October 2008 Archives

Tomorrow evening a lot of people will be heading to the IIA Net Visionary Awards in The Royal Hospital Kilmainham.

I'm attending courtesy of Realex Payments, who are one of the event sponsors and our credit card processor

I wasn't at last year's event, but I really enjoyed the evening other years.

While it is a "black tie" event it's also a wonderful chance to catch up with people who you might not see in person for the rest of the year. So while it's formal, it's not so formal that you'd feel uncomfortable.

Whether you win or not shouldn't be that important and the shortlist this year, as other years, is truly impressive:

Best Business Blogger
Deborah Hadley     Spicendipity
Karl Deeter     Irish Mortgage Brokers
Michele Neylon     Blacknight Solutions Blog
Pat Phelan     Pat Phelan Dot Com

 
Best Business Podcaster
Alex Gibson     Dublin City FM
Aoife Mahon      RaboDirect
Krishna De     One Ocean Group
Mike Kelly     MikeKelly.tv

 
Best Online Business Use of Irish
Conn Ó Muineacháin     Edgecast Media for AnLionra.net
Niall O'Driscoll     vStream Digital Media for the Referendum Commission, Lisbon Treaty Website
Rónán Ó Caollaí     Gravitate for Gaelport.com
Tom Fitzgerald     Bárd na nGleann for Litríocht.com

 
Best Online Exporter
Caitríona Nic Giolla Mhichil     Gael Linn
Lulu O'Sullivan     4giftsdirect.com
Mary Power     SelfCatering.ie
Richard Moyles     Mattress.co.uk

 
Best Online Financial Service
Brendan Hughes     FBD
Geoff Boyle     123.ie
Gerry Carron     Hibernian.ie
Martin O'Leary     RaboDirect

 
Best Online Trader Ireland
Brian Fallon     DAFT.ie
Ciaran Crean     MicksGarage.ie
Kieron Guilfoyle     3V Transaction Services
Scott Tattersall     Zignals

 
Best Use of Social Media
Marcus Mac Innes     Pix.ie
Paul McAvinchey     YABOYA for Diddlyi
Ronan Higgins     Locle
Vincent Donelly     Movies.ie

 
Educational Contribution
Bernie Goldbach     Tipperary Institute
Ciaran McCormack     FIS BookClub
Paul Whelan     Lichens.ie
Siobhan O'Connor     Meath County Council

 
e-Government Award
Cathy Clarke     ItsYourMoney.ie
Dara Keogh     GeoDirectory
Maire NiDhomhnaill      South Dublin County Council for Connect iWalks
Siobhan O'Connor     Meath County Council for Meath Care Portal

 
Innovation Award
Kieron Guilfoyle     3V Transaction Services
Niall Devine     MyCharity.ie
Paul Walsh     Segala.com
Ronan Farren     Brandmail Solutions

 
Internet Entrepreneur
David Lenahan     polldaddy.com
Derek Quinn     MyAddress.ie
Kieron Guilfoyle     3V Transactions Services
Michele Neylon     Blacknight Solutions

 
Internet Marketer
Andrew Jenkinson     vStream Digital Media
Jennifer Curtin     Newsweaver
Michele Neylon     Blacknight Solutions
Mick Dillon     CarsIreland.ie

 
Journalist Award
Deirdre McArdle     ElectricNews.net
Emma Kennedy      Sunday Business Post
Maire Boran     Silicon Republic
Niall Kitson     PC Live

 
Mobile Internet Innovation
Ciaran Bradley     Sentry Wireless
David Barrett     AntiDis - iPhone Train Timetable
Johnny Beirne     Downloadmusic.ie
Pat Phelan     Twitterfone.com

 
Social Contribution
Anthony Lindsay     The Wheel
Eoghan Crosby     Camara
Martin McKay     Texthelp Browsealoud
Niall Devine     MyCharity.ie

 
Web Designer Excellence
Derek Jones     Flavour 9 Design
Karen Hanratty     Pixel Design
Marcin Banaszek     Webtrade Ltd.
Tony O'Donohoe     Lightbox

 
Web Developer Excellence
Claude Lacey     iPlanit
Jennifer O' Brien     Webtools Software Limited
Karl Glennon     Roomex.com
Tomek Kaczmarek     Lightbox

To all my fellow nominees - best of luck!

