Jason Roe / Blog, Jason Roe - Web design, Development, SEO Advice

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I normally don’t do fluff but here we go!

Mobile Web Design: Tips & Techniques

“We’ve examined the mobile web landscape. We’ve covered four approaches to developing for it. Our discussion now shifts from that of concept to one of execution.”

Vo-ip calls on your Nokia Wi-fi mobile.

“Truphone routes your mobile calls via the internet.That means free mobile calls to other Truphone users and very cheap calls to anyone else.”

Analytics - How do I track AJAX applications?

“With a typical HTML page, you can use the URL to differentiate between multiple pageviews. But in an AJAX application, a request to the server is made without changing the URL of the page..”

Digg style clean URLs with PHP and Apache

“You might have noticed that Digg has a cool way of maintaining clean URLs. Digg actually uses LAMP. But where are the .php extensions?..” 

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• Posted in Technology
• 8 Comments »

Dole.ie provides a one stop shop for job hunters, the site spiders and indexes many of the larger Irish job sites. One of the notable features that dole.ie provide is a RSS feed. Many of the job sites that it spiders do not offer this service.

According to a post over on boards.ie Webmaster/Flash forum, Irishdev.com has been hammering dole.ie with requests for its search RSS feed. As a result dole.ie was forced to shutdown temporarily for about 12/24 hours until a solution could be found.

The interesting fact behind this saga is that irishdev.com seems to have passed all of the content off as its own, with no reference to Dole. Ok come on you steal their content … hammer their box … then pass the content off as your own! Cop on lads!

On the bright side .. IrishDev now say that they will only grab the content once every 3 hours. How nice of them! No mention of credit for the RSS or content.

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• Posted in Business, Technology, Web Design & Development
• 11 Comments »

Following up from Michele’s post “Irish SEO - Where to Submit Your Site� I decided to have a look for a few more Irish directory sites. Here are the results of 10 minutes work. Some of the sites are free, some are paid and some I have absolutely no idea how you get a link into them! Enjoy!

http://www.irishsites.com/
http://www.kilcooledirectory.ie/
http://www.purplepages.ie/site/content/default.asp
http://www.itdirectory.ie/
http://www.irishabroad.com/Directory/
http://www.tipperarydirectory.ie/htmlsite/directory.asp
http://www.fashion.ie/directory/
http://www.gaire.com/dir/
http://www.queer.ie/directory/
http://www.gaycork.com/directory/
http://www.irishbuildingindustry.ie/
http://kildare.ie/business/
http://www.mayodirectory.com/
http://www.letterkennyonline.com/
http://musicdirectory.dfloor.net/directory/
http://www.galwayec.ie/schoolsdirectory.html
http://www.sustainable.ie/directory/index.php
http://www.hotspots.ie/
http://www.progressivetrance.net/directory/
http://www.isearch.ie/
http://new.galway.net/directory/
http://www.longford.ie/business/directory.asp
http://www.furniture.ie/directory/
http://www.adlib.ie/directory.asp
http://www.ballyfermot.ie/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=43
http://www.youth.ie/arts/directory/
http://www.dun-laoghaire.com/directory.html
http://www.longford.ie/community/directory.asp http://www.carrickonshannon.ie/carrick_local_business_directory/index.php
http://www.braydirectory.ie/
http://www.weddingsireland.com/directory/

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• Posted in Business, Marketing, Technology, Web Design & Development
• 9 Comments »

I’m glad to see that Irish users have started to latch onto the idea of text link ads. To be honest they are fairly cool. I have made about $54 so far from them. It’s like money for nothing. Payments have been made every month on time via Paypal.

So what’s a link on my site worth? Text link ads produced a cool ill calculator. The tool works out how much you could get depending on what kind of site you have. To be honest if my site was gambling related my links would be worth $69, that’s over twice the price of my current links. So go over to text link ads sign up and start making money!

Also a big hello to iWorld one of our text link advertisers, it seems that you can Buy iPod and iPod Accessories at their site. Some of them look fairly cool too. Please note the nofollow link.. Have to keep them keen after all.

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• Posted in Business, Marketing, Technology, Web Design & Development
• 3 Comments »

Brick and mortar e-commerce has stumbled over from the USA and landed in Ireland. “iSoldit� seems to be a fairly unique idea, its essentially an eBay power seller who sell item on your behalf. iSoldIt offers a walk in centre or shop where you can bring in items that you would like to sell on ebay. They provide a professional photographer to take pictures of your items. All of the shipping, handling, support and payment is managed by iSold it.

