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In order to preserve our sanity I've modified the settings here so that comments will automatically close after 120 days.
So any entry that is 4 months or older will no longer be open for comments.
Since quite a few of the posts on here are time sensitive eg. special offers it makes sense.
It also means that we don't have to plough through hundreds of spam comments on older entries.
If you want to know about any service affecting maintenance, technical updates or anything else of a technical nature, we recommend that you check out our new Technical Blog.
The site is hosted outside our core network (we don't even use our own nameservers just to be 100% safe!) and is part of our backup / contingency plans for emergency situations.
While our network uptime has been and hopefully will continue to be exemplary there's no reason to be lazy. We need to make sure that we have a system in place in case there is an issue NOT after the issue arises.
You can subscribe to the site's RSS feed OR to the email alerts.
Your choice :)
You can sign up for the email alerts by filling out the form below:
For the last couple of years I've been writing a monthly column for PC Live, which is one of Ireland's consumer electronics magazines. Since January of this year I've also been writing a short column for the Sunday Business Post's monthly ICT supplement, Computers In Business.
Since neither publication makes all of my articles available online and the content is mine ie. I retain the copyright, I've decided to republish the articles here. I may not republish all of them, as there is overlap at times between what goes into print and what gets put on the company blog. In other cases the content may not lend itself to this medium as it wa time sensitive ..
If anyone has any feedback on this please post a comment below
Thanks!
Much to my amazement we've made it through to the shortlist for this year's Irish blog awards!
The competition in the business blog category is particularly tough, but it was nice to have made it this far.
Best of luck to everyone!!
It seems we've been nominated for the Best Business Blog category at this year's Irish Blog Awards.
Thanks to whoever nominated us!
I honestly don't expect us to win, as the competition is very strong in that category, so best of luck to all the nominees!
We've been offering Wordpress via an automated installer for quite some time and it's proven to be very popular.
Unfortunately Wordpress' use of SQL is far from optimal and this can easily lead to a popular blog or site causing serious issues on our servers (or anyone elses for that matter!).
We don't like enforcing certain policies on our users, but we're not left with much choice.
Due to the recent issues regarding busy WordPress websites affecting the performance of shared hosting servers, we are contacting all of our customers that are using WordPress and asking them to please look into enabling caching.
I just wish the Wordpress developers would listen to reason and enable saner caching by default.
There are two possible solutions:
- use a blogging / CMS solution that is a bit "saner" in terms of SQL and / or caching content (You'll notice that this blog has always been running on MT for this very reason!)
- install one of the available Wordpress plugins that will provide caching
There are currently two caching plugins available that we know of:
What the caching does is take the load away from the MySQL / PHP processing so that the web server (Apache) only has to serve static content, which it does very well!
If you do not enable WP Cache (or similar) there is far greater chance that if your WordPress site experiences a period of high visitors or similiar, then it could cause issues on the server.
As per our Acceptable-Usage Policy, we might have to suspend any site that causes issues like this. Putting it simply - if you're not being a considerate neighbour we might have to shut you down until you behave.
Setting up caching should only take a couple of minutes and if you have any issues or need assistance our support forum is available, as is our helpdesk
EDIT: Gary, from our technical support team, has put together a short document to help people install and configure WP Cache. You can get it from here
As I've mentioned a few times in the past few weeks and months, we're in the process of switching over from blacknight.ie to blacknight.com.
I switched this blog over to the .com a couple of weeks ago and didn't think anymore about it until just now.
Normally I check the comment spam filter every couple of days to see if any legitimate comments have been blocked and end up dumping several thousand junk comments.
For the last few days it's been completely empty!
I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but I suspect that the spammers are confused by the redirects or something... I guess they'll find the new location for the comment form fairly soon, but if they don't I won't complain!
Of course I might have just broken the blog comments ... If you can't post a comment please let me know (michele@blacknight.com)!
As you may have noticed there are now not one but two of us posting to the Blacknight blog.
Paul started posting to our official blog yesterday and we may be adding a couple of more of our staff to it over the coming weeks.
