Tom Doyle :: TALK

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.11379

Came across this “tool” today - my god I’d have so much fun shotting the guys in the office with this…

We’ve been working on a project for a couple of months now, it’s a pretty standard website with the only major piece of coding being the used car search.

The client was already a signed up member of CarZone and really had no need to ditch them because the system worked quite well for them. However, what they did want to do was integrate the search more into their website so that they make it easier to use and get more content on their website.

On approaching CarZone, they gave two ridiculous integration options that in my mind are beyond belief.

Option 1 was to template a hosted solution on CarZones server. This wasn’t a goer for us because the site also had a Content Management System. So if anything changed, like the navigation or special offer etc. we would have to provide them with a new template each time. Obviously this didn’t make sense at all for the client.

Option 2 was for the results to be provided in an iFrame. Of course in my opinion, the further away from iFrames the better. We all know about the compatibility issues surrounding them, never mind the the fact that they can be quite restrictive in terms of layout etc.

After much consultation with CarZone, I was left feeling quite disappointed and badly treated when I tried to find other integration options. They refused to take simple suggestions on board that could have made this an easy integration for both parties. Even waving money in their face didn’t make a difference!

I was told, even after insisting it wasn’t, that the iFrame was an adequate solution. I’m sorry, but from a professional developers point of view anything to do with iFrames is not a solution. Maybe it is for beginners - but certainly not for pro’s who can do other things in a similar timeframe, yet have a much better solution in the end.

What’s really sad is that in this day and age, with all the hype about Web 2.0, one of Ireland’s leading websites can’t make the simple transition to providing basic xml feeds for their clients.

Come on CarZone, be a bit more creative instead of just sitting back and taking your clients money! Start providing a value add!

MySpace are planning a redesign of their popular website. The idea is to improve usability and maximise its ad space. Here’s a sample of what it will look like:

I know it’s early yet - but so far the indications are that the Lisbon Treaty looks set to be thrown out by the Irish.

Disturbingly enough, our government have come out to say that they have nothing planned on how to handle the treaty being rejected. So although I think it’s a good thing that it’s been rejected, I have little confidence that our government have the competency to organise a strategy for dealing with this situation.

Where does Ireland go from here? Our goverment have been too naive, arrogant and ignorant over the whole Lisbon Treaty. To expect the country to just sign up for something that they were told nothing about was just as I have said before… ridiculous…

So Google and Yahoo! are now partners on search ads huh? My god what next??

I have to say I think it’s a great deal for both parties. Yahoo! can greatly increase the monetisation of their pages, while Google can continue to grow their penetration of the search advertising market.

Here’s Google’s apparent reasoning for the joint venture : http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/our-agreement-to-provide-ad-technology.html

ConsoleSource.com, the games console accessory online store have published all their affiliate members profiles online.

Today I was notified by email from a source calling themselves GamerGenesis.com, that all my information, including my home address(!) has been published on the ConsoleSource.com website.

In an obvious security breach, you can access their affiliate list at the following address : http://www.consolesource.com/affiliates/admin/print.affiliates_all.php

Adding to the breach, GamerGenesis.com questioned whether any affiliate had actually received payments from ConsoleSource.com.

So if you plan to buy anything from or sign up with ConsoleSource.com be very careful as to what information you provide.

EDIT: Apparently this has now been “remedied”.

Another handy little tool for all your developers. IETester is a nicely presented tool for checking how your website(s) look in legacy IE browsers and of course the latest IE 8 beta!

Download and more information here:
http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

Disturbed have launched their new album “Indestructible” and I have to say I quite like it!

The guys seem to have gone back to their roots with this album sounding like an updated version of their debut album. Unfortunately however, they don’t have any killer tracks like “Down with the Sickness” on this album.

None-the-less it’s a great album and a damn good listen.

Here’s the controversial new video from track 2 of the album “Inside the Fire“:

Some of you may have noticed that Google are using a new Favicon for their website. Like me, I’m sure you were wondering why… well here’s why:

“The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set.”

So there ye go… now you know!

If you were new to the web, you wouldn’t be forgiven for thinking the homepage of Google is un-inviting, un-interesting and downright boring. Why have such a large company with all their billions never updated their homepage to make it more exciting?

Well to put it simply, it’s been years of testing it’s users. At the Google I/O Conference a couple of weeks ago, Marissa Mayer explained why:

“When Google was a relatively unknown 80-person start-up, the company tested Stanford students on how well they could use Google to find which country won the most gold medals in the 1994 Olympics. The result: students would sit in front of the Google screen for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute…”

When Marissa intervened and asked why they were waiting so long to perform a search, most people said “I’m waiting for the rest of it”. The students were clearly waiting for busier more flashy website and it was never coming.

So what did Google do to counteract this issue? No, they didn’t make it flashier, nor did they add a lot of extra content. No, it was something so simple, most people probably wouldn’t have thought about…

They put a copyright notice at the bottom of the page! Yes, that simple!

It’s not there for legal reasons,” Mayer said. “It’s there as punctuation. That’s it. (It tells the searcher) ‘Nothing else is coming; please start searching now.’”

That’s debatably the most innovative idea to come out of Google to date!

• We’re all guinea pigs in Google’s search experiment