June 2007 Archives

The much vaunted, hyped, publicised, talked about (etc., etc., etc.,) Apple iPhone is now available in the US. Over the next few days you can expect to see more and more reviews, interviews, critiques, whines and blog posts (is there a difference?) about the latest "toy" that every self-respecting gadget freak wants. The Apple Store for the US is selling the devices, but there seems to be a two to four week backlog already! Will I want one? Probably. Will I get one? That depends. I'll wait a while to see how things pan out. It's not exactly clear when the iPhone will be made available in Ireland anyway, so there's no point getting excited about it just yet. Adrian's got a couple of more posts about the new toy that are a good read.

I'm off to Cork later today to attend Miss Ireland 2007 in the Silver Springs. Of course I left everything to the very last minute, so I still have to go and collect my tux this morning! At least the event isn't being held outside, as the weather today is pretty miserable

Over the last couple of days Google has launched a number of new enhancements for adsense publishers. The first change was a wider range of options for advert display. You can now choose from a number of advert box styles: When you go to choose your adsense format you will see the new options. Full details are on the Adsense blog The other change is much more important for European publishers. The product referrals have finally been expanded to include both Google Apps and Google checkout. For Irish publishers with a primarily local audience the checkout options won't be of much interest at the moment, but Google is meant to be expanding the product offering into the EU market this year. As someone involved in the hosting industry I have my reservations about Google Apps. As I mentioned previously, Google insist on ignoring industry best practice in their email implementation and this can have a very negative impact on users of their services. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to be blinded by Google's "wow" factor and haven't noticed the downsides yet. For those interested in the "nitty gritty" Google Apps will payout $5 for new accounts that remain active for 4 weeks, while Google Checkout pays out $1 for a new buyer making a purchase for a value in excess of $10. More information on the features on the official blog In related news, they've also expanded their not-for-profit advertising solution to encompass Irish charities, as Dave mentions.

Google desktop has now been made available for Linux You can peruse the documentation or download the files from the Linux version of the site. As should be expected there are both RPM versions (RedHat and derivatives) and .debs (for Ubuntu / Debian). I'm not sure how useful this would be, as the only time I need to conduct search is with email and thunderbird handles that really well (and quickly too!). Of course the problem with a Google bit of software on a machine running Linux could be the license. While the software may use some open source libraries it's not open source itself

MT 4 Beta 4 was released earlier this morning. The changelog hasn't been updated yet, but probably will be during the day.

Just a reminder to people that BarCamp Belfast is on this weekend. I'd love to be going, but I am meant to be down in Cork for another (non-technical) event We'll be there in spirit anyway :)

While I was trying to be clever and conform to the dotmobi rules it transpires I was also hurting my pagerank........... Richard provided links to the updates, so fixing it was quite easy. Simply overwrite the existing files in: /wp-content/plugins/wp-mobile-wurfl/data The ones you need to update are: wurfl.xml and web_browsers_patch.xml You can see what WURL is doing by running tail on wurfl.log I'm not sure what the best way of fixing the spidered pages issue is, but adding wp-mobile.php to robots.txt might be a good start, though I'm open to suggestions.......

Following on my little "adventure" I've been thinking about credit card options. From what I have been able to gather none of the "normal" credit cards come with any option for emergency replacements. American Express, however, does seem to offer this service:

We will issue a replacement Card usually within 24hours. If you are travelling abroad and wish to have a Card sent to you, we can arrange for a replacement Card to be waiting for you at the nearest American Express Travel Service Location or to be delivered to you in person

It's not clear how long it takes for the card to get to the local office, but issuing a new card within 24 hours is a lot better than anything my bank can offer with a standard Visa. Are there any other options out there?

The ICANN meeting in San Juan officially starts tomorrow, however there have been meetings this weekend and I'd also expect that a lot of people would have been arriving in the venue from Friday onwards. As I can't be in two places at once I won't be attending, though I'll be trying to follow it from a distance!

Yesterday morning I became yet another statistic. I was pick pocketed on the Paris Metro. My wallet, which contained my credit cards, Laser, cash and various other bits and pieces, was stolen. So I spent a good part of yesterday hanging around Parisian police stations. I was able to cancel all of my cards fairly quickly - hats off to the AIB call centre staff - they're very helpful and efficient. Hats off to the RATP (Parisian public transport) staff who were also incredibly helpful. Thankfully nearly my entire family are here in Paris with me this weekend, so I wasn't left completely cashless and without any way of paying hotel bills etc. The thing that bothers me, however, is the big "what if?". How the hell would you pay for your hotel bill etc., if your wallet was stolen in a foreign country. Years ago I would probably have been travelling with a bunch of traveller's cheques, so I would have left what I didn't need during the day in my hotel. These days we're all using the Euro and it's a plastic economy, so you carry your VISA and Laser / Cirrus with you everywhere. You're not likely to leave either card in your hotel room, are you?

