Anyone who knows me knows The Doors are (or were) my favourite band. I’ve got all the albums, T-shirts, read all the books, visited Jim’s grave, been in a Doors cover band and even got a tattoo of Jim Morrison on my arm! So I guess this gig like the previous 2 Doors gigs I’d seen could never have lived up to my expectations or memories, especially without Jim and Densmore. Their current tour seems to have been planned to coincide with the new Doors movie “When You’re Strange” which I’ve yet to see..

After a long, meandering (yeh, we got lost) walk to the new Grand Canal Theatre in Dublins refurbished docklands, we met with old friends from our gigging days and fellow members of our Doors Cover band “The End” bought a few ridiculously overpriced drinks and sat down in the very plush theatre to anticipate what promised to be something different – the Doors music accompanied by a 50 piece strong orchestra! I had a couple of well liked classical recordings featuring both Nigel Kennedy and George Winston so I knew it could work but it didn’t on this occasion.

About 10 seconds into the first song “Love Me Two Times” I turned to my friend and said, “this is going to be a  long night”!I think maybe the playing of both Manzarek, Krieger and the rest of the band and the orchestra was accomplished but either the sound engineer, theatre designer or booking agent should be shot. For nearly the entire gig, except for parts where the band played quietly or not at all, I couldn’t hear the orchestra one bit. Couldn’t pick out the strings, wind, timpani, nothing…Manzarek’s keyboard and Krieger’s guitar hurt my ears and the stand in lead singer who was way too young and fit looking compared to the other old rockers, was just a screamer and regularly cocked up songs including one memorable occasion when he fell over a monitor!

The song choices saved the nght a little bit with some of the more obsure Doors songs getting an outing for once with songs from all 6 Doors studios albums. It seemed like a totally different gig after the interval, still with sound problems but the audience came to life dancing and singing along, with a little element of anarchy, Jim would have approved! I suspect some drugs were consumed during the break!

I’m still glad I went if only to see 2 of the surviving members of one of the world’s greatest and most influential rock bands but I’m done now..

Leon..

Here’s a video of the intro song, “Love Me 2 Times”:

Here’s some photos:

[View with PicLens]

Happy to pencil off seeing another great of modern music at the O2 tonight and a real treat to see one of my guitar heros and one of the best living guitarists, Mark Knopfler, lead singer and guitarist with Dire Straits.

I mention his old band as not a lot of people I talked to beforehand seemed to know who he is/was! Dire Straits are responsible for all time greats such as “Money for Nothing”, “Sultans of Swing”, “Walk of Life”, “Romeo & Juliet”, “Brother’s in Arms” and a lot more, only some of which he played tonight, preferring instead to focus on his own solo stuff, not a lot of which I knew but it didn’t really matter to me what he played! I knew it would all be great and so it was..

I was here mainly to see Mark play guitar up close in his own unique, fingerstyle, brilliant way and to hear that unmistakable lead guitar, volume controlled, strat tone he’s become famous for. Him and his band didn’t dissapoint.

We were treated to an evening of musical and instrumental mastery with a seated (he blamed a trapped nerve!) Mark doing his trademark guitar swapping for nearly every song. He played Strats, Gibsons, Dobro and Acoustic all equally brilliantly and his excellent band all swapped between instruments ranging from Guitar, Upright Bass, Keyboard and Piano to Flute, Accordion, Pipes and a few I’d never even seen before. A very talented and melodic bunch who eased out multiple dynamic musical styles from Folksy to Ballad to Rock to Blues.

It was my kinda live music, very easy on the ears, not too loud, melodic, tap along and upbeat. The O2 acoustics were crystal clear and obviously suit this kind of music way more than some of the louder rock gigs I’ve seen there recently since the rebuild.

It was a shame the point wasn’t full but at least it gave me some extra leg room for once! It was still a decent crowd but for some reason they couldn’t sit still, with everyone constantly up and down for drinks etc..

