Tom Doyle :: TALK

We’re now on Interenet Explorer Beta 3 and I stupidly installed it on my machine thinking that it would have improved from Beta 2.

But low and behold… eh no… It’s still a very poor attempt by Microsoft at producing the next generation browser. Maybe this wasn’t their intended goal, but it’s what I would expect from a company who is losing ground on market share to the all conquering FireFox.

What really got me again was the uninstall of the program. I had this on 2 previous occassions and thought I knew how to get rid of it a third time…. But eh no…

This time after going through the older steps of :
Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Tick “Show Updates” > remove….

It hung on “running processes before uninstall” - no matter what I did, it didn’t complete uninstallation.

So I finally figured it out…. I had to stop the regsvr32.exe process - which allowed the uninstallation to proceed.

I’m all clean now and back to IE6. Don’t bother installing IE7 just yet - not nearly ready for general consumption!

You may have noticed that our company have launched their new website - www.2bscene.net - and what a journey it has been.

We wanted to make our site compliant to all the latest standards in web development and yet create a visually attractive website that could be somewhat backward compatible.

We’re not there yet, but we have overcome some things that seemed impossible to get around. So over the coming months we will be fine tuning the website to be as good and cross browser compatible as it possibly can.

In our quest for ultimate standard compliance, we came across this very handy little tool that I think should be in every web developers toolbox. It’s called CSSVista.

From the guys who also brought us SiteVista (www.sitevista.com), CSSVista is a great tool for watching your CSS ammendments made in front of your very eyes and (the best part) in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

It’s extremely easy to use, simply type in your website address, choose edit CSS and make changes to your CSS in the editor panel. Changes are made instantly in front of your very eyes. It’s a great way to see how the changes you make to your CSS file affect your site layout.

My only con about this program is that it would be even better if you can have more browsers and different versions of each browser. But you can’t have everything, especially when it’s completely free!!

An absolutely fantastic little tool!

The new Google Webmaster Central was launched late last week, without even a whisper….

Originally known as Google Sitemaps, it provides webmasters and online marketing professionals with tools to help them make their website more accessible to Googles search spiders.

Google Webmaster Central comes with some great new features and tools that all online marketing professionals will find really useful.

Google Webmaster central provides tools to:
- tell Google that www.domain.com and domain.com are the same
- test your robots.txt
- discover crawl errors
- see some spam penalties
Check it out at www.google.com/webmasters/

Searches made on Google.com accounted for over 60% of searches made in the United States this month.

For the first time ever, Google has achieved 6 searches for every 10 searches made in the United States. Yahoo! was the closest rival with just over 22%, followed by MSN with 12.1%.

Ever wondered why your website doesn’t appear in the “sites from Ireland” search results in Google? Well this could be due to numerous factors. There are two simple steps to ensure your website will be found when someone searches using the “sites from Ireland” option in Google.

1. Domain Name
The easiest way to get a listing under the “sites from Ireland” search is to register a .ie domain name. Google automatically treats sites with a .ie domain name as a site from Ireland.

2. Hosting in Ireland
Google uses the ip address of your website to decide if it should list you in these results. A lot of companies opt to have their website in the US because it is generally cheaper than hosting a website in Ireland. Ideally you should move your website to an Irish based hosting company. If this isn’t an option, talk to your existing hosting company to see what they can do for you.

It’s that simple!

Google, the search engine giant, has won the rights to serve search and keyword services to MySpace.com

The battle to win this right was rumoured to have been fought out by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Google have agreed to make minimum revenue share payments to Fox Interactive of $900 million, based on certain criteria.

MySpace currently use Yahoo! (via Overture) for this service. The current deal with Yahoo! ends at the end of October 2006.

As I’m a County Wicklow resident I was quite disheartened to see that Minister Dick Roche is pushing for water charges to be introduced in households by 2007.