To anyone else who is planning on attending - see you there!

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We've been inundated with queries about magento over the last few months. Today we've rolled out some php5 upgrades to all linux shared hosting machines so we can now support Magento. Please note that this only applies to our minimus, medius and maximus (linux) plans.

Also this upgrade now supports imap and imaps so you SugarCRM users can get cracking and start using those e-mail features that are built into Sugar.

If you have registered a .com/net/org/info/biz or mobi domain name through us (or anyone else for that matter) you will normally get an email once a year asking you to verify your whois details.

This is normal.

If you need to update the details you can do so via your control panel.

At no time do we or eNom (the registrar of record for most of our com/net/org/info/biz domains) ask you to login to anything when you're checking the data.

So if you do get any emails asking you to login to eNom websites (which we'd never do ..) then please be wary.

Further details of the current phishing (email fraud) emails going around is available over on Domain Name News.

UPDATE:

Enom have provided a screenshot of the phishing email that is doing the rounds (click to enlarge):



NB: THIS IS NOT A LEGITIMATE EMAIL.

SEO (search engine optimisation) competitions, where the entrants have to get their site to rank for a random keyphrase, are a bit of fun. They also allow people to show off their SEO skills.

Damien Mulley posted earlier today about an SEO competition he's running, but as he hadn't mentioned any prizes I thought we should step in.

If you're expecting to win a Ferrari or anything extravagant I'm sorry, but that's not going to happen.

The Prize:

What we've offered (and Damien accepted) was to give the winner the following:

• 1 year's hosting on our Medius plan (choice of Windows or Linux)
• 1 domain registration period for a choice of com/net/org/info/biz/mobi/ie/eu/co.uk (period as co.uk domains are registered for 2 years not 1 year)

The Rules:

The rules etc., are over on Damien's blog, so I won't repeat them here.


Disclosure

I will be "entering" but my entry is not to be taken seriously ie. I have absolutely no interest in winning a hosting plan from my own company, as I already have plenty of hosting to play with. I'm entering "for a laugh".

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There are several "hot" topics in the domain world at the moment. The introduction of new gTLDs, which I have touched on, is one, while the introduction of IDN (internationalised domain names) is another.

For most of this site's readers IDN isn't that important.

Most of our clients, with some exceptions, are English speakers.

Of course the world is not an English speaking world, even if some people would like people to think it was.

So what exactly is this IDN stuff?

In simple terms IDN allows you to put non-ASCII characters into a domain. A very obvious example would be an accent. In the Irish language, for example, a lot of people's names and place names have accents, but at present you cannot register domains WITH the accent.

Of course accents are only the tip of the iceberg.

Imagine being able to register domain names in Cyrillic? Or place names in kanji?

So which TLDs support IDN?

That's a very good question!
There are mixed levels of support among the gTLD operators. There seems to be a higher level of "real" activity within the ccTLD world.
You can, however, peruse the resources on the Verisign site.

So which ccTLDs support IDN?

There's a list over on Wikipedia, though I'm not sure how accurate it is (wikipedia is very useful, but you can never be too sure how reliable the information is)

Eurid are talking about introducing IDN for the .eu namespace, but we can expect that to take at least another 12 to 18 months before there is anything for users. (See Stephane's recent post which is more optimistic)

IEDR like to say that they are ready to introduce IDN, but haven't made any move to do so even though they have been asked about it more than once in the past. (They're waiting on "a positive indication of market interest" whatever that is)

Nominet on the other hand has devoted time and resources to IDN


Whether IDN will become widely available in 2009 or 2019 is moot. It's on the way and when it gets here it will open up a whole range of exciting opportunties for people whose language is not English

Of course it also opens up a whole range of new problems as well, but doesn't everything?

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Remember the Firefox addon that the cool guys in Weeno Media released?

They've added the most recent release to the Firefox addon site

Nice!

Everyone loves getting stuff for free, so I'm always happy when I can offer our clients little "extras".

We're now offering clients free online advertising credit via Google Adwords.

In order to avail of the offer you need two things:

1. An annual hosting plan (Minimus / Medius / Maximus)
2. A Google Adwords account that is less than 14 days old
   

More information on this offer is available on our site here


If you're with a competing hosting provider, then why not make the switch over to Blacknight now?