If there are any topics you'd like us to cover please let us know!
Michele
Just a quick note to people posting comments.
Since we moderate all comments (it's a business blog, so I really don't want spam on it!) there can be a delay in comments appearing. I'm sorry about that, but there's not much I can do.
If your comment doesn't appear and you think it should have done please let me know.
I won't allow spam comments or anything that could be considered libel, but I don't have an issue with most other comments ie. if we get something wrong telling us isn't a bad thing.
If you submit a comment it will be published on the internet and it will be spidered and listed by search engine robots. If you do not want your comments made known to the public then please email us privately as we have to work on the assumption that you are aware that comments will be made public.
At present we do not accept trackbacks, since they've been rendered almost useless by the spammers who have learnt to abuse them.
If you are a mobile user then you might be interested in adding the Blacknight widset to your account.
It's a nice little alternative to using an RSS reader to get the latest news, tips and rants from team Blacknight!
More info on the Widsets site
BarCamp Galway takes place on 22nd September and we're delighted to be sponsors.
We may even get to send someone to attend the event! Though I won't confirm that just yet, as it seems to curse any chance of it happening if I do!
In any case you can find out more on the event's blog or on the wiki.
So far to date we seem to have sponsored every barcamp event that's been held in the 32 counties!
We're sponsoring yet another BarCamp - BarCampBelfast, which is being held this Saturday, June 30th 2007 at Queen's University in Belfast.
I've been at a couple of the BarCamp events over the last year and if anything they aren't boring, so it should be a good day. In any case it's a wonderful excuse to head up to Belfast!
I just got back from Mullingar a couple of hours ago where I was a guest of the Westmeath County Enterprise Board and the IIA.
The event, which was entitled "Using the Internet and Blogging to Increase Sales", was highly enjoyable and featured a great panel:
The event was held in the Mullingar Park Hotel on the outskirts of Mullingar and was very well organised.
Kudos to both the IIA and Christine Charlton and her team from Westmeath County Enterprise Board.
If anyone wants to see my presentation you can download it here. It's in Powerpoint format, but will work fine on Open Office (I converted it from OO to PP this morning)
I'd just like to take this opportunity to give a huge thanks to the organisers of BarCamp Southeast.
Tom and Keith did an absolutely amazing job and it is only due to their hardwork and meticulous preparation that the day was such a complete success.
Several of our team went down to Waterford for the day to hear about some of the cool things that the Irish 'net community is currently playing with and I think I speak for all of them when I say that we thoroughly enjoyed it.
Admittedly there will have been a few groggy heads this morning, but I guess that's a sure sign of an enjoyable post-BarCamp session 
It looks like several of us will be attending Bar Camp Southeast this weekend in Waterford.
I'd a really good time at the Cork event last year, so I was delighted to get us involved with the Waterford one.
Hopefully I'll get to take more photos than I did last time!
So if you're going to be in the general vicinity of the venue on Saturday why not pop in?
Over the last couple of weeks the Wordpress development team have released two updates to Wordpress.
The most recent release, version 2.0.7, was released last night (full details here)
If you are using Wordpress we urge you to upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible.
There are two ways to upgrade, however, in both cases, it is recommended that you make a backup of your blog first. You can do this easily via your control panel.
If you installed Wordpress via our auto-installer (Installatron) you will find an upgrade option within your control panel.
If you installed Wordpress manually please follow the upgrade instructions on the Wordpress site (here)
We endeavour to post important security notices on our forum, so subscribing to the Security Board can help to keep you informed (use this link if you have signed up for our forum already)
If you have any questions, queries or issues, please let us know
Thanks
Michele
If you have been nominated for a Net Visionary Award this year you can now put a tasty logo on your website or blog.
(The sponsors haven't been left out either, as you can see from the main page of this blog.)
Adding the logo to your blog is quite easy. In my case I am using Wordpress for my personal blog, so I added it the theme's sidebar (sidebar.php).
Simply download the logo that corresponds with the category (or categories) that you have been nominated for from the IIA website. In most browsers you simply right click and choose "save as".
