.. and you definately know they’re there! You can SEE them sitting snuggly in the folder complete with their correct number of bytes, via your FTP client, so why not in your browser? The answer is that you probably uploaded them using the incorrect method of transfer.  The choice is: ASCII or Binary.  ASCII is [...]

I came across this video today while following a discussion on Freelance Ireland’s group on LinkedIn. The discussion was about businesses or freelancers selling themselves short. Watch the video and see how ludicrous this is when you relate it to the vendor/client relationship in real life situations.

I absolutely love this. World Wide Web founder, Tim Berners Lee recently admitted at a symposium in Washington that the forward slashes in http addresses are completely unnecessary and the decision to include them was made on a whim. Now I don’t feel quite so bad about all those stupid, stupid filenames that, let’s face [...]

Microsoft recently announced on their blog that they will continue to support their now 8-year-old  browser IE6 until 2014. For readers unfamiliar with the reasons why this might be news-worthy,  it is mainly because we web designers have wasted half our lives trying to get our client’s websites to display correctly in this antiquated browser [...]

In my previous post 5 Essential Plug-ins for WordPress I listed some pretty basic ones that I wouldn’t put a WP site live without. This next round-up is a list of useful but not really essential plug-ins.

WordPress is the most widely used publising platforms available.  While it is fully functional straight out-of-the-box, there are a number of essential plug-ins that will greatly improve your blogging experience. WordPress plug-ins are very easy to install and with a large community of developers working with and using WordPress you will find a plug-in to [...]

If you don’t have an account with Paypal and you checkout using your credit card, you will probably have no problems. If you have an account with Paypal and you login you may not have any problems, but if you get too confident and start using it all over the shop (‘scuse the pun) you will run into problems.

Attention Web Designers and Developers! I am currently researching Content Management Systems in terms of ease of installation, customisation, availability of plugins/add-ons and end user-friendliness (is this even a word?).  I would really appreciate your help with this. I will be publishing my findings here and contributions I receive will be featured and linked so [...]

Using social media web sites to promote your business is a cost-effective way to market your products or services. However, it is not easy to see how your business can benefit from it when you look at these sites and all you see is people talking rubbish to each other.

The traditional Irish music label, Claddagh Records have launched their new online ordering website. Claddagh has access to more traditional Irish music than any other company, and will send it anywhere in the world! Use the code ‘claddaghlaunch’ at the checkout to received a 15% discount for a limited time.

My previous post,  Mills & Boon-style has secured me a free ticket to the IIA (Irish Internet Association) Congress ’09 later this week. The article was written in response to a competition for tickets on the IIA blog. The theme this year is: Better Business Online in a Tough Economy: Money, Marketing, Monitoring & Mobile [...]

Ambrose sat motionless, staring at the screen in front of him. He couldn’t quite believe what was slowly unfolding before his eyes.  Slowly, because he was, unfortunately, still on dial-up – even though he’d promised himself that he would find a broadband provider as soon as she… well, he couldn’t contemplate thinking about that now.  [...]

I love the idea behind the ideas Campaign!  It’s terrific – stop whinging and start acting – send in your ideas on how to solve Ireland’s economic problems. I had an idea I wanted to share so I went over there to submit it and was dismayed to find that the website uses a third [...]

THE potential offered by the Internet to the business owner is enormous. If you have a product or service to sell, you need a successful online presence. This means more than just getting the company website up-and-running – it means using the internet to market directly to consumers.

Why are we so reticent when it comes to discussing money? Clients will send out request for proposals looking for the sun, moon and stars but give no indication as to how much they have to spend.

Now here’s a great idea from lookandtaste.com .  I gave up ironing about three years ago, so I think I’ll try this just to make it feel loved again…

It gives me great pleasure to announce the arrival of rollingball.ie. RollingBall supply rehabilitation equipment designed to aid in the rehabilitation of neurological patients following stroke, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, as well as patients with multiple sclerosis or other neurological diseases and injuries. Coiscéim Eile Joan Ryan and her daughter were involved in [...]

Robot © Jack Ryan When unemployment figures are at an all time high, it is reassuring to read that Microsoft are busy working on virtual replacements capable of multi-tasking for those who still have jobs. Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, during a discussion about why Microsoft continues to invest in research [...]

[poll id="4"] If you have some ingenius way around this dilemma, please leave a comment. Thanks

Have you ever tried to migrate data from MS Access to MySQL? It should be straight-forward enough. Export to Excel, then save as CSV, import to MySQL.  You will probably need to customise the format of some fields such as date or currency. Checking that all the data has slipped nicely into the correct fields [...]

Recently I’ve been side-tracked by some unusual events in my life.   There was my first visit to the high court, swiftly followed by my first visit to a creditors meeting -  but that’s a story for another day. .. So distracted was I that I missed the publication of my guest posting on Joe Scanlon’s  [...]

My post yesterday must have upset Twitter…

Wednesday’s  poll produced some interesting results. The poll was set up to find out if Cork bloggers are in fact taking over the Internet. All Irish bloggers were invited to take part but only a fraction of visitors over the three days used their vote. 56%  of  visitors  over the last three days were from [...]

… off yis go now and read all about it:

There once was a blogger from Cork, who ate all his food from a fork, one day he was seen in old Skibbereen eating fish from a knife, what a dork!

Why are most Irish bloggers from Cork? Are they actually from Cork or do they just pretend? Because of course they could be from anywhere. This morning I visited a number of Irish blogs with a view to making some nominations to the Irish Blog Awards (to be held in Cork!) and this is how [...]

Lots of categories and a blog can be nominated in any category by anyone. Go there and vote – but please – don’t spoil your vote – read the rules first! Oh, and you can only vote once so if you leave out a category you can’t go back and nominate for that category later [...]

M e r r y   C h r i s t m a s a n d H a p p y   N e w   Y e a r

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The first mouse, built by Bill English, was made of wood and had one button. At a Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) on the 9th of December 1968, Inventor of the mouse, Douglas Engelhart, at that time a scientist at the Stanford Research Institute, first demonstrated how text files could be clipped, copied and pasted as well [...]

I neglected to mention the Young Designer of the Year award winner Naoise Ó Conchubhair in my previous posting. So upset was I that my site didn’t win, I stopped paying attention for a while… Naoise is studying Visual Communications and said his biggest challenge was to push the boundaries of graphic design whilst working within [...]

I hear that Sarah Palin has been big time shopping at great expense to the US Republican National Committee. Since early September bills for accessories alone came to almost $50,000 and hair & makeup almost $5,000. I reckon the major make-over will be well worth it if the party get lucky in the election and she has a [...]

yoox.com is a virtual boutique of multi-brand fashion & design. I discovered YOOX about 5 years ago when I was looking for something to wear to a wedding and have been receiving their weekly ezine to my inbox ever since. In all that time I don’t know if I’ve even spent 5 minutes looking at the clothes so distracted [...]

I  finally got around to setting this up after months, no, years of it sitting on the ‘to do’ list in my head.  I began some time ago by downloading WordPress version 2.0.6. By the time I uploaded it to my server, version 2.3.1was out – so I upgraded and put the ‘go live’ date [...]