article explaining why RSS cannot replace email which is definitely worth a read.

Amazon are the latest company to join the list of phishing targets.

I really like FeedBurner. I think it's a really cool service and have been delighted with each and every new feature that they've added. I have no idea how many users they currently have, but the vast majority of blogs that I read on a regular basis seem to be using the service. Of course they may feel that they need to increase market share, but there are good ways to do that and there are bad ways to do that. Spamming is not the way to do it. Spam, UBE, UCE - call it what you like, is a serious issue. If the likes of Yahoo and AOL are considering taking action that would potentially block "free" access to their users and in so doing change the very nature of email, you may begin to get an idea of how serious spam is. If I take a quick look at some of our email statistics, for one part of our network only, the level of spam hitting the network can be quite worrying... We rejected over 1.5 million emails last month alone !! (these would have been primarily dictionary attacks with no valid recipient) So let's look at what seems to have happened with FeedBurner... The Blog Herald reports that they received an email from Feedburner as follows:

To Whom It May Concern: I noticed that you are currently running some RSS feeds on your site. I am writing to suggest that you run those feeds through FeedBurner.com. We currently manage over 190,000 feeds for over 120,000 publishers; through FeedBurner, publishers get invaluable insight into their feed usage: how many subscribers they have, which items their subscribers are reading, and which items generate the most click-throughs. Our core service is free, though we do have some premium services if you’re interested in more detailed analytics. If you decide to run your feeds through us you will not only gain a more friendly “subscribe” page (see my feed at feeds.feedburner.com/thewannabevc) but you will also gain access to many other helpful additions that will add functionality to your feed and make your feed more accessible. In addition to feed management services, we also offer feed monetization – which gives publishers the ability to advertise in their feeds. With our growing list of publishers across a broad range of advertising channels, we have a number of very interesting ad campaigns running that might be appropriate for your feeds. If you need any help setting up your feeds at feedburner.com or if you have any questions please feel free to ping me. Take care and I look forward to working with you in the future. —— Eric Olson Associate - Business Development FeedBurner - http://www.feedburner.com xxxx@feedburner.com AIM/Skype: xxxx

Problems this raises:

• It was unsolicited
• It's obviously bulk
• There's no indication of where they got the email address from
• There's no way of unsubcribing
• It's pushing a commercial service

It's a clear case of spam. Or is it? Others would like to argue that it is merely a case of "direct marketing" and that spam can simply be summed up as:

Spam is the rubbish about unwanted pharmaceuticals, knock-off software and disgusting websites. An unsolicited email about a service in my sphere of interest is legitimate direct marketing.

The first sentence would echo most people's perception of spam ie. that is only about certain topics, but even there the author is being extremely subjective, as he refers to "disgusting" websites. Disgusting according to whom? Some people actually enjoy them, so it's all a matter of personal taste and views, or, to put it more succintly, it's subjective. The second sentence is highly subjective and even contradictory. If it's unsolicited and sent in bulk, then it is, by definition, UBE (unsolicited bulk email), which is another name for spam. Some of his other points are amusing:

Lots of bloggers and every day people wouldn't call it email spam. They would think it interesting.

Yes, they might call one email interesting, but when you are getting hundreds of them per day and your network resources are being eaten up by this junk I'm fairly sure the "interest" swiftly wanes. The scary thing is that Feedburner executives can't see anything wrong with what they've done. Sure, they're vaguely apologetic about it, but what makes me think that they thought they'd simply get away with it? Have a look at some of their comments here, here and here Of course they should be more worried about their registrar taking action against them. In recent weeks the number of ICANN registrars who have decided to implement strict anti-spam terms of service has grown and spammers do run the risk of finding their domains deactivated.

I've taken IrishBlogs.com offline temporarily. It will probably be resurrected or pointed to another site at some stage over the next few days, however as a project I think it is best "shelved" at this juncture - at least in its present form.

There seem to be almost as many comment presentation styles as there are blog templates. If you want to see how some of the more attractive implementations look drop by Smiley Cat who has posted a collection of them They've also got some nice tips on how to layout your comments: 10 Tips to Improve the Comment Section of Your Blog

Every few weeks the topic of adult content in Ireland raises its head. In some cases people are looking at domain names, whereas in others they are interested in the content itself. I've gone over a number of these topics in the past, as they were topical due to the release and subsequent shelving of the .xxx TLD. So where do people think the line should be drawn? Should a line be drawn? If you draw a line with regard to what occupies Irish web space (and the IE namespace) should you also restrict access to adult content from Irish ISPs? What is "adult" anyway? Where does erotica end and pornography begin? Is there any difference between the two? As a consenting adult should you have the right to view whatever content you wish in the privacy of your home? If an Irish company were to openly host pornographic content would they be able to survive in the marketplace? Why is the opening of a nightclub in Dublin cause of such furore? I wish I had the answers.. I do have my own thoughts and opinions, but most of those are already in the public domain, so little would be served in rehashing them.

Since the relaunch a few months ago it seems the GoldenPages.ie team have been working on adding new features, or else I never noticed them before.

According to an in the New York Times AOL and other ISPs are considering a plan to charge for email sent to their networks. While unpaid mail will still be accepted it will have to "run the gauntlet" of the spam filters etc.,:

AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links. As is the case now, mail arriving from addresses that users have added to their AOL address books will not be treated as spam.