People from Dublin are probably saying “What’s he complaining about? We’ve had water charges for years…”. Well I guess I’m complaining about something that you guys complained about before the introduction of water charges in Dublin.

I don’t think anyone in Ireland should pay water charges but certainly not people that live in Wicklow

Why should I be so biased? Well apparently we pay water charges for maintenance etc to the water schemes. The resevoir in Roundwood sends 30,000,000,000 litres of water to Dublin each year (Blessington provides a similar amount), if the Wicklow county council was to charge the coucils in Dublin for the use of this water, there would be plenty of money in the Wicklow councils coffers to maintain the water system for everyone in Wicklow.

Aside from that, why do we as a nation put up with this double taxation. Not one to usually get political, but I’m quite frankly pissed off with Fianna fail at this stage.  Each year when budget time comes round, they make themselves look wonderful by giving us the so called “Give Away Budgets”. But all they are doing is reducing the amount of income tax and generating it somewhere else, such as bin and water charges etc.

With the amount of surplus money they expect to make on taxes, why not just rid us of this tax??? Someone is getting rich somewhere and they should be ashamed of themselves…..

Each year we think Fianna Fail are great

All the talk today is that Martin O’Neill is poised to take over the managerial role at Aston Villa. I admit I would be shocked if he did. It seems strange that he would turn down so many great offers and then all of a sudden choose to work with a team such as Aston Villa. No disrespect to Aston Villa, but Martin O’Neill has had much better offers!!!

There are some rumours going a round that some billionaire is planning to take over Aston Villa, Roman Ambrovich style and plans to make them into a great footballing club. If that is true, the I completely understand his decision.

However, if it is not… Why are you doing it Martin? More to the point, will you be able to do it on such limited resources?

I’m sure most of you that work in an office have a daily routine of going to the local deli for a sandwich at lunch time. I, no different from anyone else, frequent the local Super Value in Deansgrange, Co. Dublin each weekday lunchtime.

Generally I was pleased with their service, although on most occassions, you weren’t entirely sure how much a sandwich would cost on a day to day basis. But at least you knew the threshold. A typical brown, plain chicken with tomato, lettuce and onion would never cost more than €3.30, but could sometimes cost as little as €2.90. How this price fluctuated is beyond me….

Anyway, yesterday I went to the same store for lunch and got the usual sandwich, same as always. Today however, they were letting everyone know that the price of sandwiches had increased. I thought to myself, ah sure a couple of cents, there’s nothing wrong with that, they provide a good service anyway…… But I have to admit, when I received the sandwich and saw the price I was quite shocked, mind you not as shocked as the guy I work with, who too got his usual sandwich.

My sandwich had increased in price by €0.50, bringing it to €3.80. Some of you people that work in Dublin city centre, probably think this is a fair price. But this is a price from a supermarket in the outskirts of Dublin. For €3.80, I expect to be able to sit down in the place and enjoy my sandwich in nice surroundings. The local (Dun Laoghaire) O’Brien’s sandwich bar costs €3.90 for the same sandwich, that’s if you have it in and it’s cheaper if you take away!

The guy who was with me, I’m not sure what he got, but I know it consisted of Tuna, saw an increase by €1.40!!!!!!!!!! No wonder he was so shocked!

I really don’t know how Super Valu can justify this increase, they just keep saying - It’s our new prices.

Even though we are probably at the mercy of this deli, because there is very little around Deansgrange, I think we will be looking for an alternative, just out of principle.

I think if the whole country made these decisions about extortionate prices, the country as a whole would be a cheaper place to live… It takes all of us to do it though, not just a few of us!

An interesting new tool for Firefox has been released. SEO for Firefox provides various research tools for Google and Yahoo.

Aaron Wall, the creator of the tool says, “This tool is designed to add more data to Google or Yahoo! to make it easier to evaluate the value and competitive nature of a market.”

I find this a handy little tool which gives you one click access to some interesting information when researching an SEO campaign.