January 2007 Archives

DomainFest kicks off this afternoon with the registration, a talk of some kind and a party... It's hardly surprising that some of the delegates had arrived already and when you combine that with an ICANN regional meeting in Santa Monica.. Yes - you guessed it. Domain types everywhere. Yesterday evening I met up with Freddy from EuroDns and a couple of the others who were here for DomainFest. Since they were all a bit jetlagged they didn't want to come to Laugh Factory last night. Jothan was there with a load of people who were attending the ICANN meeting in Santa Monica. So I finally got to meet Jothan who then introduced me to a bunch of people from ICANN, Register.com, BuyDomains.com, DotMobi and more The comedy was hilarious The party tomorrow night should be interesting:

The DomainSponsor party is going to be better than ever. Prepare to indulge in a night of pure 007 luxury, complete with Bond girls, freshly rolled cigars, dry martinis, and a complete casino setup, brought to you by a powerful revenue machine – the leader in domain monetization.

So now it's time for me to get my act together and head off for another day of being a tourist :)

After a night of beer I was feeling quite groggy this morning when Tino picked me up. He got me to Warner Brothers for around 930 am, so I was able to regain my energy by gulping down a couple of coffees in Starbucks (I seem to be spending a lot of time in Starbucks... ). The studio tour was absolutely incredible. While I took the "short" two and half hour tour, there is also a longer one which lasts about 5 hours or so. After today I am seriously considering forking over the extra cash to take it. Why? Because it is amazing. I can't think of suitable adjectives to describe it. I keep on coming up with silly words like "awesome" or "cool", which really don't do justice to the experience. While I did get to see plenty during the tour the lot is huge, so going back for a longer tour would be really worth it. If I was a Gilmore Girls fan I'd have been in 7th heaven, as we got to see them filming (albeit from a safe, off camera, distance). The bat mobile driven by Christian Bale was probably one of the morning's highlights, so I tried to take as many photos as possible. I only wish I had a better camera, as some of the photos came out looking pretty awful and I wasn't able to get the right kind of views.. (note to self - buy a better camera) What really amazed me was how passionate the staff of WB are. They seem to really love their jobs. Needless to say I did succumb to temptation in the gift shop and am now the proud owner of several branded tshirts, keyrings etc., I've added a few of today's photos to my Flickr stream

Some photos I've taken so far .. More to be added

Yesterday I started my day with coffee and croissants in Starbucks, courtesy of Jason from Alertsite who had sent me a Starbucks' card before I left Ireland. I wandered around the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre before succumbing and signing myself up for a tour of the stars' homes. Yes it is incredibly tacky, but I feel zero guilt :) Did I see anyone famous? No. The only thing you get to see is the outside of houses of various shapes and sizes ... I've taken a few photos, though I am beginning to regret not having invested in a better camera, as the lens on my Sony isn't the best. After seeing how the other half live I wandered around Hollywood Boulevard some more. The walk of fame goes on for well over a mile on both sides of the street. If you're not careful you end up walking into people as you spend your time staring at the ground! It's obvious that they're pouring money into some parts, but other areas look really rundown and dodgy. I'm planning on going to Warner Brothers today, so my driver is picking me up from the hotel at nine. (It's currently 730am) I'd like to have a wander around Beverly Hills if I can get back up there. I've always been fascinated by overpriced shops :)

I'm staying literally two minutes walk from Hollywood Boulevard. Yesterday afternoon I was picked up at the airport by a very swish Town Car and dropped off at the hotel. I had slept a bit on the plane, but the seats weren't particularly comfortable, so I wasn't feeling exactly refreshed. In order to get my internal clock on track (there's an 8 hour difference) I thought I'd go for a wander down Hollywood Boulevard and kill some time. Unfortunately my camera was still charging, so I didn't take any photos last night. First impressions? Very mixed. The cars are all very big. Hollywood Boulevard is jammed with tourists, but tshirts etc., seem really cheap. Food doesn't seem to be terribly expensive Beer seems to be cheaper than Ireland, though it's incredibly weak I've managed to get a proper night's sleep, so I'll be doing some proper exploring etc., today (with a charged camera!!) I think I'll do all the really touristy things like tours of the stars' homes or something equally mad :)

