Category: Web

Your Firefox Add-ons

Go on then, what gems have you that I haven’t heard of yet? Here’s my lot, with the ones disabled until I need them in italics.

  • Adblock Plus – Should be obvious. I disable in on sites I support. And so should you, on Foot.ie!
  • Add Bookmark Here 2 – Bookmark directly into a folder.
  • Download Statusbar – Downloads in the statusbar rather than Downloads Window, for easy access.
  • DownThemAll! – For downloading sets of files.
  • FireFTP – In-browser FTP client.
  • FireShot – For taking screenshots.
  • IE Tab – Load tabs in Internet Explorer, or send links to IE. Useless Irish banks.
  • Iterasi – For archiving web pages.
  • Menu Editor – New to my collection, what it says on the tin.
  • Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0 – Can’t uninstall it. Typical MS.
  • Mouse Gestures Redox – As on the tin.
  • Nightly Tester Tools – I use this fella to load deprecated Add-ons. Must check I still need it!
  • Property Bee – Monitor properties on Daft.ie.
  • Tab Mix Plus – Tweak the hell out of your tabs.
  • Uppity – Lets you pop up a folder in the website tree.
  • Web Developer – For, like, web development dude.
  • Xmarks – Bookmarks synchroniser.

I’m still not a blogger…

Although to be fair to Mark from the Sunday Times, he did tell me he’d be doing a piece and quoting me, unlike the thieving hacks in the Star who steal content from Foot.ie on a near-weekly basis. This is in relation to Amazon’s decision to start shipping electronics and the like to Ireland again. I’ll continue down this road.

Adam Beecher, another blogger, is not impressed with the internet retailer’s change of heart. “I’ll continue to buy elsewhere, apart from exceptional circumstances,” he said. “I have no intention of jumping back into bed with them just because they flip a bad decision three years later, and implement the change badly while they’re at it.”

I would like to say though, Mark, that it would be nicer if you asked, rather than informed. I understand you don’t have to for a simple soundbyte, but it’s nice to be nice. But thanks anyway, I appreciate it.

Blackout Ireland Avatars

Didn’t really fancy the one on the Blackout Ireland site, so I made one of my own for Foot.ie. a few size variants below.

If you haven’t been paying attention, this is happening in protest against Eircom’s capitulation to the Irish Recorded Music Association attempts to censor the Irish Internet. You can read more about the subject here.

Blackout Ireland 200x200px

Blackout Ireland Avatar 150x150px

blackout-ireland-100x100

blackout-ireland-75x75

Google Analytics script 97% slower at peak in Europe

According to Pingdom, performance in Europe is significantly worse than Stateside. Lets hope AdSense performs better. Beef up that European infrastructure Google!

And webmasters, make sure that script is at the bottom of your pages, not the top!

3238995762_bd276e8f57_o

As you can see, loading the GA script from North America is overall a bit slower than loading it from Europe. On the other hand, while the European load times are significantly faster on average than the North American ones, the performance is much more uneven over the course of the day.

The difference between the maximum and minimum load times for North America is 27%, but in Europe the difference is 97%.

How To Create A BETTER Irish Bar

Jason Sheehen of Denver Westward tells us how to create a great Irish bar, and doesn’t get it far wrong. But if he wants a real taste of the “old country” as he calls it – I’ve always hated that phrase – he needs a few adjustments:

For a start, he lost credibility when he mentioned Harp. Harp is piss, the Budweiser/Fosters of Ireland. The only good thing Harp ever brought to this world is the “Pinta Harp and a packeta dates there Laurence” ad from the late eighties. Remember that?

Jameson isn’t bad but Black Bush from our friends north of the border is smoother, and Midleton Rare is the finest Irish whiskey on the… well, in Ireland. Personally I don’t think it should be allowed outside the country, but that could simply be naked greed. It’s all I drank at my wedding, but sure everyone else was buying!

Ampersanded pub names are British, not Irish. Ampersanded pub names IN Ireland are there because some British bastard named it, and we haven’t got around to changing it yet. Sure there’s no rush like. (Lenny Henry said it best when he described Ireland as a “cold Jamaica” and gave an example of an Irish fella ejected from the pub, horizontally, pint in hand, saying “ah sure I was leavin’ anyway”.)

