Archive for Januar, 2009

Google says the Internet will harm you, even their own Website …

Posted on Januar 31, 2009, under Bugs.

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The internet is bad!

The internet is bad!

Google has patches something to its search results, which apparently is not really working. Whatever search you try it comes up with a warning about the site maybe harming your computer…

Google has been working on this kind of Malware warning for a while and seems to have implemented the ultimate filter. That also makes the Google Safe Browsing Diagnostics page redundant (which displays a 502 Error at the moment)

For more Information on thet topic: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2008/05/safe-browsing-diagnostic-to-rescue.html

Web Project Management (PM) & Quality Assurance (QA)

Posted on Januar 29, 2009, under General.

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During the last years I have met so many customers, who were not really happy with their web service agencies or web designers. I realised at some stage that all problems regarding “your new website” are due to one or more of the following factors:

  1. Inability of Communication – Client: “Why is he telling me something of Exchange Servers and POP or IMAP Protocol? All I want is email for my company!”
  2. Ignorance of Possibilities – Client: “Oh I thought that when I add a link to my site, it automatically links back to me …”
  3. Ignorance of Clients Needs – Service Provider: “He is alone and and has hardly any page updates during the year … great, I’m gonna sell him a Content Management System anyway”
  4. Lack of Knowledge regarding up-to-date Technologies - Service Provider: “No, its not possible to post to your blog using your email!”

I believe it is our duty as Web Service Providers or even companies in general to get to

  • Understand our clients and speak their language
  • Commit to their goals, rather than pushing them to what we think is best for them.  It does not make sense (except for our own profit) to sell them a sports car, if all they really need is a mountain bike
  • Keep up-to-date about technologies and trends

In this context we provide

Web Project Management

and independent

Web Quality Assurance.

Need a second opinion?
Contact us!

The Firm List – Honest business …

Posted on Januar 29, 2009, under General.

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I just got this reply to my request for mediadata, as i was thinking of paying for the Full Membership:

Hello Chris,

To be honest, I might be phasing out Full Memberships in the
near future. They really haven’t been worth it for me and I will
be exploring other options in the future.

Pretty much every firm who has become a Full Member firm has
done so to either try to get higher up in the list when they are
in a city/town with lots of listings, or else they feel they’ve gotten
a lot of benefit (in whatever way) from being on The Firm List and
chose to give a little back.

I really don’t think it will be all that beneficial for you… the features
I usually think are worth it are the chance to have more exposure
(on the site and in Google) through Profiles and Press Releases,
but I am exploring opening those up to all firms in the near
future, so it wouldn’t be fair to you.

Sorry I don’t have that data together and sorry to sound like I
am talking you out of giving me money, but I think it’s probably
the right thing.

Let me know if I can be of some other help.

I believe this is the true way of keeping customers. Well done, Matte.

The Firm List is a world-wide directory of web design and developement companies, it has about 15000 entries in over 170 countries.

Free SEO advice using IGOpeople

Posted on Januar 28, 2009, under General, SEM, SEO, SERP.

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After following the rush and registering with IGOpeople today, we have decided to give Free SEO Advice using this service. We will answer SEO and SEM related questions. If you have a website, that is not performing as you wish, let us know and we will have a quick look. All you have to do is register and contact us through our IGOpeople – Achill Online Internet Services -Profile-Page

If you want a more detailed analysis we are happy to offer you a

Website Health Check

for a promotional price of

129,- € incl. VAT

This offer is valid until the 30th of June 2009.  The Price for the Website Health Check can be set off against any optimisation we carry out.

Will the National Broadband Scheme (NBS) bring broadband to Achill Island?

Posted on Januar 27, 2009, under General.

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There is a short answer to that Question: “No, it won’t!”

Present Situation

Digital Subscriber Line or land-based (good ol’) broadband

At the moment the Achill Sound and the Bunacurry exchange are enabled for land-based DSL. Giving a theoretic download speed of up to 3Meg and an upload speed of 384K. In reality here in Achill Sound the speed is not far off. Using Irish ISP Speed Test I just now measured 2.58 Meg down and 327K up. I rang Eircom a few weeks ago asking for the 7Meg DSL and got the answer that it is not rolled out yet, but is due to come to Achill in 2009. The Eircom 7Meg broadband will also only allow an upload speed of 384K.