I just made it through the US immigration thing in Dublin Airport. It was incredibly simple and the staff were really civil. I've been stopped at several borders in the past, so I nearly always expect the worse (when you've had your bags pulled apart a few times this sense of paranoia tends to grow) I'm now waiting to board my flight to LA... It's handy having wireless broadband, though it's a pity that it's not a bit cheaper ... €5 / hour is quite high if you're hanging around for a couple of hours (you have to check in 3.5 hours in advance) I've no idea how busy this flight is going to be.. as long as I don't end beside some nutjob I won't care (I've an awkward habit of attracting the weirdos)

Yesterday afternoon I discovered where I'd left my camera charger. After wasting several hours ripping the house asunder it transpires that I left the damned thing in Cork. After passing through the departures area and into duty free in Dublin Airport I found my solution! The Hahnel Ultima is a really cool little device. It's a lot neater than the original charger that came with my Sony Cybershot T7, which I've always considered to be a clunky piece of plastic compared with the sleek lines of the camera it serves. As you can see it's quite neat. Notice the removable plate. It comes with three different ones, so you can handle different battery sizes with ease. What's really cool, however, is that it comes with US and Irish plugs :) If you're in the USA you can plug it straight in, while in Ireland you simply slip the adaptor over it and off you go. And for those of us who have love affairs with our cars it also boasts a car charger!! (I think I need to get my car cigarette lighter fixed first!) So what could have been a disaster has actually worked out surprisingly well :)

Just noticed that for some really odd reason Google Adsense keeps throwing up ads targetting the gay community on my blog's main page. I'm perplexed :)

I mentioned previously how blogs and forums (fora) are converging. I've been running the excellent VBSeo mod on a couple of forums for the last few months and the SEO results have been more than satisfactory, however there's no such thing as a free lunch :) The downside is that the forum is being hit with trackbacks from splogs all the time. In the last 24 hours it got really silly, with splogs hitting it every couple of minutes. I've had to disable trackbacks until I can come up with a sane solution for filtering them. Yes they do go into a moderation queue, but the number of them is such that moderating that queue could become a full time job!

I'm off to LA tomorrow morning at last!! I'll be heading up to Dublin this afternoon / evening, as I need to be in the airport before 8am. Since public transport in this country is so good that means that I have no choice but to drive. Fortunately the helpful members of the OPEN list were able to point me in the right direction - thanks! I'll be spending most of today running around like a headless chicken - as I've probably forgotten something really obvious. If anyone is looking for me over the next week or so I will be checking mail etc., but you may have to wait. My personal address gets lower volumes of mail - so send it there. I'm really looking forward to my "escape", though I am already dreading the amount of mail I will have to download when I get back :)

There are a lot of honest hard-working designers and developers out there. However, from a client's perspective, there are some things that they should be careful of and that they should possibly question

• The cost of the project seems to low
• The cost of the project seems to high
• The only contact details you can get are a mobile number
• The only contact details you can get are an email address, and it's a free one
• They won't let you choose where you host the site
• They won't let you access the site via FTP even when you ask
• They don't give you access to any form of control panel for email addresses etc.,

Don't get me wrong, not all of these factors mean that you are going to run into trouble. Even if you avoid them you could still "get done" by a "reputable" company. There maybe valid reasons why the developer does things the way that they do, but it can't hurt to ask. There are probably a lot of other things you could add to that list and I expect some developers would defend their stance on some of the items I've included :)

Paul sent this around this afternoon Raid for idiots Very funny, but also easy to understand!

Just got an email from CD Wow promoting the nominated films for the 2007 Academy Awards. I hadn't had a chance to look at the list previously, so I popped over to the official site, where I quickly discovered that I hadn't seen most of the films :(

Alan "SpoiltChild" gave Geek Toys a facelift in the last couple of days. It looks a LOT nicer now :)

Amazon UK are currently processing payments, so if you're set to receive payment by gift voucher (ie. email) keep your eyes open. Adsense payments for EFT seem to have already been processed for the month of December :)

With my business partner we run a hosting company, as most regular readers know. We offer a range of internet related services including hosting, domain registration and the like. (This is not an advert - it's more of an explanation) Over the past few years we have taken (and made) a lot of phonecalls - 9 out of our 10 fulltime staff spend a good part of their day on the phone. While some of the conversations may amuse hardcore geeks, others are simply bizarre. About two years ago I got a phonecall in the afternoon. It was a gentleman's voice with a rather strong regional accent. After doing the obligatory "Good afternoon Blacknight" I couldn't have possibly been prepared for his question: "Where can I get a combine harvester?" Naturally I presumed that he'd got a wrong number, so I tried to explain who we were... Bad idea! "You're an internet company?" "Yes" "So where can I get a combine harvester online?" "I don't know. Have you tried looking at the Golden Pages?" "I already did. That's how I got your number" At this point I wasn't sure if it was someone pulling my leg or a seriously confused gentleman, so I gently suggested that he try to search on Google and assured him that we couldn't be of any further assistance. A few weeks ago one of our staff got an even odder phonecall: "Good morning, Blacknight. How can I help you?" "Do you sell bras?" "Sorry?" "Do you sell bras? You know... ladies underwear.." "Em ... No. We're a hosting company" "But do you sell bras?" She somehow managed to gently extricate herself from the call .... People ask the oddest questions ......