Irishwhiskey.com has sold for $8k. I'm not sure if that price is high or low, as the "e" might cause issues for non-Irish users. In any case it was just one of the hundreds of domains to go under the hammer at the Moniker live auction in New York yesterday. Full results are here and here

If you want to do something dodgy online there are ways to do it without getting caught. Of course some people obviously think that they won't get caught and try some really dumb things. Damien got crap service from an Irish company recently and blogged about it. There are several ways that the company in question could react to this kind of situation, but obviously someone in there decided to take matters into their own hands. They seem to have signed Damien up for a load of gay dating sites - from their office IP which is clearly assigned to the company! Talk about dumb! Tip: If you have a fixed IP properly assigned to you or your employer acting the maggot online is a bad idea! The other little "gem" is the email I got this morning from yet another one of those companies that works really hard to get business. You know the type - they're in the same category as the vendors of herbal viagra and all those other gems. The email is a classic:

To whom it may concern, Have your WebSite Designed or Renovated.

Brilliant! So you don't know who you are addressing and you don't know how to punctuate either! But it gets better.. skip past all the badly worded marketing crap to the footer:

This email was sent according to the guidelines of the Data Protection Commissioner All recipients of this mail were compiled from online directories therefore given permission to be contacted by email.

That's brilliant! So not only are you spamming me, now you're trying to say that your spam is "ok", since our website is listed in online directories. Maybe aadwebdesign.com can hook up with whoever submitted Damien's email to the gay dating sites. I'm sure they'd have a lot in common!

I'm currently in Paris for my aunt's wedding, so i'm staying in a hotel in the 15th... Anyhow, the hotel offers Wifi via Orange.fr.. The only problem is that I can't find any information on their SMTP (if they even have one for wifi users). It's not the end of the world, as I can always use webmail to send if I need to, though I'm supposedly on holidays.. Now it's time to head off to get some food and maybe catch a film ....

Beta 3 of movable type 4 has been released. Download it from the official site. No changelog etc., yet, but it was only released an hour ago!

Films.ie finally went live this evening (thanks to James Larkin for the design work) The problem I am trying to find a solution to is the currency conversion. At the moment it is using a static value, so I have to manually change it, which is not exactly practical. Does anyone know of a service that allows you to get the value on a daily basis and write it to file?

I'm off to Paris in the morning for a week and am currently trying to get myself organised... Now where did I leave my passport?

I'm currently considering buying an Apple MacBook Pro 17". Why? My Dell laptop is functional, but it isn't that comfortable for watching DVDs etc., and I was really impressed by some of the stuff Donncha was doing on his last time I met him. I still thing they are seriously overpriced, but I have my eye on one of these: The problem is that the Apple webstore offers me very confusing options when I try to buy online (I'm still fantasy shopping, but you get the gist). Display (monitor) There's glossy vs. matt. According to the site:

Choose the glossy widescreen display to make your graphics, photos, and videos appear with richer colors and deeper blacks - great for watching DVD movies.

That sounds fine, but does that mean that DVDs will look awful on a matt display? It's not terribly clear. Apple Software Solutions It comes with OSX, but does that give you a fully functional laptop or do you need to get extras like iWork? Would a copy of Open Office do the trick? Airline Power Adapter Sounds like a nice idea, but which planes / airlines offer this kind of service? AppleCare Protection Plan (APP) This is where I got completely confused.

The AppleCare Protection Plan extends your computer's 90 days of complimentary support and one-year warranty to up to three years of world-class support.

Do I need this? Is it really necessary? Are Macs more likely than PCs to explode? At EUR449 ex-VAT it strikes me as really expensive.

I've just posted a very brief overview of DNZoom on my domain blog.