Rock on Knopfler.

Blogs in general (including some of my own posts here!) are some of the most trafficked sites on the net and the first thing that pops into most people’s heads when it comes to monetizing that traffic is advertising. I’ve been using some of Tribulant’s excellent WordPress plugins and was delighted to see that they had a Banner Advert plugin as I needed one for a new online venture AboutLeitrim.ie.Tribulant’s Ad plugin is compatible with the current version of WordPress (2.9.2 as I write this) and goes in easily in the usual way. Here’s a quick rundown on what the plugin can do:

• Multiple Predefined and Custom Ad Sizes & Zones.
• Multiple Sidebar Widgets.
• Manual Embedding/Hardcoding into your theme.
• Page and Post Embedding.
• Order or Random Ads
• Static Image, Text and Flash Ads supported.
• Integrated Ad Banner Upload.
• HTML and Google AdSense supported.
• Banner URL’s.
• Ajax Ad Rotation with Time setting.
• Impressions, Click and CTR Tracking.

Some standout features for me are:

• Template embedding of Banners and zones.
• Ad Ordering or Random rotation (you choose).
• Click Tracking.
• Ad placement/Zone flexibility.
• Ad duration settings.

The click tracking might be a method of charging your advertising clients per click or view rather than monthly, weekly etc..

The plugin is very reasonably priced at $30 and perfectly stable. Full demos are available on the Tribulant site.

Get it HERE.

We’ve been looking for a house to rent or buy for ages now and I also have an iPhone, so app = handy being able to browse or search homes while in bed or while out and about actually lookin for houses ‘manually’. I’ve tried a few different property apps including MyHome’s and PropertyNews but the Daft one wins hands down.

Propertynews, while feature rich seems to have a Northern Irish/UK bias and I don’t like the map based navigation of MyHome. I prefer a simple list.

Here are the features and reasons I like the Daft app:

• Ease and speed of use.
• List type results with images and main details.
• Photo viewer.
• Comprehensive search filters.
• “Nearby” Searches.
• Maps.
• Quick links to Call or Email agents.
• Bookmark properties.
• Sales & Rentals.
• Sorting.

Hope we find a home to buy soon, only looking for about 7 years now..

Leon.

Took my time going to see this but finally managed to catch it last weekend in the Gaiety Cinema Sligo. It was difficult to avoid all the hype about this film in the last few months and the danger was that it would never live up to its hype. Some early reports suggested as is common with these films that the whole thing was FX and no plot. Well I’m happy to say that for me and my 3 fellow cinema goers it lived up to all expectations and surpassed them!

We got in a bit late some 10 mins after the film started and turned to confront a 3D bespectacled audience which was a bit surreal! Looking at the film without our freely supplied (and get to keep!) 3D glasses wasn’t possible but when I put them on my jaw dropped. I think maybe the last time I saw anything in 3D was a Commodore 64 shoot ‘em up back in the 80′s and maybe some roller coaster thing at Funderland about as long ago so this was a new experience for me.

Looking at a 3D movie like Avatar on a big screen (and in the front row too!) makes you feel like like you’re in the movie and the action surrounds you, helped by the surround sound too no doubt. It was hard to resist reaching out to try grab stuff and lookin like a twat to all behind! Several times during the movie we had to duck and dive to avoid gas cannisters and the like! The “Bioluminescent ” nighttime forest was absolutely gorgeous and you just wanted to be there running around the trees with the scantily clad (and rather sexy I thought!) Na’vi natives. 3D apart the film was a glorious, panoramic technological achievement along the lines of Beowulf or the recent Christmas Carol which if I understand it correctly use a combination of motion capture and CGI to create ultra realism.

In Avatar, gone are the wonky eyes and rigid movement of previous GCI flicks and the facial closeups were incredibly detailed. The action was smooth and some of the scenery and interactions were breathtaking and tear inducing not because of the emotion of the scene but the sheer beauty of it.

