Techie :: Techno ::: April 2006 Archives

I was brought up in a household where newspapers were bought and read regularly. Nowadays I usually buy at least one Sunday newspaper, while I read a certain amount of news online. Whenever there is a big news story you can expect bloggers to reference "authorative" sources, such as newspapers, be they Irish or international. However the reverse is not true. Irish newspapers do not seem to care about the blogging community. Earlier today I came across a post on Frank Michlick's blog which referenced the Washington Post. The Washington Post, in turn, embeds a little box into the article: Not only do they track which blogs are talking about the article they also encourage you to bookmark it using delicio.us Now why can't Irish newspapers do the same thing? Considering that most of them sell advertising space on their sites, wouldn't it be a good thing if they were able to generate more traffic?

The ICT Expo is on next Thursday and Friday in the RDS. I'll be there on the Friday for most of the day, as I am giving a talk in the afternoon on Open Source software in the enterprise. If you're going to be around during the day let me know :)

I just installed one of the nightly builds on a new blog and it all works perfectly. No issues with permalinks. No weirdness with templates (at least not with the ones I've tried so far). No strange things with posts. The new features that will be included in the upcoming release are not going to be groundbreaking, but they will improve some areas. I haven't been keeping up with the wp-testers list, but from some basic initial testing it looks like they've sped up quite a bit of the code, so the page I am currently viewing (for editing a new post) should render in about half the time.

IEDR unlike Nominet does not have a democratic structure, nor does it have committees or other organisms to oversee rules, regulations and many other aspects of the registry's development. Who is even on the board of the IEDR? Who chooses the board members? While personally I think this should all be addressed I have to admit that some areas of the registry's activities are cause for more concern than others. While the rules and regulations have developed over time they are still sorely inadequate for the Ireland we now live in. As things stand the IEDR is lumbered with a number of rules that while aimed at protecting the national domain name space are actually doing more to hinder its development. A case in point is the personal name rule. While there are ways and means to circumvent this restriction the question begging to be asked is why the restriction exists in the first place. The other one that springs to mind is that of "indecent" or "offensive" domains. On the plus side IEDR management can smirk (or possibly gloat) at the chaos in Eurid.

Prior to the Blog Awards I took delivery of an iPod Nano to give to the winner. At the time I was sorely tempted to get a nano for myself, but I resisted.. at least for a while Anyhow my personal iPod Nano arrived on Friday afternoon. It was shipped from Hong Kong, as I had it etched with the Blacknight Logo. It looks kind of like this: Unfortunately I couldn't get the text bit onto it, so it's just the logo at the top, but even so it looks very cool. Under Windows there is iTunes to manage your playlists and send files across to it, while on Linux I've been experimenting with gtkpod, which seems to be more functional than iTunes. The next question, of course, is whether I want to put linux on it or not...

One of the few things that Eurid seem to have done properly is providing a DAS server to supplement whois lookups. While a whois query on a .eu domain will return none too verbose results the das query is simplistic:

whois -h das.eu:4343 get 1.0 mneylon % .eu Domain Availability Server 1.0 % % (c) 2005 (http://www.eurid.eu) % %% RC = 0 Domain: mneylon Status: REGISTERED

No extra legal junk or dns etc., Simple results.

The Ubuntu project's upcoming release - the dapper drake - is now in beta. Over the last couple of days the various project teams have released beta versions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu etc., so the clock is now ticking until final release. The graphics are taking shape and there are probably lots of tweaks and changes under the hood. I am now seriously considering a fresh install on this desktop pc, as there seems to be a lot of junk leftover from old installs, tests and accumulated junk.

Jason mentioned text links ads recently, so I thought I'd signup to see what all the fuss was about. What caught my attention was that not only do they offer both publishers and advertisers a wealth of options they also offer some very slick integration techniques for a wide variety of website platforms. If you are running Wordpress, for example, you can integrate the ads using an actual Wordpress plugin, so instead of messing about with code all you need to do is add a new template tag. If you want to put the ads on a vBulletin site they offer plugins for that software also. The CMS/software supported at present is:

• Wordpress
• Drupal
• vBulletin
• Movable Type
• PostNuke

while they also offer a range of integration options for server-side languages such as Perl, Asp, PHP and Cold Fusion. The only thing that seems to be missing is vanilla HTML. However, if you investigate their publishing system it becomes clear why they rely to heavily on server-side scripts. The entire system runs off XML, so it needs some form of server-side magic to make it all happen. I'll be experimenting with the system over the next few days / weeks to see how well it works. The only downside I see at present is that the number of Irish publishers is quite low, so from an advertiser's perspective this may not be overly attractive as yet. However, I'm sure that the numbers will increase over time if the platform takes off. If you are an existing adsense publisher there's no reason why you could not use text link ads alongside your existing adsense blocks, as the ads are not contextual.

Google's website builder - Google Page Creator - is accepting signups again, as long as you have a gmail account. The user interface is simple and quite intuitive, though it is obviously limited in its functionality. Some of the AJAX tricks they've used to make it all work are pretty nifty and really fast! Unlike some of the other site builders I've tried over the last couple of years, this one works perfectly in Firefox, so I presume it will work equally as well in Internet Explorer. If the CSS hacks in the stylesheet are anything to go by it is probably as cross-browser as possible. I put a couple of pages online very quickly just to test it (don't expect a work of art - you'll be sorely disappointed!) While you can customise the first part of the page title you seem to be stuck with a default string for the second part. The title tag contains: The bolded section is the part that you are currently able to customise. Other shortcomings I found in my quick experiment:

• Navigation - if this is aimed at novices helping them to give meaningful navigation to their "sites" is a must
• Repeat Elements - Footers on most websites are uniform throughout the site. This new "toy" doesn't allow for this.

Of course the obvious question has to be asked... Who exactly is this aimed at and what is the business model? If it is aimed at non-technical people then it is moving in the right direction, but it still has quite a bit to go.... Or is Google trying to move into the hosting space? Would this explain its ICANN accreditation ? Will we soon see Google Hosting competing against Yahoo! et al?

If you want to sell to me you need to market to me effectively. Sending me and most of my staff an email without a subject line but with a 3 megabyte attachment is not the way to do this. So shredit.ie / dmg-services.com welcome to my killfile

The Data Retention Directive has been published in the Official Journal. (You can download a copy of the directive here in PDF format.) This means that "the clock" has started ticking .... Over the next few months ISPs and other vested interests will be doing their utmost to make sense of the text and see what impact it will have on their business What bothers me about all this is that there are a large number of Irish hosting "companies" who seem to think that this kind of legislation does not apply to them as they do not either own hardware or manage their network - preferring instead to use cheap servers based in the US. Sorry boys - but the minister will probably be contacting you all about this too.

The IIA in association with Engineers Ireland is organising a half-day seminar on blogging, podcasting and all that funky stuff... Brian Greene is currently talking about the finer points of podcasting... How to do it and what it is.

Since I upgraded php to php5 the other day I've been having some very interesting issues with Wordpress themes. Basically the only theme that will display correctly is k2. The others all give a blank screen and don't throw any errors in my logs. Is there something in k2 that the other themes don't have or vice-versa that makes it compatible with php5? I'll be doing some more investigation, but if anyone has any insights I'd really love to hear them, as this issue is really annoying! EDIT: I finally found the culprit! A plugin I was using to rewrite the post titles was causing issues, so it's now disabled

I'm now using php5 (apt forced me to). It seems that my choice of template was causing issues, so I've moved to a new template until I can work this out.