3G / HSDPA

The rest of Achill Island is broadband wasteland. The only company offering 3G broadband is 3. O2 and Vodafone have not set up there Network to serve 3G/UMTS/HSDPA. You can use the Three 3G Modem from whereever you have line of sight with the mast on Minaun, so there are really only a few spots, where you cant get it, e.g. Doogort East. The modem costs about 20,-€ per month and is available from Kilkellys on Main Street, Castlebar. The main drawback is that it gets really slow at weekends and at night and is nearly unusable at Bank Holiday Weekends, as all logged-in useres share the same bandwidth.

Satellite

The third (kind of) broadband solution is through satellite, but it is kind of unreliable, due to it’s sensitiveness to some weather conditions. It is also a bit difficult to set up, as the satellite beam is very narrow compared to satellite television. Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) through satellite is only possible with very few providers.

Two different kinds of satellite connections are available:

  1. Sending and reviewing the signal from the satellite, which requires a big dish and is very expensive. Here the speeds vary.
  2. “SkyDSL” – Sending the data through a telephone line and receiving through the satellite, which is less expensive. It still requires a telephone line, which is -unlike DSL- blocked by the signal. Here the upload speed is a maximum of 128K, which would require a double ISDN line, but usually it is about 56K using a simple telephone line and an analogue modem

The National Broadband Scheme (NBS)

The National Broadband Scheme (NBS) is supposed to provide 100 per cent broadband coverage to all of Ireland. BUT many rural areas of the county currently without a reliable broadband connection have been omitted from the scheme. AND the technology that will be used is inadequate and WILL NOT BRING broadband-speed.

Regions in Mayo omitted from the NBS

  • Louisburgh
  • Foxford
  • Kiltimagh
  • Kilmovee
  • ‘Lower Achill’ (all of Achill except the anyway already broadband-enabled exchanges)

For these regions only the above mentioned satellite connections will work (if they work).

The NBS

The Government has entered a scheme with communications company ‘3’, with a view to provide 100 per cent broadband coverage in Ireland by September 2010. With a €223 million investment ‘3’ is to extend its network to provide mobile wireless broadband services into the NBS areas. The download speed is supposed to be a minimum of 1.2Meg.

Unfortunately I believe that this speed will never be achieved in reality and will remain a theoretical figure. Furthermore at the present stage it is not possible to hook up a small company network to one of these plug-in-devices, so using it will be a one-man-show. Companies will not be able to use this technology to safely connect to the Internet using a central firewall or gateway. I also believe that the use of VPN will not be possible. The Company Commsoft sells the Dovado USB Mobile Broadband Router (UMR), which supports a wide range of USB (3G/HSPA, CDMA, iBurst) modems, particularly those used by Irish providers: O2, Vodafone and Three.

Definitions (by Wikipedia)

DSL or xDSL, is a family of technologies that provides digital data transmission over the wires of a local telephone network.  DSL can be used at the same time and on the same telephone line with regular telephone, as it uses high frequency, while regular telephone uses low frequency.Typically, the download speed of consumer DSL services ranges from 256 kilobits per second (kbit/s) to 24,000 kbit/s, depending on DSL technology, line conditions and service level implemented. Typically, upload speed is lower than download speed for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line.

High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is a 3G (third generation) mobile telephony communications protocol in the High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) family, which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity. Current HSDPA deployments support down-link speeds of 1.8, 3.6, 7.2 and 14.4 Mbit/s.

A virtual private network (VPN) is a computer network in which some of the links between nodes are carried by open connections or virtual circuits in some larger network (e.g., the Internet) as opposed to their conduction across a single private network. The link-layer protocols of the virtual network are said to be tunneled through the larger network when this is the case. One common application is secure communications through the public Internet, but a VPN need not have explicit security features, such as authentication or content encryption. VPNs, for example, can be used to separate the traffic of different user communities over an underlying network with strong security features.

Monitoring “achill island” on Google

Posted on Januar 26, 2009, under SEO, SERP.

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About two weeks ago I started a weekly monitoring of the search string “achill island” on Google.

Here a few interesting Facts about this search:

  • Even though the search shows “Results xxx of about 375,000 English pages for achill island. (0.45 seconds)”, Google will only show 661 results. Even after clicking on the link repeat the search with the omitted results included. It will only show a maximum of 872 results.
  • Doing first search beginning of January only scanned the first 100 results, returning 25 sites based on Achill Island.
  • Last week I went through all 661 results and ended up with a total of 44 results (6.66%) being local sites, of which 23 were in the first 100
  • Today I found 43 sites (6.51%), of which 24 were in the first 100
  • All together I found 49 local sites so far, some sites seem just dissappear, to reappear the week after.
  • Some sites I know have not made their way to this search at all. This tells, that the relevance of the website is minor in relation to the monitored search string.