The story was a classic big cinema tale with superb action sequences, underdogs standing up, love, acceptance etc..with currently relevant “Green”, “Data Sharing” and “Networking” themes and strangely (but refreshingly) for once the US army were the bad guys and the strange Alien Na’vi race turned out winners. Perhaps the Bio Electrical, shared knowledge, live forest in the film is indicative of where Social Networking will eventually lead!

Go see it if you havn’t..awesome.

Leon.

Looked forward to this gig greatly. It’s not often you get to see a Beatle live and my favorite one at that!

The luas extension to the O2 from our Tallaght base was dead handy and we arrived in good time on a freezing night to grab a warming coffee and find our seats, or so we thought! It turned out that between the time I chose my seats while booking priority tickets online to the time I paid, I managed to go from securing great seats to standing only. Pretty disappointing as I vowed never to stand at a gig again after U2 in Slane. Bad back you see. I was pretty pissed of for a while as I thought I booked seats and I don’t know why there was a block and seat number on the printed tickets? Sure enough by the end of the night I was in agony both from standing and from the bitch beside me who seemed to think she was the only one at the gig and flailed around whacking everyone close to her..

Moaning out of the way, it was an awesome gig. The countdown started with an incredible, vertically scrolling montage/slideshow of images from the 60′s inluding many photos and press cuttings of the Beatles and other big names and events from the era including Hendrix and Joplin.

Being someone who makes these kinds of slideshows myself but on a much smaller scale, I could really appreciate the work that went into all the cutouts and layout. The whole thing lasted about 20 mins and played to a backing track of Beatles remixes. Very impressive.

Paul and his excellent band came on at about 8:30 and started off with “Magical Mystery Tour” complete with psychedelic video backgrounds. He then spent the next two and a half hours going through only part of an awesome back catalog of Beatles and Wings tunes with some if his solo stuff thrown in as well as one or 2 covers including a bit of Hendrix!

Highlights for me included, a very emotional solo, acoustic tribute to Lennon “Here Today”, an explosive (literally) version of “Live and Let Die”, “Something” (played partly on Ukulele!), an acoustic version of “Blackbird” and all the great piano standards like “Hey Jude”, “Long and Winding Road” and “Let it Be”. I counted 5 different instruments played equally well by Paul. Bass, Guitar, Ukulele, Mandolin and Piano. Pity he didn’t give the Drums a bash although the band drummer was excellent.

McCartney was on form all night and was his usual wise cracking self and threw in quite a few phrases as gaeilge, with decent pronunciation, the least you’d expect from a lad from “Ireland’s real capital, Liverpool” as he cheekily said!

The band returned for 2 encores at the end and the night didn’t seem to to take much out of a guy pushing 70. You got the feeling he could have gone on all night. I would happily have listened all night too if it wasn’t for my back giving in..

Definitely a gig to remember and great to have seen a living legend. Here’s some Pics, Video and a Setlist:

[View with PicLens]

Magical Mystery Tour
Drive My Car
Jet
Only Mama Knows
Flaming Pie
Got To Get You Into My Life
Let Me Roll It/Foxy Lady (tribute to Jimi Hendrix!)
Highway
Long And Winding Road
(I Want To) Come Home
My Love (tribute to Linda)
Blackbird
Here Today (moving tribute to “friend John”)
Dance Tonight (one of his best recently written songs!)
And I Love Her
Eleanor Rigby (great)
Something (started off with solo ukulele!)
Mrs Vandebilt
Sing the Changes
Wonderful Christmas Time (he had to do 1 xmas song!)
Band on the Run (great version!)
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Back in the USSR
I’ve Got a Feeling (great riff!)
Paperback Writer
A Day in the Life/Give Peace a Chance
Let It Be
Live and Let Die (explosive!)
Hey Jude

Encore1
Day Tripper
Lady Madonna
Get Back

Encore 2
Yesterday (awesome!)
Helter Skelter
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Leon.