If your website is slow then people will either get annoyed with it or simply not visit it. Bottom line - you can lose money. I met Donncha in real life for the first time a few months ago and one of the things that I was anxious to talk to him about was Wordpress' speed or lack thereof, as both my own sites and those of clients etc., seemed to suffer from performance issues. This site has been known to do over 100 gigabytes of transfer in a month, so performance can become an important factor. Donncha, who works for Wordpress fulltime, was adamant that WP itself was not to blame. As I had previously suspected the culprits were badly written plugins. Unfortunately this is one of the downsides to PHP. It's simply TOO easy to write bad PHP code. If even I can release a modified plugin (and I cannot program to save my life) then you know what I mean! Evaluating Performance Prior to the reinstall on this site the number of SQL queries per page was outrageous, with some pages requiring well in excess of 100 SQL queries to render! If you look in the page footer now you can see that it's been cut back significantly. Server Side Options On the server-side I'm using MySQL 4 - simply because it ships with Ubuntu. The Ubuntu config includes some caching already, but the max clients setting had to be increased significantly, as the server would become either slow or simply unresponsive at least once every 24 hours. The fix for that was simply to "borrow" a config from a much busier server :) On a sidenote. If your site is really important to you and is a major source of revenue, be that direct (sales / affiliate sales / advertising revenue) or indirect (such as business referrals worth thousands of Euro) then going dedicated or at least semi-dedicated is the only sane option. You simply cannot run an important site in a shared environment. Apache could be optimised further by simply removing unwanted / unneeded modules OR, as some people have suggested, by replacing it completely with a lighter HTTPD. Php could be sped up using a caching mechanism. As none of the open source PHP caching solutions seem to be available as Debian / Ubuntu packages I have decided not to try this method as yet, however, if anyone has done so I'd love to hear about your experiences. Instead of upgrading the backend, and leaving loads of old files lying around the place, a clean slate definitely helps. Now, in my case, getting a "clean slate" was not intentional, however it has paid dividends. If you cannot think of a valid reason to use a plugin, then you can probably do without it. There is no reason to have more than a couple of plugins enabled. If you need tons of plugins then you probably should consider using something else or maybe writing your own software... One of the plugins I find particularly useful is Brian's latest comments, however the "stock" version is rather heavy, as it generates SQL queries on each and every page load. Donncha "Wordpress" O Caoimh rewrote it so that it's a hell of a lot saner. (thanks!) Another plugin that was worth enabling is Wp-Cache. The latest version includes some improvements supplied by Mr O'Caoimh :) What both of these plugins do is create static files on the physical disk instead of relying on MySQL to do all the work. (This is one of the reasons why some sites such as search.ie or blog.blacknight.ie use the Perl scripts that they do!) I'm not sure what else I can do at this point to speed things up, as I've effectively taken the number of SQL queries per page from an alltime high of about 110 to about 30 (or less) If anyone has any other suggestions I'd love to give them a go

There was a time when a Google PageRank update took but a few days to complete, but the current update seems to have been dragging on for ages. An alternative theory being that they've moved the model completely OR that they had to redo it... In any case I've just been informed that IWF *should* get a PR of 4! Why do I care? I can think of a couple of reasons, but the most obvious one is monetisation. Low PR sites are harder to monetise using TLA

Rather than try to reinvent the wheel and in order to keep in tune with the Open Source / Technical flavour of Skycon.... I've decided to give the talk on email filtering using MailScanner... Since that sounds very uninspired I'll see if I can come up with a sexier title. How about: Mine's big enough! - Filtering 50,000 users' mail using open source technology It doesn't have a great ring to it... OR Phishers and phuckers Neither exactly scream "inspired!"

A couple of the plugins that I used to have installed on here were bloated and won't be coming back anytime soon. Others, however, are incredibly useful, but I do worry about the silly number of SQL queries that they can add. Brian's latest comments, for example, seems to add quite a few SQL queries which may not be necessary. Does anyone have an alternative that offers the same result but with fewer SQL queries??