In Detail:

  • www.art-gallery-ireland.com was on position 69 two weeks ago, and dissappeared last week. This week I found it on position 269
  • www.blackfield.com appeared under the name www.twilightguardian.com two weeks ago as well as this week
  • www.redfoxpress.com dropped from position 72 to 191 and came back to 81 this week
  • www.clubachill.net made a leap from position 417 last week to position 243
  • www.achill-surf.com dissappeared.

Winner & Looser

This weeks winner are: www.clubachill.net (+174) and www.redfoxpress.com (+110). This weeks looser are: www.achillbliss.com (-23), www.realtnamara.com (-20), www.achill-ireland.com (-16) and www.achill.com (-15)

Top & Bottom

On the first page of the Google Search results you will find: www.achilltourism.com (1), www.achill-ireland.com (3), www.visitachill.com (5), www.achill247.com (7) and www.achillproperty.com (9). On the last page you will find: www.achillholidayhomes.com (470)

Application Error apache.exe – Modul msvcr71.dll

Posted on Januar 20, 2009, under Bugs, Knowledgebase.

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I just came across a little problem with my XAMPP installation. After reorganising some local virtual webservers in my %SYSTEM%/drivers/etc/host and %APACHE%/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

I could not restart my apache through the XAMPP Control Panel it just kept crashing with the error

	Fehlgeschlagene Anwendung apache.exe, Version 2.2.4.0,
	fehlgeschlagenes Modul msvcr71.dll, Version 7.10.3052.4,
	Fehleradresse 0x000017fb.

I restarted my machine but no change. I checked out the changes I had made to the httpd.conf file an realized I had not only used blanks in my webserver path -which worked fine so far, if quoted-, but also “umlaut” or mutated vowels. After changing these to the international circumscription, everything worked fine and I was able to restart my apache.

NameVirtualHost www.dapper-anhaenger.loc

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerName www.dapper-anhaenger.loc
	DocumentRoot "E:/2009/Dapper Anhänger/de.anhaenger-dapper.www"
	DocumentRoot "E:/2009/Dapper_Anhaenger/de.anhaenger-dapper.www"
	<Directory "E:/2009/Dapper Anhänger/de.anhaenger-dapper.www">
	<Directory "E:/2009/Dapper_Anhaenger/de.anhaenger-dapper.www">
		AllowOverride All
		Order allow,deny
		Allow from all
	</Directory>
	ErrorLog "E:/2009/Dapper Anhänger/de.anhaenger-dapper.www/error.log"
	ErrorLog "E:/2009/Dapper_Anhaenger/de.anhaenger-dapper.www/error.log"
	CustomLog "E:/2009/Dapper Anhänger/de.anhaenger-dapper.www/access.log" common
	CustomLog "E:/2009/Dapper_Anhaenger/de.anhaenger-dapper.www/access.log" common
</VirtualHost>

Setting up my business in Ireland

Posted on Januar 20, 2009, under General.

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After having arrived to Achill Island in February 2008, our first year was much about settling down. Finding a nice house, organising “our new life” here in Ireland and looking after my business relationships and clients in Germany. For 2009 I set myself a few goals, which included the increase of my local business activities.

eWrite, Cork

End of 2008 I had done some work for eWrite and it seemed a good opportunity to develop this relationship. So, a few weeks ago I went down to Cork to meet with the guys from eWrite and to attend the first Cork Open Coffee of 2009. It was an interesting two days, as I got to meet a few people that I knew from Twitter, which I had joined only a few weeks before.

My contact person at eWrite was Gordon Murray, I had briefly met him last year. As he has always been very supportive, I was looking forward to meet him again and to discuss the possibilities of intensifying our business relationship. I also got to meet John Fitzgerald of eWrite for the first time and we have been in eMail contact since.

Work I have done for eWrite include the Design of a website for Gerard Kearney – Close Up Magician and Browne Brothers – Site Services. At the moment eWrite and myself are working on a product bundle, that we will be developing and marketing together.

Open Coffee Club, Limerick

I have been asked to redesign the Blog of the LOCC (Limerick Open Coffee Club), a draft will be available soon and I will be travelling to Limerick to meet the people there.

Serving Local Businesses

So far I have redesigned the Websites of a company that does accounting anf tax consultanting in Castlebar, the Ferndale Fine Dining Restaurant & Luxury Guesthouse (Keel) and Ferndale Design (Keel)

Outlook for 2009

For the year 2009 I plan to attend the Open Coffee in the Innovation in Business Centre (IiBC) at GMIT Castlebar or maybe organise an Open Coffee in Castlebar. Furthermore the developement of a new Achill Island Website (achill-island.info) is planned.