One of the top feature requests by web design clients is of course the ability to sell items online and I’ve had to do a bit of research to find a suitable and robust shop plugin for my web design tool of choice WordPress. There’s a few smaller, basic plugins that do a job but for a proper cart the main plugin seems to be WP-ecommerce but I’ve had nothing but trouble with that, seems very buggy. Sometimes you just have to go commercial with plugins and get what you pay for! So here’s my recommendation for the best all round commercial wordpress shopping cart plugin at the time of writing.It’s logically called WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin by Tribulant Software and its priced at a very reasonable, once off $50 for a single installation. Here’s a rundown on the highlight features:

• Unlimited Products and Categories.
• Support for automatic Digital Product sales.
• Multiple payment methods including Paypal and Manual.
• Multiple Currencies.
• Customisable shipping structure.
• Discount Coupons.
• Product Variations/Styles.
• Inventory Countdown.
• Product embedding in wordpress posts and pages.
• Multiple widgets available.
• Custom Fields.
• Ajax powered content tabs.

The standout features for me are:

• Digital Product support.
• Ajax (fast loading) product information tabs.
• Flexible pricing and shipping options.
• Custom Fields.
• Realex Payment Integration.

There’s also a very interesting setting to make any product an External/Affiliate item. I also like the Recommended Retail Price option which displays the RRP struck out over the actual price. The checkout procedure is very nicely laid out in a step by step method which should help conversions and minimise confusion, a common problem on e-commerce sites.

The plugin is way lighter than its rival wp-ecommerce, is pretty much bug free as far as I can see and  is compatible with recent versions of wordpress including the current 2.8.5.

This is about the best e-commerce plugin currently available for wordpress and the price won’t break the bank.

Get it now on the Tribulant site.

Leon.

* UPDATE – Unfortunately I have had to stop using this plugin due to confusion between standard wordpress posts/categories and shop products. If you are not running or displaying a blog then this may not affect you.

It was never my intention to go to see U2 on their current world tour being just a casual fan but I wanted to have a quick look at the Ticketmaster site to see if all dates had sold out and when I found myself on the checkout screen with 2 good seats available I just said what the hell, might as well go!

I’d only been to see U2 once before in Slane and was a bit knackered having to stand in a field all day (my last outdoor/field type concert!). The sound was a bit crappy too so I wanted to make up for that by seeing them in a more comfortable venue. I managed to get good seats for the first night in the lower Hogan stand at the end of the stadium where they had to put the stage/claw. Croke park couldn’t allow the stage to be centered due to safety restrictions on Hill 16 but it suited us as we ended up right in front of the action!

The support acts, Damien Dempsey and Glasvegas were odd choices with the later completely boring the crap out of both of us! U2 came on at about 9pm after Space Oddity by Bowie and with a little less fanfare than previous shows (remember the Lemon!?) or the mighty stage setup suggested. They started off with a few songs off the new album “No line on the horizon” which I’d been listening to for a week or so before hand and loving. I’d been looking forward to hearing “Magnificent” and it was a pretty good version.

As the show went on U2 seemed to pick up pace and the crowd, a lot of which were pretty late arriving, came alive. Bono’s vocals were better than expected and the overall sound was pretty good. Highlights for me were “Magnificent”, “The Auld Triangle”, the Acoustic sets, Bloody Sunday and Bono’s Laser Coat and Mic Dangling!

Lowlights included whatever song that was were Larry came out for a walk with a bongo and the nonsense with the masks!I was also a bit surprised that there was no encore. I can’t remember the last time I was at any kind of gig and the band didn’t come out to do 1 or 2 more songs although in fairness, they played a long set and the audience didn’t really demand more.

However, the undoubted highlight of the show was not a performance, song or event but the actual stage itself! As it got darker the ridiculous thing lit up in all sorts of amazing ways and you couldn’t take your eyes off it. At one point about midway through and almost imperceptibly, the massive 360 degree screen expanded downwards to about 3 or 4 times its original height!