Pat Phelan and Alexia Golez are organising a pre-BarCamp Cork dinner on Friday 31st October in Bangkok93/Taste of Thailand on Bridge St.

You can find out more and signup via Pat's blog (places ARE limited)

If you are thinking of heading to BarCamp Cork, or are still undecided Sabrina has done a roundup of events being organised that weekend.

(Noodle Nerds graphic courtesy of Sabrina Dent)

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• Pre Barcamp Cork dinner

If you haven't voted yet head over to the Net Visionary website now to do so

Voting closes tomorrow.

While I'd obviously prefer if everyone voted for me I'd be happy if everyone actually took the time to vote for whoever they wanted ie. participated

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Barcamp is coming to Cork in November.

Over the past couple of years there have been several barcamp / creativecamp events throughout Ireland and we've been involved in some form or another with most of them (we may have missed out on one or two - I'm honestly not sure).

If you're interested in attending then here are the "raw" details:

When?: Saturday November 1st 2008
Where?: Webworks, Cork (it's very close to the centre of the city)
Who should attend?: anybody and everybody - the topics at these events are as broad ranging as the attendees

It looks like there might be an informal webmaster meetup the night before being organised by several of the regulars over on Irish Webmaster Forum (IWF)  For more information see this thread

What's our involvement this year?

So far we're sponsoring the hosting and domain.

As the event is being held in my home town I'll probably show my face...

I'm a very strong believer in letting people move their domains and hosting around as much as they want.

Unfortunately some people do not share my philosophy and prefer to hold their registrants to ransom.

While I've already written about .ie domain transfers and those of .com, I hadn't gone into much detail on co.uk domains.

Let's be completely transparent about costs.

We are a Nominet registrar, so we pay Nominet £5 (sterling) to register domains for 2 years. In turn we charge registrants €8. Depending on the currency rates our margin per domain will vary and we also have our Nominet membership fees to factor in. Yes. We do make money on each and every co.uk registration and renewal, but we're a business not a charity.

Now when it comes to moving a co.uk domain from one registrar to another Nominet's system is a little different.

With most ccTLDs and gTLDs the registrant requests that the new registrar takeover the domain (pull) , while with Nominet's system the losing registrar has to hand the domain over to a competitor (push). However  Nominet does not charge the registrar for this change ie. it is free and takes only seconds to complete. All the current registrar needs is the IPS tag of the new registrar and the domains to push. It couldn't be simpler really.

Or could it?

Well some people's business model seems to rely heavily on overcharging clients for just about everything.

While I have no issue with charging for things that cost money to provide I find it abhorrent to charge people who want to change provider. If they're changing provider there maybe an issue with the service we're providing (or not) so why make a bad situation worse?

Fortunately there is light at the end of the tunnel.

All owners (registrants) of co.uk domains have access to Nominet's online services system. Under normal circumstances the online system allows you to manage your contact details and conduct basic maintenance on your domain portfolio, however it also allows you to transfer domain ownership and change registrars if you so choose (for a fee).
Nominet charge £11.75 (including VAT) to retag (transfer) any number of *.uk domains for a registrant. So if you want to move 1 domain or 500 domains the fee will be the same.

Don't be held ransom!

If your domain matters to you choose a registrar you are happy with.

(We don't charge anything to retag *.uk domains - we don't get charged, so why would we charge you??)


 

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The first Irish Web Awards are being held tonight in Dublin, but due to circumstances beyond my control it looks like I won't be attending.

Damien has done a wonderful job putting the entire thing together and I know tonight will a great success.

Hopefully the first of many!

To all those shortlisted - well done!

To the winners, who will be announced later this evening - congratulations.

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• The Inaugural Irish Web Awards

Since we launched the new platform we've been trying to attract customers from Europe and farther afield. Most blockers are for the non english speakers who find it difficult to understand the technical English that they are presented with in the control panels.

Today I've added the following language packs to our Windows and Linux sitebuilders:

Dutch and Portuguese

I hope to add some control panel language packs in the coming week for the Blacknight Customer Control panel (CCP). Initially these will be for the webhosting side of things, VPS management, domain management, dns management etc. The "billing" tab in your control panel is a seperate system even though it's completely integrated. The language packs for billing may not be installed initially but we'll get to them.

Please let us know if there is specific languages that you'd like to see in our systems.