It seems like Grandad wants to get in on the whole web "game". He's been getting advice from his friend "Ron" I'll let you all work out what the .ie is that he wants to get :) Maybe David Curtin will take pity on him - sure he's only an auld fella!

I am always impressed by good quality direct marketing, so last week's missive from Interactive Return was really welcome.

Search Marketing World 2007, Dublin March 21, 2007, brings together the search marketing professionals, the search engines, the business owners who have successfully implemented search, the ad agencies and you.

While you might be tempted to think that it is just a gimmick all you need do is look at theevent lineup. Danny Sullivan is a heavyweight, so getting him to Dublin for a conference is no little achievement. Hopefully it will be a complete sellout, as it looks like a really worthwhile event.

Every time people head over to the US for a few days they always seem to come back laden with gadgets and gizmos that cost a fraction of what you pay here. (Or at least that's the impression I've been given). With that in mind, what should I pick up in LA?

I love quirky job titles! Alan's just posted on his business blog that they're looking for:

a team of freelance pixel wranglers and code poets for a number of upcoming projects over the next few months.

Full details on the Pinstripe blog (SpoiltChild Design)

Voting in the 2007 edition of the Irish Blog Awards (a Mulley initiative) closes this Friday. They've fixed the voting form, so you can now vote for all the categories at once. So, who should you vote for? Best Blog - hard one really. I'd almost vote for Adam on this one, as he'd hate being labelled a blogger. Best Blog Post - There have been some good ones, but I think Dave's explanation of how to get listed in DMOZ would get my vote. That's not fair on Red Cardinal's amazing work on the Golden Spiders, however, so you could vote for that instead. Best Arts and Culture Blog - no idea. Any suggestions? Best Political Blog again I'm not that sure. Best Group Blog Tcal won last year, so who does that leave? Best Personal Blog I think Damien should get that one. Best Use of the Irish Language in a Blog Conn is the only one that springs to mind... Most Humorous Post Both Head Rambles and Twenty Major have made me laugh over the last few months, so it's hard to pick one post in particular. Maybe checking their archives would help you decide .... Best Podcaster Best Podcast There are three strong contenders here. Brian Greene, Bernie Goldbach and Conn - all three are excellent podcasters in their own right, but they've all done a lot to promote podcasting and teach others and encourage people in general in a completely selfless manner. Best Technology Blog/Blogger Maybe Adrian Weckler? I particularly liked his review of the iPhone :) Unlike the sheep he wasn't afraid to speak out about the potential flaws. Best Designed Blog There are some really nice ones out there! Alan's personal blog is a nice clean design, while I've always liked Ken's various layouts. Best Sport & Recreation Blog no idea Best News/Current Affairs Blog not sure... Best Photo Blog Donncha's Photo Blog Best Specialist Blog I'm not too sure what qualifies ... Maybe Jmcc's? Best Newcomer Head Rambles Best Business Blog There are a couple that I like including Infacta's Messaging Times Best Music Blog No idea really... Kilkenny Music? I tend to listen to music rather than read about it :) Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere Mulley? Donncha for his work on both Wordpress and WP MU? Who else has done stuff this year? Both Roger and John won last year for their contributions (or maybe I'm confusing awards ..... ) Anyone who has any ideas for the gaps in my voting card please make sane suggestions :)

While Adam may enjoy poking fun at my reluctance to simply "dive in" and upgrade my Wordpress install it seems that I may be proven correct :) Looking at the WP testers list today there are a number of people who've run into issues. While an upgrade may work fine for someone using a standard install with a fairly standard theme and plugins, there is no guarantee that it won't break it completely. I did upgrade one of my smaller blogs earlier today without running into any major issues, but as it only uses one or two of the simpler and more popular plugins I wasn't really expecting any issues. So what do you do if you break your blog completely? Well, first of all you should ensure that you have a backup of the original database. If you don't restoring the original is going to be very awkward (though probably not impossible) Fortunately ther are tutorials online for people who don't feel comfortable with MySQL imports :) Why am I so cautious? Experience has taught me that it's the only sane way to proceed with software :) No matter how good the developers are they can never quite account for all the possible issues, even when the issues are caused by the users themselves. Someone like Adam may have the necessary experience and skill to fix a broken upgrade, but a lot of Wordpress users simply don't.