Towards the end, the glitter ball I’d noticed at the top of the spike emanating from the claw and rising above the height of the Croke park roof, came alive and drenched the audience and possibly most of Dublin city in beautiful sparkles. About the only thing the stage didn’t do was get up and walk about! Maybe for future U2 gigs..

All in all it was a memorable show and proof that U2 are still the biggest and most original band in the world.

Here’s some photos from the night:

[View with PicLens]

Here’s the setlist for the night, a pretty good mix of old and new:

Breathe
No Line on the Horizon
Get On Your Boots
Magnificent
Beautiful Day
Elevation
Stuck in a Moment That You Can’t Get Out Of
Desire (Bono and the Edge acoustic)
The Auld Triangle
One
Until the End of the World
Unforgettable Fire
City of Blinding Lights
Vertigo
I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Pride (In the Name of Love)
MLK
Walk On
Where the Streets Have No Name
Bad >
40 (Tease) >
Fool to Cry (Tease) >
40 (Reprise)
—
Ultraviolet
With or Without You
Moment of Surrender

Had our daughter’s christening recently and decided to pull out all the stops and have a great party because of the length of time it took to have her (5 years infertility treatment) and also partly to avoid cooking and preparing food for the 50 people that said they’d come! So for the first time ever we decided to get catering in and we tried a few local places, got some quotes etc before finally settling on the Bay Leaf Restaurant in Drumshanbo, Leitrim after having been there for dinner one Sunday afternoon.

We settled on salads and cold meats from the menu and presumed it would be fairly basic stuff and even worried we wouldn’t get enough to feed 50 but when I went to pick it up the day of the christening I got a ton of Caviar Canapes, Foie Gras, Salmon on Brown Bread, Pasta Salad, Rice Bowls, French Beans, Ham and Almond mix, Chicken, Ham & Beef cold meat platters as well as Potato Salad and Coleslaw!

There was enough food to feed 70 more like, all gorgeous and it went down well with all guests.

Prices are very reasonable and the owner John is a nice guy.

The Bay Leaf – 0719640461.

For me, one of the most important plugins you can have for your wordpress powered Blog or Website is a good Newsletter/Mailing List system. Recently, I’ve researched and tested out quite a few both free and paid for and this one is the best I’ve come across so far.

Its called “WordPress Mailing List Plugin” and is available for $49.99 dollars for a single installation from Tribulant Software. After having a good look at their online demo, I paid my fee and installed it on my own VPS Plesk server. It’s a much smaller (file size) plugin than some of the others I have used but packs quite a rich feature list in. Installation was fine on wordpress 2.7.1 despite the presence of a ton of other plugins on my blog including one other newsletter plugin.

Here are some of its standard features you’d expect:

• Double Opt In Auto Subscriptions.
• Full management from the WordPress Admin.
• Sidebar and Post/Page Subscribe Form.
• Add Attachments.
• Import/Export Subscribers.
• Newsletter Templates.
• Email Scheduling.
• Bounce Email Management.
• Automated Latest Posts Subscription.

Here are some extra features that stood out for me:

• Multiple Different Mailing Lists.
• Publish newsletter as a post and vice versa.
• Paid subscriptions (Paypal & 2CheckOut).
• Email Tracking.

Of particular issue to me was the Import/Export functions. I needed to port my existing list from my previous plugin and this was a pretty simple procedure except for a slight complication caused by the old system.

Creating new Lists and Emails/Newsletters is a breeze and sending them out was error free.

The killer feature is probably the ability to generate ‘offsite’ code which allows you to embed the newsletter signup on any other non-wordpress site.

If you need a comprehensive email newsletter solution that covers all bases but is easy enough to use, paying for this is well worth it!

Get it HERE.

Leon.