For the privilege of this service they change you a 30% fee based on the overall selling price, they also seems to skim money off the shipping and handling fees. To quote the website:

In addition to receiving a commission from the seller (your customer), you will also collect a handling charge that is paid by the buyer. You also get to keep the difference between postage and shipping “rack rates” charged to the buyer and your actual reduced iSold It reduced postage and shipping corporate rate.

According to an article on ENN “Galway eBay store opens its doors�. I went over to the corporate website for iSold It to find that they have no Galway stores listed on the “store locator�. This could just be a sloppy mistake made late on a Friday evening after banging out as many press releases as possible, or maybe its an indication of lack of planning and coordination by the company as a whole.

The one aspect that ISold It didnt describe in they franchise pitch is how they manage dispute resolutions, shipping delays and lost goods. What if the item is damaged before shipping, who picks up the costs then? What about fraudulent or stolen goods? The list of questions goes on. Maybe I’m just nitpicking but it seems like a very unstable investment over all.

I like the idea, to think that someone would pay €25,000 for a franchise with no brand in the Irish market is just insane.

It is believed the typical cost of operating a franchise in Ireland ranges between EUR90,000 and EUR150,000, depending on factors such as rent, labour, size of the store etc.

In my opinion anyone could go out tomorrow and duplicate this business model in a matter of hours. This seems to be a service that you would expect from your local Internet café, its not rocket science.

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• Posted in Business, Technology
• 3 Comments »

A new firefox plugin called Google Browser Sync was announced by google. The plugin allows users to synchronise browser settings including bookmarks, history, cookies and saved passwords. Google has also provided a detailed FAQ for Browser Sync.

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• Posted in Technology
• 1 Comment »

I found this article quite interesting. This highlights how far behind Ireland is on improving infrastructure. One can only hope that this investment might help to speed up the process of providing broadband to rural areas.

Ireland has received EU permission to spend euro170 million boosting broadband in small towns across the country, the European Commission said Thursday.

Just over 5 percent of the population has a broadband connection, putting Ireland just ahead of Greece for the lowest broadband take-up in the 15 “old” EU member states.

The Irish government now wants to build fibre-optic networks in 120 towns ignored by Internet suppliers so far, using EU money earmarked for improving infrastructure in poorer parts of Europe.

Source: www.businessweek.com

On a side note, for more information on broadband check out www.broadbandforall.ie. Broadband For All is an initiative of IrelandOffline.

“We aim to give you the low-down on everything you need to know aboutBroadband to get you started. We’ll help you determine the best Broadband and whether it’s available in your area, and we’ll provide you with some options if you want to switch Broadband provider, or complain about poor service.”

Looking for broadband availability? check out www.getbroadband.ie

“GetBroadband.ie, your guide to all things broadband. Providing an independent resource for anyone upgrading their broadband connection, or getting a broadband service for the first time. “

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• Posted in Business, Technology
• 1 Comment »

Smart Telecom has implemented a new policy on blocking outbound connections to SMTP mail servers. This policy affects all customers and means that smart users will no longer be able to send mail via private mail servers. Smart telecom insist that the use of the in-house SMTP server is available to all customers.

A representative from smart telecom commented on the matter:

“this change has affected less than 1% of our customers. We provide our SMTP server details to every customer that signs up and 99%+ use the details provided”

This is an estimated 200+ customers affected by the new policy.

“As our DSL user network has grown we’ve been receiving an increasing number of complaints about SPAM coming from DSL user machines.

This SPAM wastes peoples time and network/computer resources. It also leads to problems for all DSL users because it increases the chances of valid emails being rejected as more of our IPs appear in email blacklists.

So, for the above reasons amongst others, we have decided to start blocking outbound SMTP(TCP port 25) traffic from DSL users with dynamic IPs. Customers with static IPs will have the option of requesting the opening of outbound SMTP for their static IPs.”

There has been some uproar on public forums regarding the way smart telecom handled the matter, lack of notification to any of the affected customers has caused some concern. On the upside this policy change did not affect business customers with static IP addresses in place.

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• Posted in Technology
• 2 Comments »