Sometimes the cure can be a lot worse than the disease. In the case of WikiPedia one of the issues was the amount of spam that was being added. While it was all being removed as quickly as it was added the editors have decided to add the "nofollow" tag to all outbound links. If you would like to see the discussion on their mailing list here it is. Some of the posts are interesting and informative. Others sound like they were written by petulant children. What does this mean? Basically the "nofollow" tag, which I've mentioned in the past, is used to signal to search engine robots, such as Yahoo's Slurp or Googlebot, that they should ignore the outbound link ie. not follow it for spidering. In practical terms it means that any links from WikiPedia pages to your site(s) will lose their SEO value. While I can appreciate how annoying spam links can be, this sort of Draconian solution is totally uncalled for. (In case you care, which if you are interested in SEO you probably should, all outbound links from comments etc., here use "rel=external") The net effect of this move is that WikiPedia will become a one way street. The "neighbour" effect will be all but removed. If a site is an authoritative source of information on a subject then people will link to it. It's only reasonable that an outbound link from that site should be given the weight that it deserves. So maybe we should all add "nofollow" to our links to them? :) At least that's what Marketing Pilgrim is suggesting and I'd be inclined to agree.. though I generally don't link much to WikiPedia anyway. (via)

If you're going to run an advertising campaign using Google Adwords (or anything else) you'd want to ensure that your website is actually online. It's even more important if you're actually advertising hosting.... Spotted this morning on Irish ISP Test:

Company Business-class hosting ....

Since I can't click on my own ads I typed in the address.. which led me to a page announcing:

Site has been suspended

Basic rules of selling hosting:

• Pay your bills
• Ensure you've enough bandwidth
• Don't make claims that can be easily seen through

Basic rules of online advertising:

• Make sure your site is online
• All of the other rules from above

The company name is not being mentioned to protect the em .. well.. there's no need to rub salt in the wound, is there ?

Brian Greene is the IIA guest blogger, which I mentioned before. He's just posted his "plans". It could be very interesting depending on who agrees to submit themselves :)

Wordpress 2.1 has been released. Some of the new features may be attractive but, as usual, you should check that plugins etc., are compatible before upgrading. A plugin compatibility checklist is available as part of the documentation project. According to the documentation most of the more popular plugins will work fine. So what's new?

1. Autosave - handy if you're writing longer posts directly on the web interface and don't save your work.
2. Database improvements - this should be interesting to see in a shared environment, though most of the issues people encounter stem from badly written plugins that use inefficient SQL. Do you really need over 100 queries to generate a page? :)
3. Lots of AJAX - hopefully this brings improvement and not just feature creep
4. Pseudo-cron - sounds like they've brought the plugin into the core

They've also decided to put a development plan in place:

More exciting for most of our users, though, is our new development cycle. Based on everything we’ve learned in the past 3 years of doing WordPress, we’ve decided to shift to a more frequent release schedule like Ubuntu, with major releases coming several times a year. So, for the first time in WordPress’ history, I have an answer to when the next version is coming out: April 23rd.

So, should you upgrade? As this release is not a security fix there's probably no reason for you to upgrade unless you actually want to. If you have a working setup that you are happy with, why would you want to break it? I will probably upgrade when I get the time, but I'm in no rush.

I started writing this yesterday evening, but then I got distracted .... Anybody who knows me will happily agree that I am not a morning person - not unless I've had enough caffeine to kill an ox! However yesterday morning I was up at 7 in order to drive down to Waterford for BarCamp Southeast. Since there were a few of the Blacknight team going down we had arranged wakeup calls, which after the previous night's shenanigans were probably a really good idea :) I picked up Keith shortly after 8am and we hit the road. I must say it was a lovely drive down, as there were hardly any cars on the road! I pity Keith, though, as I have an awful habit of chattering away incessantly ..... The directions we'd been supplied with were spot on, so we'd no issue in finding the venue and actually arrived earlier than we'd planned. (I'd had visions of driving aimlessly around Waterford for hours!) Coffee and pastries devoured the other delegates started to drift. There were plenty of familiar faces, such as Damien, Jon, Donncha, Keith B (not to be confused with Keith G), Berni, Conn, Laura, Grainne, Elly and plenty of others (Do you really want a list of names? :) ) The venue, which is nestled in the Waterford countryside, is beautifully equipped and there was wireless access throughout. The lineup of talks was overwhelming, but I did manage to get into a couple of them, as well as trying to learn to juggle. With my total lack of co-ordination that was no easy task, though I did sort of manage to juggle (more "sort of" than "manage"). The first talk I got to was on podcasting, while the second was on a slightly different topic - death and divorce in a digital world (which deserves a post of its own) After the last talk a bunch of us headed down to the Ramada Viking. Most of us were staying there that night, so it was simply a matter of booking in and dropping bags off in rooms etc., Over the past year or so I've stayed in a lot of hotels. They all seem to merge into one. The Ramada Viking's staff, however, were extremely helpful and the room was fantastic. I've stayed in a few of the supposedly "good" hotels in Dublin and been completely underwhelmed, whereas this time I paid a lot less and got fantastic service in charming surroundings. After a couple of beers in the hotel we all piled into the city for food (which we were sponsoring) and then back out to the hotel for beer and banter. Unlike the first barcamp I actually made it into my bed before dawn :)