Got intercepted by the guys at PageLime CMS during a Twitter conversation about something related to CMS’s and ended up checking out their site and system! The power of Twitter eh!? I’d like to do a quick review of their site, software and service here. I’ve seen a similar system to this before but this is well impressive. The basic idea with their system, which is a hosted, online service (SAAS) is that, instead of building a new site using a content management system or re-building one from the ground up to include a CMS, with PageLime you can quite easily apply the CMS to an existing, static site which is quite cool!

The PageLime Website is quite nice looking and easy to navigate. Their Demo Video made me want to try it to see if it actually worked because I couldn’t envisage one website being able to access and update mine as described! Signing up was painless and I got a nice, human looking welcome message from one of the site owners.

The control panel for the CMS is quite slick but perhaps my only gripe would be that, I found it slightly hard to navigate initially. Sometimes simple rather than slick is best guys!

So here’s how the system actually works. You need to add a CSS class ID to any section of your pages or even images to make them editable with PageLime. This is easy enough to do for any decent web designer and not something a client would need to do. While this might be a bit of initial hassle for a large site, at the end of it you’ll have a site that can be completely updated by a client but you can keep layout areas blocked in case they do damage. Client user accounts can be added easily and the system includes an image browser/uploader and everything else you might need without having to resort to external applications although webbies might find it hard to part with Dreamweaver and the likes for adding the CSS code.

The system is currently free but might be monetized soon so give it a bash quickish!

Leon.

I was invited by Invoicera themselves to review their Online Invoicing Application following my review of Zoho Invoice. Here goes.

The signup link on the Invoicera site is pretty obvious and as with most of these online services, theres a free account option so I clicked signup. The form is simple enough with 2 pages asking for some basic personal info and then some location and currency questions followed by an activation email which arrived straight away.

The system has the usual functions you’d expect from Invoicing including the ability to add Clients, Estimates, Invoices, Products/Services, etc.. I tried adding a Client first but found it tricky. I had to choose an Invoicera address for them and the one I picked was taken so it returned me to an empty form and made me type all my new client info again which is not good! I was able to add an estimate for the newly created client straight away which you can’t do with Zoho so one up there. You can also setup recurring client profiles for repeating bills which is always handy.

I must compare Invoicera with Zoho Invoice as these are the only 2 online invoicing systems I’ve used and I continue to use and be very happy with Zoho. The pricing is similar with Invoicera charging per Client and Zoho charging per Estimate/per month but Zoho seems more advanced and it looks and perfoms a bit better. Invoicera seems to be the simpler, more basic of the two so perhaps it should be slightly cheaper?

Invoicera has a many more payment gateways/modes than Zoho but as far as I could see, lacks the ability to send customised automatic reminders to customers via email to pay their bills, something I use a lot these days! Theres is also a comprehensive reporting facility as is standard.

I might sum up by saying that I’d reccommend Invoicera for smaller businesses who want something simple to use and Zoho for slightly larger businesses looking for more functionality.

I’d been with the same shared hosting company since I went commercial with my small web design business around 2005 and I can’t really fault the service from them. I continue to use them for my clients sites and I’m happy enough. However, there comes a time when you need to expand!

I’d heard of dedicated website hosting and liked the idea. I’d always been a loner anyway so the idea of having a computer all to myself to do what I wanted with was exiting! Of course physical dedicated hosting was and is prohibitively expensive so when this whole cloud computing revolution came upon us and companies started offering ‘virtual’ dedicated hosting with all of the benefits of physical dedicated hosting but at a much more reasonable rate, I got interested. My internet presence was also growing and couldn’t be accommodated effectively by the old host.

I’m a regular reader of PC Live magazine where Blacknight have regular adds and that where I first noticed their VPS service so after a pile of questions to their support and CEO (who conveniently hangs out on twitter a lot!), I was ready to commit.

Basically VPS hosting lets you manage your own virtual operating system on which you can install whatever software you wish and configure the system from the ground up. Typically VPS servers are not quite as powerful performance wise as shared servers but because you’re not sharing with hundreds if not thousands of other sites, the performance evens out.