I've been a fan of Amazon's marketplace service for quite some time. It seems that Play.com have now followed suit and introduced their own version of it. The system is pretty cool and easy to use, though it is firmly aimed at the UK market, which is a pity. You simply choose to sell an item and then are guided through their catalogue to choose the corresponding item. You can search using ISBN, barcode or simply the item name. If you are based in the UK a listing is easy to create, but if you're in Ireland you are going to have slightly more difficulty as you will have to allow for the postage costs to all EU states. All in all though it's a really nice idea. You can see it in action here

I don't like buzzwords. In fact I'd almost go so far as to say that I loathe them. Of course I do use them - it's really hard not to. For the last 7 years or so I've been subscribed to Jakob Nielsen's newsletter. I missed a few issues over the years due to moving emails around (I have a tendency of doing that!), but I've always found his reports to be thought provoking. We're currently working on a couple of things to improve the company website and other public interfaces ie. control panels, order forms etc., As a result of this work one of the things that I have been thinking a lot about is usability. While it maybe a nice idea to have an accessible and usable website my motivations are much simpler. If we can make things more usable, then it will be easier for people to buy stuff, so we should, hopefully, get an increase in sales. Even if we don't get a direct increase in sales our costs should be lower. Why? The following example illustrates what I mean. Up until about 2 months ago we used to get a lot of phonecalls from people who wanted to pay for their hosting / domain renewals online. We've been offering the facility to do this for ages, so I was a bit confused as to the volume of phonecalls. Eventually the proverbial penny dropped: The link for credit card and Laser payments was simply too subtle for people to notice it. We knew where it was, but our poor clients didn't. Solving the problem was very easy - I just got our designer to do up a couple of obvious buttons and we integrated them into the billing system. The number of calls dropped dramatically! The addition of a simple graphic made it all that much easier for people to do things. So I'm currently thinking about how we can combine usability with gorgeous design while also focussing on our site's key purpose - sales. If anyone has experience of usability testing and reports I'd love to hear from them. PS: I blame IQ Content's post about AIB's interface for this. It really got me thinking!

Being able to access blogs on a mobile device, such as a phone, may not be that important to everyone, but I know there are a certain number of people who read this site while on the move. As I own both mneylon.mobi and micheleneylon.mobi I've repointed them directly here and am using the dotmobi WURFL plugin to handle it all. I know that some of the images I post won't fit neatly onto people's handhelds, but the text should be legible. Now to find a similar solution for Movable Type!

According to an article published on Out-law.com, online shoppers are willing to pay more if they feel their privacy is being respected. I wonder has anyone mentioned this to Irish website owners? While editing search.ie and armchair.ie I've had to visit thousands of Irish websites. The number of them that either don't have privacy policies or have incredibly vague and incomplete ones is worrying. Of course, if you take into account the number of them that still haven't got any tangible contact details this probably isn't too surprising.

I was hoping that I'd be able to play with the new beta release last night, but it wasn't announced until the middle of the night. I'll see if I can install it this morning.. The announcement from Byrne Reese also includes links to the changelog and an updated list of known issues.

No sooner do I mention Safari on Windows and Niall goes off and finds someone's zero day exploit So basically it's insecure ...

Another beta release (beta 2) is scheduled for release either later today or tomorrow (the time differences confused me!). There's been quite a bit of activity on the various MovableType blogs and mailing lists, so I'd expect the next beta to resolve quite a few issues. I'll probably flatten the current install I have before trying it.

Cormac mentions that Safari beta 3 is available for download on OSX and Windows XP! I just grabbed a copy and have tried it out on a couple of sites. Its rendering engine is fast, but will it live up to the claims? According to Apple it:

loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

It also ships with Bonjour, which is an Apple networking tool. I'll have to try it out at work for a couple of days to see how well it handles 15 or more tabs simultaneously. If it can render pages faster that's one thing, but what's its memory footprint going to be like? The only way to really find out is to try it I guess

Two online services that are run by Irish operations have been nominated for awards recently. PollDaddy, which is run by Infacta has been nominated for the Webware 100. You can vote for it here. It's up against some stiff competition in that category, so best of luck to them! Aodhan Cullen, the man behind StatCounter, has been nominated for a BusinessWeek Young Entrepreneur Award. There's more info on their blog. On a sidenote, as Adam notes, the blog isn't written by Aodhan. What's that all about?

SPF has been around for a couple of years now and is included with all installs of Spam Assassin by default. So why is it that some hosting companies can't understand how it works or how email filtering works? It's not rocket science. SPF, which I've mentioned here several times in the past, allows a domain owner to specify which mail hosts can send mail from the domain. It's of particular relevance if you are likely to be spoofed, so it's hardly surprising that financial institutions are using SPF records. What is surprising is that some Irish hosting companies obviously do not know how to configure their mail so that SPF actually works. One client contacted our technical support team this morning as their mails weren't reaching their destination. Why? It seems that for some reason the hosting company in question's mail servers were changing the headers of the mails, so the source IP was being set to be the email filter and not the actual source itself. End result being that the mails couldn't get through Brilliant!