If you are using Wordpress for your blog you can either edit the template file via your browser (if the permissions are correct) or you can download the file to your computer and edit it there.
The HTML code you need to add could be as follows:
<a href="http://www.netvisionary.ie/votenom.html"><img alt="Net Visionary 2006 Nominee" src="http://blog.blacknight.ie/images/award06_nominee_blogger.jpg" width="133" height="214" /></a>
Just ensure that the "img src" part points to the correct location for the image you are using.
In the example code above the nominee logo is for "best blogger" which would display like this:
Don't forget - voting is open to everyone and you don't need to be a member of the IIA to vote.
We'll be letting all our clients know about this really cool special offer later today, but I thought I'd give our blog readers the inside track first.
Blacknight in partnership with SpreadShirt is offering free upgrades to the premium SpreadShirt shops. This upgrade will save you €60!!
Spreadshirt is an online platform that allows you to easily design and sell tshirts and other merchandise from your website or blog. In fact you don't even need a website to use it!
You can easily upload your own designs and add them to high quality tshirts, sweaters and even underwear.
To avail of the special offer you need to sign up to SpreadShirt through our website if you haven't done so already.
Once you have a spreadshirt account setup through us simply follow the link on our signup page to upgrade your account and use the special code reserved for Blacknight clients "BLACKNIGHTMERCH"
Within about 24 hours your account should be upgraded to a premium one which gives you a range of new options including:
So what are you waiting for? Sign up for a Spreadshirt account today and start selling custom tshirts and other merchandise
NB The coupon code and upgrade will only work for spreadshirt accounts that were created from the Blacknight signup page. The coupon code is valid until the 3rd January 2006. Please ensure that the upgrade coupon has worked and that you have not been charged for the upgrade, as we will not be held responsible for any charges.
We are proud sponsors of the Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards again this year.
This year's awards sees the introduction of two new categories that reflect the growing popularity of the media in question - namely blogging and podcasting.
Here at Blacknight we're passionate about new technologies, so it's little surprise that several of our clients have been nominated.
Best of luck to all the nominees this year, as I can see that some of the categories are going to be hotly contested.
NB: Voting is open to everyone - you DO NOTneed to be a member of the IIA.
I was down in Cork on Saturday for BarCamp which we were sponsoring.
I had a really good time and met some really interesting people.
None of this would have been possible without the hard work of the organisers and volunteers, so I'd like to take this chance to thank them for all their selfless work - without people like them great events simply cannot happen.
Maybe this could become an annual event?
The Irish Internet Association annual awards, the Net Visionaries, will be held later this year.
The Net Visionary award is the only award in Ireland where the public can not only nominate the winners, but also vote for them. You don't need to be a member of the IIA, nor does the nominee.
You can nominate people under any one of the range of categories on the official site.
This year's categories include the introduction of both "blogger" and "podcaster"
Blacknight is sponsoring the "Web Designer Excellence" award.
Here at Blacknight we are passionate about blogging - or at least I am
Anyhow I thought you'd like to know that we've expanded on our support resources and have added a number of handy tutorials for users of Wordpress.
Enjoy!
Here at Blacknight we are passionate about blogs and blogging, or at least I am
As more and more companies embrace blogging and RSS to keep people up to date with their latest happenings the number of RSS feeds you may end up reading just keeps on growing.
A year ago I probably tracked ten or fifteen blogs on a regular basis and I only subscribed to the feeds of one or two. Nowadays I find myself tracking a much larger number, while my RSS subscription folder in Thunderbird just keeps on growing.
Services like Feedburner make it a lot easier for both bloggers and their readers to keep track of what's going on, while FeedBlitz offers you the option to get email updates as well.
Of course the biggest problem these days is finding blogs that are worth reading.
So where can you begin?
If you are interested in finding out what other Irish bloggers are saying then you could have a look at some of the Irish blog sites:
No matter what your area of interest you are sure to find a blog to suit your taste!
PS: You can now subscribe to this blog via both Feedburner and FeedBlitz!!