The beauty of a VPS system is that you can control everything from apache configuration to adding new websites to server wide spam control and all from a pretty easy to use interface (presuming your subscription includes control panel access as mine does). The downside is that the buck stops with you. You are responsible for whatever happens (or doesn’t happen in my case!) on your server and theres no-one there to bail you out if you mess up. I found that you can have a little TOO much control sometimes!

The stand out feature for me is probably the (pretty much) one-click installation of web applications on any domain/site you have. New applications can be made available by uploading distribution packages from www.apsstandard.org/app. This at least saves me the hassle of uploading massive installation files on a shit broadband speed.

I must also say that Blacknight support and in particular Tara, have been fantastic in explaining some of the basic concepts and pointing me in the right direction for some tasks I just couldn’t figure out. Perhaps because their service is new enough, the Knowledge Base and Forum are not that well populated yet so some email support was required on startup.

I’m on the Linux VPS Basic (Debian 4.0) + Plesk 8 option which costs about €52 per month.

Check out www.blacknightvps.com

Leon

I had just got hold of a few HD movie files when I came across this wireless HD media player on the Elara website so I snapped it up for what I thought was a reasonable price and actually would have been had it worked!

The unit promised both wired (via LAN) and Wi-Fi streaming of multimedia content from your PC including MP3′s, WAV’s, Photos and HD Video. The inclusion of a USB socket swung it for me so I bought it from Elara.ie which is not a site I like much but as I said the price was ok. The unit arrived and I got the hardware setup easily and quicklessly before tackling the software side.

Upon entering the included CD I was presented with a setup interface the “setup” button of which opened up Windows Media Player 11 (required) and asked me to go into the Library menu and setup “Media Sharing”. WMP11 found the device ok but I had to re-add my music folder locations which took half the day with my 500GB or so of files! Once that was finished and once I proved the player was on my network by updating the Firmware online via the unit’s menus, I went looking for my media files. Nearly 2 weeks later it still hadn’t found them! I also loaded a usb stick with some HD video and tried to play it but it kept skipping so nothing really worked for me.

I searched the manual, google and even emailed D-Link support for a few days but no luck. I suspect there was some kind of router/firewall issue but to be honest people can’t be expected to figure out all that stuff themselves so I’ve repackaged it and hope to sell it on soon!

For those of you with Intel VIIV PC’s, you might have more luck as apparently its easier to setup with those.

The only broadband I’ve been able to get in my current location in Leitrim is O2′s mobile broadband usb dongle which, for the most part has been fine but sharing the connection around the house via LAN or WiFi is tricky.Traditional routers only accept the likes of Eircom landline or wireless broadband LAN feeds in the back and don’t support 3G modems so your stuck using whatever pc you have the dongle plugged into. Of course you can plug it out and stick in in another computer or laptop but then maybe you wont get a signal in another part of the house. I personally have to have my dongle stuck up in one particular window with bluetack!

With the help of a knowledgable tech friend I was able to setup an unused slave pc upstairs into which I plugged the dongle then fed a LAN cable out the window, down the wall and into the office. This gave me a WiFi network but was a lot of hassle and my partner weasn’t too pleased about a noisy pc in her room! So I badly needed some kind of simple solution and last week it came.

I found out by chance (either through Twitter or Irish Press Releases, can’t remember which!) that Commsoft, an irish company, were selling the first 3G usb broadband router that I’d ever heard of so I snapped it up off their site immediately! It came quick enough in the post and very easy to setup.

You simply connect it up to your pc via LAN, stick your dongle in the back, power it up and visit http://192.168.0.1 in a browser and click ‘Start Wizard’. All questions were easy apart from the dongle APN (Access Point Name) which I’d no idea about until I read up and checked the settings in my dongle connection software. You then save the settings and restart the modem and it connects your modem for you! The router has all the functions you’d normally expect from a router and the wifi is fine. I can now go online on the iphone in bed at a decent speed!

