Techie :: Techno ::: November 2005 Archives

In case you aren't familiar with it SourceForge is probably the most important online portal for open source software on the 'net.

I was chatting to a couple of people earlier today about the entire "online Christmas" thing. I know that some people will go to great lengths to "spruce up" their sites and blogs. If you are running wordpress you might find some of these themes useful. Via

What does the future hold for the IE namespace, the IEDR and their clients?

To link, or not to link, that is the question. Hyperlinks are one of the most important elements of a website. They help you move from page to page and from site to site.

Who actually controls the internet? Karl Auerbach's latest post may upset some people, but it does point out some very important facts ICANN would have us believe that the 'net is not controlled by the US, but is that really true? Look what happened with .xxx

I made a minor change to the "planet" earlier this morning

Do you actually own your domain name?

I just viewed this blog in Internet Explorer 6 and noticed that the CSS in the template is making a lovely mess of the display. If one of you CSS gurus could suggest a fix I'd really appreciate it :)

E-commerce webmasters need to have basic knowledge about security.

One of the most common issues faced by server admins is spam. If you are not concerned about protecting your users from receiving it, you are probably worried about your users sending it (intentionally or otherwise).

The Irish government will release the budget for the next 12 months shortly, so the journos are dedicating plenty of column inches to the preliminary figures.

A couple of days ago I posted about our experiences with Irish Broadband.

The online directory, goldenpages.ie, has been given a facelift

I've mentioned by intense dislike of reciprocal link spammers in the past.

I'd heard a lot of people complaining about IBB's services

Blog aggregators make keeping up with the latest posts a lot easier

Sometimes search engines cause confusion

I've always like vBulletin.

I mentioned the conversion from paid Urchin to free Google analytics yesterday.

Someone posted a link to the latest pro-Firefox site - Kill Bill's Browser on CLUG It's insincere, anti-Microsoft and very amusing.

I made a couple of minor changes to IrishBlogs earlier this week, but forgot to mention them.

I had heard about banner blindness and I probably "suffer" from it to a certain degree, however I had never really spoken to anyone about it until the other day.

The much awaited .eu will be launching very soon with Sunrise 1 taking place during the month of December. In common with the launch of other TLDs, the launch of .eu is being done in phases:

• Sunrise 1 - trademark holders
• Sunrise 2 - Prior rights - business names / company names etc
• Landrush - everything else

There is quite a bit of hype surrounding the entire thing, but there was plenty of hype with the .info launch also and that has proved to be a damp squid. If you are a trademark holder or wish to protect your brand's identity then the .eu launch is important. It's a lot cheaper to get your domain name now than have to litigate later, although Eurid have some procedures in place to help mitigate the possible problems with cybersquatting. Of course the big question is whether or not .eu will take off. I'm not 100% sure. It does open up certain channels that other TLDs do not offer - .eu is a regional TLD, which gives it a certain value that a gTLD or ccTLD currently does not offer. Will that work in the market? Will people react to it and understand what it represents? That is hard to say. Many small businesses still do not really understand the difference between a ccTLD and a gTLD. For many there can be only one domain extension - .com - everything else is just background noise. If you're involved in the domain / hosting business this kind of attitude is more than a little frustrating at times. It is perfectly understandable of course, but you'd really like to have clients who knew how important protecting their identity was, instead of coming to you later, when "their" name has been taken asking you how they can "fix" it. Enough of the day dreaming, however. In the Irish market there are two companies (or three if you ignore that one is simply a new face of an existing one) that are fully accredited Eurid registrars. Eurid had originally confused the market by stating that there could be no reselling of .eu domains, however this has since been clarified, so companies, such as mine, are now in a position to register .eu on behalf of our clientele. Oddly enough the pre-launch of .eu coincides with our signing of an agreement with Ascio to handle a very wide choice of ccTLDs, so not only are we taking orders for .eu, but also .se, .nl,.be etc. etc

I don't even own an iPod, but I still find the fascination and fixation that people have with them to be quite hard to avoid.

If you read my ramblings on a regular basis you may have noticed that spam filtering is an area that I take a particular interest in. Although I may dislike spammers I hold certain anti-spam "solutions" in equal disdain.

The Spanish domain registry opens up starting this morning:

The corporate public entity Red.es announces the gradual beginning of the registration operations of domain names under “.es”, according to the rules established by the New Plan of Domain Names under the country code corresponding to Spain “.es”, passed by the Order ITC/1542/2005 (Official Journal of May 31, 2005) for next November 8, at 7:00 according to the following calendar: * On November 8 it will be admitted applications of domain names under “.es” that begin with a number or any letter from “a” to “b” inclusively. * On November 9 it will be admitted applications of domain names under “.es” that begin with a number or any letter from “a” to “e” inclusively, since 7 A.M. of such day. * On November 10 it will be admitted applications of domain names under “.es” that begin with a number or any letter from “a” to “n” inclusively, since 7 A.M. of such day. * On November 11 it will be admitted any domain name under “.es” according to the National Plan of Domain Names since 7 A.M. of such day. * Any application that does not fulfil this planning will not be admitted to be processed. We also communicate that the Registry will be closed since 00:00 until 07:00 of November 8, with the purpose of doing the migration of the information services and doing the previous necessary actions for the opening of the Registry according to the new National Plan of Domain Names.

Taken from Esnic Under the new rules the .es namespace will be as open to the public as .it and other European ccTLDs.

The adult entertainment industry is always one of the first to pick up on new technologies.

The editorial to September's Computers in Business (the ICT supplement with the Sunday Business Post) was a disgrace, as I mentioned at the time.

The IEDR, as mentioned here in the past, has been making changes and improvements to their systems and services on an ongoing basis.