Enterprise Ireland run a sometimes useful email forum which occasionally gets diverted into rather tedious debate that is better termed as squabbles between competitors.  The latest of these is on the merits of ‘push button’ websites – a rather twee term for systems like SitesToGo which enables rapid build of starter websites. But you need to watch these posts if you are involved in the industry – I had started deleting them unread until a couple of clients pointed out to me a post in the squabble asserting that Sites2Go used to do this sort of thing but seemed to have disappeared.

I do not wish to contribute to this rather puerile debate but had to in order to to point out that SitesToGo exists, is thriving and with more than 600 sites we know above all else that one size does not fit all. Sites2Go never existed and the poster was simply looking at the wrong url!

Posters on forums like this (and especially the moderators) should be aware of the potentially damaging effect of incorrectly researched remarks.  And I just changed my Google Alerts to include Sites2Go!

“Launchy: The Open Source Keystroke Launcher”

Launchy is one of my favourite tools.
Instead of going to all the trouble of clicking Start , then programs
and seaching for the program you need , with Launchy all you do
is click alt+space bar  and then type in part of the program you’re after.
Launchy will make suggestions as to the program.
It also “learns” what programs you use most and after a while you’ll
find yourself only needing to type a couple of letters and launchy will
suggest the correct program. It works similarly to the new
“Firefox 3 awesome bar“  which is also extremely handy.

Launchy in action:

At Tullamore BNI this morning I found myself commiserating with our excellent carpenter Mark Feeley over state of his advertising trailer on the main road.

The story apparently went like this.  That sign has been there for as long as we in SitesToGo can remember, but he recently pipped a competitor to the post in a lucrative tender. So the competitor took a sledgehammer and smashed all the faces of the sign by way of revenge (this is the bog folks! We do stuff like that!). From being a sign that was just a part of the scenery it became very noticable and we all started speculating on what had happened.

Mark tells me that as a result of this he is getting lots of calls – people want to know what happened – and some of those may be turning into business! He reckons his angry competitor did him the greatest favour and he wished he thought to do it himself earlier. So how to apply this to websites? Can we be just as usable but different?

Some years ago i went to the trouble of installing linux – the open source
operating system. To be perfectly honest it was a bit of a hassle , entailing as it did
re-partitioning my hard drive , burning cd’s and a tedious install process.
I recently got a new laptop and have been meaning to install ubuntu for a while (ubuntu being one
of the more user friendly flavours of linux).

However , I really didn’t fancy going to all that trouble so had been putting it off.
Then I came across wubi – the windows installer for ubuntu.
With wubi you can install ubuntu linux just like any other windows
program. Just download the program , pick a user name and it will do the rest!
Be aware though that after you start the install the installer needs to download
ubuntu , which is around 700Mb , so it may take a while.
Once ubuntu is installed, your machine will restart and you will then be given the option to boot
into ubuntu or windows. Easy as that!
If at a later date you want to remove the ubuntu installation , you can do so easily while
running windows. Simply remove wubi like you would any other windows program and everything
goes back to how it was.

It couldn’t be simpler to give ubuntu/linux a try!

Panic in the office today. Support team told me we had a call from a health and safety officer. Oho!  Well I guess we would pass an inspection but I was certainly going to take the call.  Sure enough another call came through in the afternoon and was passed through to me in mid project meeting.  I took the call. Who would not?

But all was not as it seems. I was being asked, not very professionally, to contribute to a schools project and nominate a local school to benefit from my funding for a safety campaign.  I asked for email details (a standard approach to weed out the faint hearted) and was advised because they were so poor they did not have computers and could not send email. On persisting I was sent to www.kids-safe.net which I notice is a)in the UK b)has no mention of Irish activity and c) carries no corporate credentials or charity registration pertinent to Irish activity. Through the tool at www.archive.org I can see they first put a website live between March 24 and June 11 2004.

Anyone else getting these calls from the UK?  Is it a scam? Would you engage with an organisation that has to implicitly lie about its status to get through to you?

Some weeks ago I read with interest an article in the Sunday Times
by regular columnist Sarah Carey. In it , Carey outlined her experiences as a consultant for
a new silicon valley startup.
It turns out the startup in question was a new search engine named cuil.
The company was founded by Carey’s old college friend Tom Costello.
Cuil claims to index more pages than Google at a fraction of the cost.

Checkout cuil’s wikipedia entry here

Sarah Carey’s original piece here

Thanks to the two people who spotted some broken links on an article linked to the GiftGallery.  It often happens when you are at your busiest the simple stuff gets missed and it set me to thinking about the tools we use every day to check stuff, in addition to our more specialist auditing software.  All I need to do is use them myself occasionally!

W3c has a range of tools including their Link checker 

I like this page size checker although it is rather draconian on advisory sizes ( I am not today going to talk about the state of Irish broadband!) but page size has an effect on search performance as this recent article on why heavy web pages can cost you business shows

And my latest fad is the new Google Alerts Service right now I am beta testing it against the media search service we use – it could save me a packet! And when I publish this blog I know I will get an alert for GiftGallery within hours. Ever felt you were being watched? Is this good? Of course it is for SEO and for watching others but… anyone else feel this has a privacy implication?

More useful web marketing links can be found here