Techie :: Techno ::: November 2006 Archives

Tony Kenny from Beaumont Hospital has been giving an excellent talk on using open source software. What makes his talk so interesting is that he is completely pragmatic. Unlike some of the open source zealots, Tony is able to see how you can combine proprietary AND open source solutions in a real world situation. Fascinating stuff!

I am currently trying to download a site backup for a client that is moving from one of our cheap competitors who basically resells some American hosts servers. God it is painful! I'm getting less than 30k / sec when I should be getting at least ten times that!!! If I had to deal with that kind of connection to this server, or any of the other ones that I deal with on a regular basis, I'd never get anything done and would end up incredibly frustrated. Ping speed from my desktop to this server: Ping statistics for 81.17.240.197: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 16ms, Maximum = 18ms, Average = 16ms Ping to cheap US based host: Ping statistics for xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 146ms, Maximum = 172ms, Average = 159ms Talk about bad connectivity!!! So you really do get what you pay for .. or do you? For €30 ex-VAT you can get an Irish based hosting account with plenty of disk space and bandwidth. The key factor being that it's a service that will work and won't have a bad ping ie. there's no latency On the other hand you could opt to go with a cheap provider and not only pay more but actually get less. There's no point in having loads of disk space and bandwidth if the connection is so bad that you can barely make use of it!!!

Thought I'd crosspost this as some of you are clients of ours but may not read our blog normally. We've just upped the bandwidth limits on all our shared hosting plans (all existing clients have had theirs increased) For full details read our blog

Webhost Automation have released Helm 4 but it's premature. It's simply not ready for release. Who in their right mind releases a hosting control panel that doesn't support MySQL? What sane person would leave out modules that are so popular such as Awstats? Want the answer? Simply click here They seem to be going down the route that other software vendors have taken of late, namely: - Announce major update - Hype major update - Change licensing - Launch half-finished product - Omit previously included modules - Promise to include omissions when public get annoyed Their marketing blurb is laughable if you actually know what is going on, like their article on how windows is cheaper than linux (??) Don't get me wrong - the software is not bad, but what's bugging me is their harping on about how "wonderful" v4 is and then releasing it with basic functionality missing...

There's been quite a bit of chatter in the Irish blogosphere over the last couple of weeks in relation to web standards. Unfortunately not even Google seem to give a damn about standards compliance. The main page of Google.ie has 47 errors, including no DOCTYPE!

When you take your car into the garage you expect certain things. You do not need to explicitly ask for them, nor would you expect them to be actually verbalised. What would you expect? Well, naturally, you would expect your car to be serviced to an acceptable standard. If the tyres need to be pumped, for example, then you would expect them to be pumped to the pressure that suits your car's make and model. Of course the person conducting the work on your car is qualified. You don't even have to ask about that!! Or if you were getting your house renovated... Would you ask the plumber to do the wiring? In the internet industry things shouldn't be that different, though I sometimes feel like I am working in an industry peppered with snake oil salesmen. How many times have I seen amateur web "designers" offering "competitive" prices? What about the web companies that are supposedly experts in web design, graphic design, web development, marketing, hosting, seo and search engine marketing? And all this with a staff of two and for under €600 / year? Why am I suspicious? Am I naturally cynical? Possibly, but I've actually been around long enough to know what is and isn't possible. Remember that old adage? "Jack of all trades - master of none" While that maybe fine in some contexts would you really want to entrust your website to Jack? (Not that I have a thing against anyone called Jack..) If you put the costs of a website in tangible terms then you should be comparing it with other "real world" costs.. For example if you were to run a medium sized advert in the Sunday Business Post for one issue you would pay anything from €600 to €1200 depending on where it was placed and how big it was etc., If you are running print adverts with any degree of frequency then your marketing spend can spiral quickly. So what do you put on your ad? Your contact details are bound to feature. While an email address and phone number is perfectly acceptable a website might impress. Of course if the website was done on the cheap you might as well toss the money down the toilet. Another cliche for you - build it and they will come. In the online world that simply won't happen unless you have both a search engine strategy and possibly an online marketing one as well. Should you entrust that work to one of these polyvalent web professionals who supposedly is not only a competent designer, can debug your email problems AND can keep track of the latest trends and quirks in the SEO world? I'd recommend against it If you want a tasty design use a designer who can actually design. You don't see Coca Cola changing their logo every 6 months do you? Why would they? They got it designed properly in the first instance. If you are setting up a company or business of some kind then skimping on the design / identity could cost you a fortune in lost sales. Is it really worth it? Coming back to SEO.... If you invest properly in SEO and use an experienced professional with a proven track record ie. not a good salesman who can sell himself well even though he can't actually deliver, then every cent you spend will be a worthwhile investment. Sorry about the rant :)

The shortlist for this year's Golden Spiders was announced last Friday. As usual people are none too pleased with the list and I'd be a hypocrite not to agree with them. Why so much displeasure? Well you could look at the entry criteria...... Even though the awards are sponsored by large companies you still have to pay to nominate a site. Why do I get the feeling that a lot of quality sites don't even get entered???? OR you could look at the shortlist itself.... (which a lot of people have been doing) Either way the merit of the awards is not appreciated in many industry circles. Richard and Peter both commented on how most of the shortlisted sites do not pass the W3C validation test (which tests to see if a website's code is compliant with industry standards). The W3C validator does not care which version of (X)HTML a site is written in, as long as the site's code complies to the chosen standard. Richard has since taken his gripes to the next level by doing some further testing of the shortlist. The results make for interesting reading. Of course previous winners' sites aren't even viewable unless you use Internet Explorer....