I'm off to LA at the end of the month to Domain Fest. While I've been really looking forward to the trip I'm now really excited, as I just got word that a cool conference just got even cooler !!

We are excited to announce that Michael Arrington, editor and founder of the definitive web 2.0 blog, TechCrunch, will top the list of the biggest industry names to speak at the first DOMAINfest Global. Prior to founding TechCrunch, Michael’s background in the domain industry is immense, having founded Pool.com and later consulted for domain industry giants like VeriSign and SnapNames.

Now that's interesting! The rest of the lineup is fascinating, so I hope I actually get to socialise with some of these people. So who do I want to meet? Jothan Frakes - obviously! We've been chatting online (and on the phone etc.,) for quite some time, but we've never met! Frank - whose blog I've been reading for quite some time Bret Fausett always has an interesting view on things domain related .... There are probably a lot of other people going who I should meet as well, but I guess I won't find out who until I actually get there... My big problem now is packing!!

Do you know where you live? That may seem like an odd question, but judging by some of the stuff Keith's found in our backend systems it might be a valid question to ask. NB: I have no way of seeing who supplied this information as we just ran queries on a section of the table... Ireland has 32 counties. 26 counties in the Republic and 6 in Northern Ireland.. or at least it used to have... According to some people the land mass has expanded considerably. While I know that some of the confusion may stem from wording on a website I still fail to see how "region/county" could have led to some of these gems (in all cases the country selected was "Ireland") | 9666663696h | << em. Ok... I'm really worried about you | asdasd | << you're not even trying | Éire | << presumably a nationalist / republican | berkshire | << after 800 years the roles are reversed ? | Canada | In Ireland? | CO | << interesting | County | << but which one? | FL | << Disney in Ireland I guess | Florida | | Murcia | << porque no? | n/a | | na | | none | | Pennsylvania | | poland | - that's not that surprising :) | Random | - some people like to keep us all guessing | Region | | Surrey | | sweden | | Tennessee | | test | | uk | | united kingdom | | United States/CA/Goleta | - covering all bases I guess..... | W | I now feel more sympathy toward my postman! :)

Laura has put a gun to my head. I have to decide on a topic for my talk at Skycon and I've got about 24 hours to do it. For once I won't be the only representative from Blacknight presenting!! Paul, in a possible moment of madness, also agreed to give a talk. As he's a hardcore geek he'll probably be right at home, whereas I'm a little more wary. What should I give a talk on?? Bearing in mind that it's quite a technical conference, judging by the timetable, what would people recommend? I was contemplating doing something on email filtering. (The last talk I gave in UL was on SEO) Any thoughts?

I've been interested in the inner workings of podcasting for some time, though I still haven't actually got round to doing anything about it! In any case yesterday's BarCamp featured some really interesting people talking about cool stuff (not all of it was that geeky!). The first session that I made it into was given by two podcasters that I truly respect, Bernie Goldbach and Conn Ó Muíneacháin. Conn has been podcasting as gaeilge (the Irish language) for some time, while Bernie not only podcasts regularly, but has a wealth of experience in teaching other people to do it. The talk was a combination of talk with slides and practical workshop. Bernie kicked off by explaining what he was going to do ie. put together a podcast in about 20 minutes or so and then Conn gave us a load of really useful tips on getting started. What was fantastic about the talk was that they made it all seem so accessible and easy, so even my non-technical companion at the talk was able to follow the entire process with ease (at least I think she did!). Hopefully Conn's slides will be available soon, though I know he's having issues with his broadband On a sidenote I took a couple of photos that you can see here

I came across UseAMap.com a few weeks ago on the webmaster forums, but I'm only getting around to post about it now :) It's described as:

A free service that provides you with a map that has a short URL, for example useamap.com/ourplace which is easy to remember and share with others. The user can then verbally tell others exactly where your desired location is.