While I can appreciate AOL and Yahoo's perspective on this, I can also see this having a lot of undesirable side-effects. Spam filtering is not an easy thing to do without upsetting some people at least some of the time. It's a pity that solutions such as hash cash aren't more widely implemented, as they might help avoid this type of scenario. You can read about the system in detail on their FAQ, but a basic summary is this:

Hash cash is payment in burnt CPU cycles by calculating n-bit partial hash collisions on chosen texts. The idea of using partial hashes is that they can be made arbitrarily expensive to compute (by choosing the desired number of bits of collision), and yet can be verified instantly. This can be used as the basis for an ecash system measured in burnt CPU cycles. Such cash systems can be used to throttle systematic abuses of un-metered internet resources.

(taken from here) Or in plain English.. You basically "pay" for each email you send as your computer has to work a little harder to send each email. The idea being that if you are willing to put in the effort of doing this then your mail *should* be legitimate. So, could this hail the end of email as we know it? Or will it merely mean that AOL et al will lose clients?

I came across a Spanish design agency's site earlier this evening. The caption on the main page appealed to my sense of humour: satisfacemos sus necesidades de diseño a cambio de su alma At least they are honest :)

Voting in the Irish blog awards is now open. You may also notice that the site's main page has been overhauled The list of blogs and bloggers that have been nominated makes for interesting reading. They range from quite high profile blogs through to very personal ones covering a very wide range of subjects, style etc., There are, of course, some familiar names on the list, so drop over to have a look and cast your vote. Of course anyone who has been nominated maybe tempted to ask their blog readers to vote for them, however I think TwentyMajor's post should get a commendation for "best use of a graphic 2006" :) Best of luck to everyone and thanks to Damien for all his hard work

I had heard of Nooked a few times over the last year, but it was only today that I finally got round to signing up for a test account.

I really like GAIM as an IM client, but some of the functions are a bit hidden. To get a multiuser chat going in MSN isn't as obvious as it could be. It's not hard to do, but it is a little obscure :)

Is there a way to invite more than one person to an MSN chat? Yes. Right click a buddy on your list and choose "Initiate Chat". In the conversation window that appears, choose "Invite" from the "Conversation" menu to invite another user. When the conversation framework gets another rewrite, it is possible that this will be simplified.

From the official GAIM FAQ

I've mentioned some titles by published by Packt in the past. What makes Packt different is their philosophy:

Packt believes in Open Source. When we sell a book written on an Open Source project, we pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of our Open Source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to the Open Source project.

I don't know how that works out in reality, but the idea is good. In any case they have some very interesting titles coming up over the next few months: Implementing Sugar CRM - the book I needed last year! Building Forums with VBulletin - although they don't say which versions this covers it could be a useful read. Building Websites with Joomla! - Joomla forked from Mambo Open Source and has become very popular with developers. I'm currently experimenting with it on a couple of sites, as some of the plugins / components may help with non-technical users Building Responsive Web Applications with AJAX and PHP - they could just as easily have called this web 2.0 with php.. It seems to be the "hot" topic

Stealing content or another person's bandwidth is despicable. Earlier tonight while reviewing the logs of Irish ISP Test I discovered that a "charming" individual (or company) had decided that it would be a really "good" idea to abuse the test by hotlinking to it via an iframe. We've always offered the test for free, so why the hell would someone abuse it in this manner? Will we have to oblige users to jump through hoops to check their download speeds? Or should we simply block all non-Irish users? (yes - I am very aware of how awkward and messy that would be)

Thanks to all those who have sent me best wishes for my 33rd birthday. I was presented with a lovely cake by one of our new staff this morning, which was very touching and totally unexpected :)

If you are an online marketer you may feel offended by the title of this post. I would apologise, but it wouldn't be very honest for me to do so. The problem doesn't lie with the online marketer, be they a small operation or even a multinational. The problem lies with website owners or vendors of adspace, who think that it is still 1995. This maybe an Irish problem, as I've never come across the same level of idiocy when dealing with non-Irish publishers... Let me explain... Say you want to run an advertising campaign to sell widgets. One of the more obvious places to run adverts would be on a site read by widget lovers, as they would be a part of your target market. So you contact a few of these widget fan sites and request their rates. They're more than happy to give you their pricing either in CPM or by period. The numbers are quite high, but the site owner's media pack assures you that their visitors are very discerning widget lovers who like to spend money on widgets. (You may be suffering from widget overload at this point) So you signup without asking any questions. You are an idiot! Ask the siteowner more probing questions about the statistics. Find out if the numbers they quoted were page views, hits or visitors. There's a very big difference. Over the last couple of years I've spoken to a number of these sales types and they really are amusing, in a painful and annoying kind of way. Unless they can provide you with reasonably detailed information then walk away.

According to breakingnews.ie the role of Luna Lovegood, in the upcoming film version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is going to be played by Irish girl Evanna Lynch. Full story

Some websites simply will not work in Firefox regardless of whether you are using windows or linux (with crossover office). This can be quite annoying, as you have to launch an instance of IE simply to view them. However there is a very handy little plugin that overcomes this issue: IEView Which is described as:

Lets you load pages in IE with a single right-click, or mark certain sites to *always* load in IE. Useful for incompatible pages, or cross-browser testing.

Kind of handy :)

We're continuing the offer for the month of February. Maybe it's because it's my birthday on Friday and I was feeling generous! We're having a pretty generous 2006 so far, with free asp.net 2.0 hosting plans up for grabs and a lot more :)