General: June 2005 Archives

Every day I read marketing material from other companies. What never ceases to amaze me is the total lack of content in some of their blurbs. Regardless of what they are trying to sell you, whether it is a service or a tangible product they seem to think that "more is better", ie. if you can say it 10 words then it will probably sound even better in 30 words or more. Shove in a few superlatives for good measure, regardless of whether they actually enrich the content or not. I touched on this "marketing madness" a few months ago. This evening I was reading over a preview of a new site. It was a really frustrating experience for me as I was familiar with their services and would have no qualms about recommending them to people. However if the new site's content had been the deciding factor in choosing them for our own business then we would never have bought anything from them. The other thing that is causing me much amusement at present is some of the IT press releases. I know that we all need to issue press statements and that at times they may not be the most newsworthy, but some of the recent ones I've read have been real gems. One company contradicts their own website in a press release - nothing like consistency, while others manage to spin the most insignificant of events to new levels. I suppose I should congratulate them on one level, but I can't help laughing at the same time. Ah well. It's only business :)

This seems to be the week for tweaking my blog :) Two new plugins I found whilst browsing have now been installed. One of them is only viewable by the site admin (me) and changes the admin interface entirely. WP Tiger only works with CSS2 capable browsers and downgrades automatically for CSS challenged browsers such as IE 6. The other one is for the actual RSS feeds. Feedburner can do all sorts of interesting things with a blog feed, so integrating it smoothly with wordpress was something I wanted to do. Fortunately there is a nice little plugin that does just that. The only thing on my end that needed changing was my .htaccess Judging by the issues I had been having I think my .htaccess was in serious need of an update :) Wordpress was able to regenerate it correctly within a couple of seconds, so now all my plugins work properly AND I've fixed the annoying issue with the older posts vanishing into the ether Yay!

Google has finally launched site targetting for adwords. In order to enable the site targetting option you need to go into your account settings after logging in and toggle the option. You then have the option of choosing between normal ads and targetted ones when you create a campaign. Unlike with the normal ads you then have to specify a CPM rate. So how do you choose sites? You have two options. You can either specify specific sites that you know are in the network or use keywords and then choose from the sites available that Google considers to be relevant.

We finally moved into our new offices yesterday afternoon. Moving is always traumatic :) I expect we'll bring order to the chaos at some stage over the next couple of days, but I'm not going to hold my breath. On the plus side my new desk is bigger and more comfortable. The telephone system is great, though I still haven't worked out how to use it properly - need to spend some quality time with the manual to rectify that I guess.. ... Now the fun bit ... redoing headed paper, compliment slips, business cards etc... Oh what fun!

The Irish language is to become the 21st official language of the EU in 2007. Good news for some, but probably not for all. Who gains? I suppose the usual suspects, Irish language activists, translators and minority language enthusiasts. Who looses? Not sure yet, but I'm not 100% sure about this...

Typo3 is an advanced CMS system based on Php and MySQL. I decided to give typo3 a go for a new site I'm messing about with in my free time. I needed something that could manage the content easily without looking like phpnuke with its ugly urls and box-like layout, so typo was the obvious choice. The powerful options available in terms of content management are worth the effort, but you have to be prepared for its learning curve. It's not simply a matter of grabbing the files, uploading them and publishing. The initial setup and configuration via the install tool takes a good half hour to complete, as you have to edit a wide range of options and paths before you can begin using it. Unlike some open source projects typo doesn't come with a lot of documentation - at least not in English, so using an example site as a starting point can make things marginally easier. Tom from 2BScene uses it widely and our current site uses it as the backend, so I've been picking his brain over the last few days. There are a wide range of extensions available via the online repository, so spending a bit of time exploring the options can pay dividends.

I've been trying it out for the last few days and I'm not terribly impressed either with the search results or the number of clicks :( edit: I've reverted to the default search function from wordpress

Sitevista is currently beta testing and I was lucky enough to get an invite. You can test your site against a wide range of browsers, resolutions and colour depths. Very handy! More information here

I would have thought that accessibility would have been a primary concern of any sites run by Government departments, however the CRO's "security" feature on the company search form seems to make a complete mockery of that. I am a normal sighted person. I do wear glasses, but I am far from blind. However, I have serious issues making out what the security code is on the CRO site at times. How would someone with bad eyesight or a serious ailment handle it? It would be interesting to see how many high profile sites are actually accessible. I'm not saying that all sites have to comply fully with the w3c accessibility guidelines, but some sites are even impossible to navigate using a normal browser as their authors seem to think that only Windows and IE5+ exist (ie. ActiveX junk) Related stuff: http://eaccess.rince.ie/talks/2003/braillenet-29-Apr-2003/ http://eaccess.rince.ie/white-papers/2002/warp-2002-00/

Well all the waiting is over. The latest stable version of Debian, codenamed Sarge, has finally been released: http://ftp.debian.org/dists/stable/Release - read the version info at the top of the file (nicely spotted davew) There's a couple of mentions over on Planet Debian, but nothing major. I updated my apt sources last week in preparation for the final release, so that's this server sorted (I guess) Update: the official release announcement has been posted

Today I discovered that Comodo had launched a "wonderful" new anti-spam product. It's great! It will stop all spam effectively. It will also stop any effective communication via email in the process, but surely that is a small price to pay for keeping your inbox clean? I think not. I tried to send a business email to them today but got this really "helpful" message back from them: Hi, this is XXXX. Your recent email has been delivered to my computer, but because you're not yet in my trusted senders list, it hasn't been placed in my inbox. To get added to my trusted senders list, please reply to this message with my AntiSpam passcode. Here's all you have to do: 1. Press Reply 2. In the body of the reply, type in my AntiSpam Passcode: 3. Press Send. When I receive this reply, I will know that it was really you that sent me the email and not a computerized spammer. I will then be able to read all your mail. This authentication will be done only once. Thank you & have a great day, XXXX Easy? Let's have a look at what I got in my inbox: Note the total lack of an image or code of any kind. What does this mean? Well, basically it means that the idiot is "protecting" his inbox with a defective tool. I don't care if it's a transient bug in their software or whether pigs fly. Due to their stupidity my email has not reached the intended recipient, so if I was trying to place an order ie. spend money with them, then they have lost the transaction. Brilliant, isn't it? I've never been in favour of CR (challenge response) as a method to "fight" spam, as it breaks the entire communication stream. There are plenty of ways that you can block spam and still maintain your business relationships safely. The Comodo method is obviously not one of them. I would love to know what they were thinking when they decided to "protect" their inboxes using it. Maybe they'll learn or maybe they'll lose business as a result of their stupidity.