There's nothing wrong with the odd award nomination, is there? This blog has been nominated for several in the past, though I am yet to win any! *sniff* The latest round of nominations is from the "Blogger Choice Awards". A couple of other Irish blogs are up there (including Twenty Major). Anyhow if you are that way inclined feel free to vote! (I think the company's doing a hell of a lot better in this yoke!)

I've been testing the beta version of Movable Type 4 today and I must say I am really impressed. Yes it is beta. Yes there are bugs, but it's beta software. What do you expect? The development team will fix the bugs and release a very tasty piece of software once they are happy with it. So what's it like? One of the things about MovableType that always annoyed me to a degree was the install process. If you are confident with Perl, paths, chmod etc., then installation isn't that hard, but I always felt that it alienated a lot of users. (This is probably where Wordpress picked up a lot of its user base). The new installer is a hell of a lot more intuitive. Once you've uploaded the files into the correct locations you can go to the blog URL (mt.cgi) and the installer starts. After answering a few simple questions it should send a test email and your blog is pretty much up and running. Okay, admittedly there is a bit of tweaking of permissions that you need to do before the install works as described, but they're not real "show stoppers" and the beta testers are reporting issues as they find them. As Movable Type is a multi-blog and multi-user environment you can manage multiple blogs from the same backend easily. This is a feature that has been around for ages and is one of the reasons I will probably move a lot of my blogs over to the platform once it comes out of beta. Once you login for the first time you should configure the various settings. Settings and configuration options work on two levels:

• System wide
• Blog specific

This can be a small bit confusing if you aren't used to the concept, but the navigation menu makes it quite easy to navigate around. The initial login / welcome screen gives you a summary of the recent activity: As the default user is also the system admin, you can tweak settings at both a system and blog level from the dropdown menus: For the entire system using the upper menu: For the blog you are working on with the central one: Template configuration options have definitely improved, or at least they seem to be that bit more accessible. Other little options that caught my attention were things like the trackback settings. You can easily disable the "nofollow" attribute with one click (it's on by default). Comment spam is always a touchy subject and one of the things that MT has always been pretty good at was offering various levels of authentication for commenters. The new version takes this a step further: The "native" method uses a standard image based captcha, which isn't particularly user-friendly. I'd be a lot happier with more options for this one eg. text based They've also added support for OpenId which seems to be gaining in popularity. Of course once you've setup your blogging software to "play nice" you want to actually use it to produce content. The main login screen (see screenshot above) has a nice big friendly "write entry" button that you can't miss. The software seems to be all about customisation and ease of use, so you can choose which elements to display in the composition window. The current version doesn't seem to have sane defaults, but that will hopefully be remedied in a later version. The rich text editor is really nice (unlike Wordpress'!) and handles most tasks admirably. The one task that I couldn't get working was the image insert and upload feature, so I filed a bug report. Similar to Wordpress there is an auto-save feature for draft posts, though the current version seems to only store one entry and doesn't mark it as a "draft". One of the main differences between WP and MT is the way that entries are stored, which has a direct impact on performance. Regardless of what any of the WP developers may claim Wordpress can be a resource hog in its default configuration, as each and every page view requires the database to be queried multiple times. With Movable Type, however, all the entries are stored on disk as actual files. The only downside to this is that if you make any significant changes to your templates you have to wait while the system rebuilds all the files out to disk. In the new version the publishing options haven't changed from before, though longer file names seem to be possible (I could be wrong). The one niggly annoyance is that you can't specify the build format easily ie. choosing between hyphens and underscores in the output files. It defaults to using underscores. However other aspects of the templating system make it a lot more seo-friendly out of the box. If you want to remove the blog name from the individual entries you simply edit one portion of a template, as it's already contained in a nice little "if" statement. The other nifty thing is that you can easily add other RSS feeds into your template (it took me about 30 seconds to add one) using either the URL to the feed or simple auto-discovery which is really cool. Overall I'm quite impressed and will be very interested to see how things pan out. A very boring test install of MT4 Beta 1 is over on mneylon.kz if anyone wants to look at it

When I first started blogging my poison of choice was Movable Type (I still use it on some of my blogs). For a number of reasons I moved over to WP, but I've always kept an eye on the Movable Type community. SixApart have been very busy over the last year, with upgrades to their various products and services and the release of Vox. They've just made two very interesting announcements. First off Movable Type 4 is in beta and promises a lot of new features including support for OpenID, standalone pages, aggregation and an improved editor. Full details of the new features can be found on their site. I hope to get a chance to play with it later this week after which I'll be able to provide a more comprehensive review. The other announcement is that they've launched an Open Source project. From what I can see they've taken a leaf out of RedHat's book and intend to use the Open Source project to drive their licensed version, much akin to the relationship between Fedora and RHE.