Road, cigarette and drink signs are ok as long as they’re genuine. In particular the road sign, which has to be in miles – none of your new-fangled kilometers here please – and stolen and “exported” yourself, wrapped in bin bags. Plus of course they all have to be a bit dirty. As does everything in the bar, particularly the bartop itself. A slight stickiness on the tables adds realism.

“Irish music” needs to be clearer. Boyzone and Westlife are Irish ffs, and no self-respecting Irish man would listen to that twaddle. (Of course Irish women aren’t allowed in proper Irish bars, except perhaps for a half on Sundays after Mass.) U2, Thin Lizzy and Clannad are fine, with a few unknown Irish fellas on their own instruments in the corner on Saturdays night. The langer song is not fine. It’s shite.

On the food front it’s actually King crisps you want, plus a nearly empty card of Bacon Fries and a box of Cadburys Snacks. Purple ones, obviously; or Club bars if you can find them. (They have less chocolate so they’re cheaper. And nastier. ) If you want to draw in real Irish alcoholics, Crúibíns are your only man.

Look, just go into the Spailpín Fánach in Cork and use that as a model. You’ll need to walk up to the Brown Derby for the Crúibíns though.

Palm Pre

[This has been in my drafts since January 9, only noticed it now. It does have a motion sensor and landscape mode btw.]

The wife’ll kill me, I want one of these and I only have my Treo Pro a couple months.

Palm Pre

It seems to settle a major deficiency in the Treo Pro, namely Windows Mobile. It’s not a bad mobile OS per se, but the hardware is a tad underpowered for it, and it has niggles that can’t be addressed because of it’s closed nature. That said, I don’t know if the Pre’s webOS will be open either, but hopefully Palm will have generated Clue from their Windows adventure. And drop it forevermore…

One other apparent deficiency would appear to be a motion sensor and/or landscape mode. You’d think that if it had it, the presenter in these PC Pro videos – well worth watching by the way – would have demoed it; although it has to be said that despite best effort, he’s no Steve Jobs and might have been better off deferring to someone with more charisma.

(Via Slashdot.)

.TEL Coming Soon

New TLD sunrising on December 3, landrushing Feb 3, GA March 24.

Very cool service with no hosting required, everything is done via the DNS. Put your contact details in a few NAPTR records, add your location in a LOC RR and perhaps a few keywords in TXT RRs, and your details will appear neatly formatted on your automatically generated .TEL website. (Tucows is the registrar I use in Beecher Networks.) But of course since that’s just generated from your raw data, it can be used in a multitude of other ways, by your mobile, your GPS unit, etc.

Not cheap though, at least not for sunrise. I haven’t set pricing yet, but I reckon sunrise registrations’ll run at least €300.

LinkedIn Applications

Good to see LinkedIn still developing their product, but they’re still very much playing catch-up.

Makes little difference to me as I don’t spend much time networking online (awfully un-PC for an Internet consultant to say that I know), but some people do invest a serious amount of time, energy and effort into it, and LinkedIn aren’t cutting the mustard for those people imho. They don’t need to lead the field – business communities rarely do – but a new idea here and there might keep people interested.

It remains my favourite network, but only because the only social networking I’m interested in doing is for business. If I was into it in any way, I’d be spending my time on Facebook. And I hate Facebook, because their privacy policies are in the “scumbag” realm.

Press release follows, slightly munged to fit into the post nicely. Click the logo to start adding applications to your account. (more…)

Negative reviews removed from Menupages.ie

According to several people on Boards.ie. While I can understand the commercial benefits to Menupages, I can’t understand why I’d want to use the site in any way, shape or form now. Pretty much defeats the purpose imho.

Course I don’t use it anyway, so I guess I won’t have much of an impact. Tried it a couple of months ago when I was looking for a nice restaurant to take the lovely wife too, but the usability was frankly embarassing. I reverted to the old reliable, and they trumped Menupages bigtime. Nicest evening out I’ve had in a long time.

Yay Chapter One, boo Menupages.