And it's exactly as described. If you want to map your location (or any location) you can do so really easily. For example: silly little test You can easily embed the map in your existing site, link to it and customise various aspects of the display. Nice :)

One of the aspects of the Google Adsense terms of service that has been annoying publishers for a long time was the exclusivity element. Basically if you were running contextual ads using Adsense you were precluded from using any other contextual ad network. While I could understand that Google vs YPN might have made *some* sense, as an Irish publisher this was irrelevant. However Amazon introduced its contextual product a few months ago we were all warned that it wasn't compatible with Google's terms of service. The latest update to the Adsense terms of service has changed all this!! While the recent changes originally were source of some confusion and irritation among publishers it now transpires that there was actually a silver lining. Jensense, as usual, has the inside scoop. (via) I'm not sure what that means in practical terms for the sites that I run adsense on. On the one hand I would love to be able to run other ads on there, as in some cases they'd probably perform better, but I also don't want to swamp the sites with ads. I guess it's time to go play a bit :)

Driving back from Waterford this morning I decided we'd stop off at Jerpoint Abbey. For the past three years or so, ever since I moved to Carlow, I've been going past Jerpoint in buses and cars, but I'd never actually been inside. This morning I was in no hurry - as I said to Keith, as long as we were back in Carlow for Monday morning it didn't really matter :) Jerpoint is a lovely little spot, even if it is directly facing a main road. In common with so many Irish heritage sites it is now managed by Duchas (their site seems to be dead, but the Heritage Ireland one seems to hold most of the information), which is the Irish equivalent of the National Trust. While I may not like what they've done with some sites in the past, as I was very involved with the entire heritage / tourism industry in a previous life, I must admit that they've certainly come along way. Admission to the site costs a couple of euro, but it's money well spent. The monastery dates back to the 12th century and is quite well preserved in parts. What I really enjoyed, however, was chatting for a few minutes with the curator. She was so passionate about her job that it was truly refreshing. I spend an inordinate amount of time working and playing with technology that I found it incredibly invigorating to take a step back and explore part of our national heritage. As a nation we have some incredible treasures on our very doorstep, yet all too often we forget about them, as we're too wrapped up in our day to day lives.

Associate-o-matic 3.0.4 has been released on schedule. You can read the full release notes on their site There are hints of some very funky new features in the release notes with the developers teasing us with the promise of documentation. I hate teases :)

Jimmy manages to get the oddest links. He sent this to me this morning:

The next time you find yourself on public transport or an aircraft, sitting next to someone who cannot resist chattering to you endlessly, I urge you to quietly pull your laptop out of your rucksack, carefully open the screen (ensuring the irritating person next to you can see it), and hit this link.

I'll be heading down to Waterford early on Saturday morning. My only issue will be finding the actual venue, as I'm not that familiar with Waterford. Elly pointed me in the right direction for hotels, so at least I've got that bit sorted out. It should be an interesting day and hopefully a fun night :)

In my day job (honestly I do have one!) I run one of the largest registrars / resellers of IE domains (the IE ccTLD is the domain name for Ireland). In the course of doing that I have spent quite a lot of time becoming accustomed to the rules and regulations that govern both the naming and general registration criteria of IE domains. In some cases I can understand why rules are the way they are, whereas in others I am completely baffled. I've written about matters affecting the various stakeholders in the IE namespace on several occassions in the past, but I don't feel that I have really tackled the personal domain issue in quite some time. Over a year ago I wrote a short "howto" on registering IE domains as an individual. While that article was not exhaustive it did attempt to cover some of the more salient points. Several months previously I had broached the subject of the personal IE domains. At the time I was focussed more on a separate 2nd level domain for this purpose, similar to the way New Zealand has geek.nz or the UK has me.uk. When I revisit the topic 18 months later my views have changed a small bit, but not that much. I still think that there should be a couple of second level domains available within the IE namespace. Why? Well, to put it simply, if there were a couple of separate "spaces" then the perception of "privilege" could be diluted without damaging the namespace's main root. If we work on the premise that a managed registry has several advantages for stakeholders (namely IE registrants and those of us involved in the industry) then being able to cater for the growing demand for personal, or vanity, domain names could be catered for without there being any conflict. The concept of the managed registry becomes increasingly important when you take into consideration the upsurge in online fraud and phishing which has become a serious headache over the last couple of years. By validating each and every application for a .ie domain, be that at the registrar/reseller level or within the registry itself stakeholders and the public at large can be afforded a higher level of security. Putting it more colloquially, an e-commerce site that trades using a .ie should be able to give you the "warm fuzzies", as you, the consumer, will have some assurances that the domain belongs to a real person or business. With .com it is possible to register thousands of domains while providing completely bogus registrant information. While the IEDR whois output can be problematic at times (it causes confusion for novices) they have made several improvements over the last couple of years, including the addition of a domain status field, which can show you at a glance whether a domain is "active" or "suspended". The "locked" status is a messy one, and is beyond the scope of this piece. Under the current rules only a select group of people may register their own name. If you are a published author, politician, public figure or sole trader (trading as yourself) you may be able to register yourfullname.ie However, if you are "Joe Public" or, as is increasingly the case, "Joe Blogger", you cannot normally register your name unless you play with the rules. Once people start playing with the rules a domain name space may run into issues and its perceived value could be reduced significantly in the eyes of both the general public and stakeholders (there's enough material on that kind of carry on for several articles!). If, on the other hand, a special space, such as me.ie were created with much looser rules it could help solve a lot of issues. When I last mentioned the subject I had a shortlist of pre-requisites that I felt needed to be addressed for a move of this kind to be viable:

• Automation
• Separation
• Price

Let's look at each one in turn: Automation In the latter half of 2006 the IEDR technical team led by Billy Glynn and working hand in hand with the staff of resellers implemented an API. It is now possible to send registration requests directly to the IEDR using an approved API. As the larger resellers adopt the new API they should see a reduction in their manual workload in processing IE registration requests in general. It also means that if you have done your coding in a sane and functional manner extending your implementation of the API to include a new second level domain would not involve excessive development time or costs. Separation By keeping the personal space (or any others that are created) separate from the top level it should be relatively easy to build up a public perception of the overall namespace's value and relevance. Afnic, for example, went to great lengths to encourage the wider adoption of .fr domains by private citizens last year. While their experience was not without its hiccups they managed to increase overall registration figures dramatically and with it the public's interest in the domain. (We are AFNIC members) Price While I don't like "race to the bottom" style pricing automated registrations would mean little or no manual intervention, so the costs to both the registry and the reseller/registrar should be minimal. If that was the case then the saving should be passed on directly to the public without any pre-conditions. This strategy would also allow companies that like to target a "premium" market to maintain their higher prices for the "higher value" product, namely the .ie at root level. It is my opinion that the combination of these three elements could lead to a veritable explosion of IE registrations if handled correctly. I may, of course, be completely mistaken, but I'd love to see the IEDR "give it a go", as I for one would give it my full support. NB: As usual these opinions are my own and may not represent those of Blacknight, though they probably do :)

And for once they're not mine :) Paul has finally got round to enabling comments on his blog - the aptly named weird.ie. Niall didn't jump on the bandwagon - he climbed onto it slowly - anti-blog style, so it's only a matter of time before we'll have the rest of the Blacknight staff blogging :) I've no idea what he'll blog about, so it'll be interesting to see

Niche search is a fascinating area. A lot of people seem to think that Google IS the answer to all your searching needs, whereas I would tend to think that it is just part of the answer. GoogleBot (or Slurp) cannot always tell the difference between a keyword rich splog and a keyword rich website. It's for this reason that I believe human edited directories still play an important role. If you went looking on Google for a directory of recycling companies in Ireland you might not have found anything, whereas a search on search.ie would have led to success. Not that I'm biased :) So what's with this Swicki thing? I'm still not 100% sure how well this service works, but I really like the concept, as it's pretty much idiot proof. You setup the swiki with some basic information and a few keywords / phrases and tell it where it should go to find the results. If you restrict it to your own site, like I've done in my sidebar, it will be ready to use within seconds. As people use your mini-search engine it's designed to learn and you can control which sites / URLs are given a higher priority listing. I've put another one on the James Bond site if you want to see a slightly different use. An interesting aspect of the search results pages is that they are setup as adsense revenue share, but you can choose from several other common monetisation solutions including Chitika. Play with it a bit - it's actually quite good fun :)

I wasn't aware that an icon for OPML exists, but it does. There's an interesting post over at Thomas McMahon's blog which discusses the current version of the icon and possible trademark issues it may face. In case you're wondering what the icon looks like here are a couple for you: You can download a variety of different sizes and formats (I opted for PNG) on the official site.