I've mentioned the topic of personal IE domains on here more than once in the past and in my conversations with the IE Domain Registry. Just to recap; Under the current rules you cannot register johndoe.ie if your name is John Doe. You would have to add a number to the name, thus rendering it totally useless eg. johndoe7.ie or something of that style. There are other ways to circumvent the rules which have allowed people to register a wide variety of domains for themselves, but the basic issue has always lain with the registration of domains such as:

• johnmurphy.ie
• jmurphy.ie

Since the IEDR's CEO, David Curtin, has "let the cat out of the bag" in his recent interview with the Irish Times' John Collins I've no reason not to :) At the end of last month the IE Domain Registry contacted all of its accredited resellers (registrars) looking for feedback on proposed changes to the way "personal" IE domains are handled. The registry proposed a relaxation of the policy to allow:

personal domain names which correspond to the individual's name

Of course you will have to prove your claim to the domain name by producing some form of official documentation, such as driver's license, passport etc., The format of allowed names would include:

• Johnsmith.ie
• Johnpaulsmith.ie
• John-smith.ie
• John-paul-smith.ie
• jsmith.ie
• Jpsmith.ie
• J-smith.ie
• J-p-smith.ie

which covers most of the imaginable formats that people might ask for. While the new rules will be applicable to Irish citizens applying for IE domains it still isn't 100% clear how the registry intends to handle non-Irish nationals and this category of domain registration, so the final decision is yet to be made. It is possible that the rules may be broadened after an initial period eg. 6 or 12 months. As things stand it looks likely that the proposed change will come into effect in July or August of this year. Unfortunately there will be no sunrise period, so it will be very much a case of "first come, first served".

Krystian mentions that the Polish government wants to ban the Teletubbies as they "promote homosexuality". I thought they just rotted your brain, but what do I know .... The story's been picked up in a lot of the mainstream media as well with the BBC's story summing it up concisely

ENN has been around for years. So has its current design (or at least I get that feeling) I don't have any issues with the current design, though I don't get exactly excited about it either. They're currently preparing to unveil a new design, but have made the new design available for everyone to see in advance. That's a brave move to make! In any case the new design is very different from the current site. In some ways that is a very good thing, however it's not in others. Let's examine it a bit more closely. Basic Accessibility Both the current and new versions of the site are usable using a text-based browser (lynx). The new one is slightly easier to get around, however. HTML Validation The old version does not validate and neither does the new version. The old version of the site made full use of the screen real estate, but the new one has loads of white space around it. On a lower screen resolution it probably looks ok, but on my monitor it just looks plain silly There are also some really odd design decisions that break usability. The story titles are bolded, but they're not hyperlinked (even SiliconRepublic managed to get that right!), so you have to click on the "more" link to actually get to the story. In common with so many sites these days, they've added "web 2.0" elements so that you can "digg" stories directly from the page and they've also given their RSS feeds greater prominence. From an SEO perspective, however, they've really missed the point and seem to have regressed. All the news stories have the same page title! I won't even start on the filenames! It's a shame that they didn't address some of those issues, but maybe they will before the site actually goes live.

If you are an Adsense publisher you've probably seen the very "helpful" optimization tips in your control panel over the last couple of months. I posted about them a while back, but a thread over on Digital Point got me thinking. What if the poster's theory were correct? According to the poster:

Once I removed the sites from the bad filters list, income increased 25%

Of course there's no indication of the figures involved, so whether it made a difference of 10 or 20 dollars a month or 200 is hard to say. As an experiment I've decided to remove the filters on one of my accounts for a few days to see does it make any obvious difference. As it's a long weekend here in Ireland I wouldn't expect there to be much difference until Tuesday at the earliest (earnings tend to be lower at weekends and long weekends as people aren't as tied to their PCs)

Eric, author of Uncommon Adsense (aff), has been working on a suite of PHP based scripts to ease the integration of Adsense ads into PHP based sites. The first version he has made public is completely free of charge, though he is planning on releasing a more advanced version which will cost money. Full details and sample code can be found on the Adsense PHP site.

My recent issues with content theft have renewed my interest in copyright law. I was using the Creative Commons in the past, but removed it again - possibly when I was doing a cleanup. TJ McIntyre mentioned recently that there was work being done on the CC license within the context of Irish law. This could be very interesting for Irish bloggers, but will it make any difference to the indifference of some people? The current draft content may be found here