* UPDATE

The above 3G UMR router has now been replaced with the Dovado 3GN, basically a smaller, faster version of the UMR and supporting 802.11n as well as higher modem speeds.

Check out the router here – http://www.Commsoft.ie/shop/3gn.php

Leon.

I caught a video of some of the new features in WordPress 2.7 a few weeks back and since then I’ve been eagerly awaiting its official release (no beta man me!). So it arrived yesterday and I finally got to play with it.

First off, I used WordPress Automatic Upgrade as always to upgrade to 2.7 and it done the job ok. Only ok I say because it never turned back on my plugins but maybe this was a blessing in disguise as I then decided to turn them all on one by one to see if anything cocked up. Out of all my lengthy list of plugins, all re-activated and only 2 had problems when I tried to actually use them again – ‘Share This Newsletter’ and ‘Loudervoice’. After some minor tinkering with Share This I got it working again but I await word on Loudervoice.

I also found that 1 or 2 plugins could be discarded as their functions are now covered in WP 2.7, ie – ‘Ozh Admin Dropdown menus’ because the new menu system is sleek and ‘WordPress Automatic Upgrade’ itself as WP 2.7 now has automatic upgrade built in. Yay!

My WordPress theme, K2 is sometimes a problem on these upgrades but everything seems fine there too and the main front end of the blog looks exactly the same so happy days!

Here’s some of my favorite features of the new admin:

• Love the minimalist feel and design and like the new icons.
• The new admin plugin installer lets you upload plugins directly from your pc which will make it easier for my clients to add their own plugins in future instead of me doing it or telling them to use ftp. You can also install external featured and popular plugins with a couple of clicks directly from admin.
• You can customize the layout and tidy up most screens, eg – Dashboard, Edit Posts, etc.. handy for the OCD’s amongst us!
• The new menu system is great and if you compress it it acts like a drop down/fly-out!
• That afore mentioned built in automatic upgrade should be cool, hope it works as well as my previous plugin though.
• Like the ‘QuickPress’ function on the dashboard through which I’m writing this post!
• Love the Quick Edit’ function on the Edit Pages, Posts and Comments screens.
• Liking the Bulk editing functions also.
• The word count at the bottom of the description editor is handy!

Here’s some of my least favorite features:

• The text at the bottom of the admin – “Thank you for creating with WordPress, etc…” is in italics and looks shit like all italics on the web!
• Em, can’t think of anything else at the min….

All in all this new WordPress 2.7 seems to be built more efficiently both in terms of performance and time saving functions as well as giving you the opportunity to reduce clutter and generally speed up your blogging. It was worth the wait and excitement.

Leon.

Heres one of the coolest applications for the iphone yet! Its called Shazam and once downloaded and installed on your iphone you can hold your phone up to the speaker on your Hi-Fi, TV, Radio or whatever plays music (not your own voice, good as mine is!) and in a few seconds it will tell you the name of the Song, Artist & Album and give you links to purchase on iTunes, links to Youtube videos and links to share the song with your friends! Don’t know how the hell it works but its awesome!

“Sitecheck” is a useful online tool from www.siteimprove.com for checking and improving your website so it performs better in the areas of Accessibility, Navigation, Spelling and more..

During the trial I submitted my main web address and a few days later I received an email with a password protected link to my results. This results area presents VERY comprehensive lists of:

• Broken Links (internal & external)
• Mis-spellings
• Missing ‘Alt’ Image Tags
• Accessibility problem areas
• HTML Validation

The results screen also presents a ‘Site Inventory’ section with lists of everything on your site from Documents & Email addresses to Pages, Meta Tags & Media such as images and video.

Summaries are available on each tab to show info at a glance and you can export everything to a pdf report.

I found the results helpful in fixing a few linking and spelling problems with my site but the amount of info presented is huge and would take forever to go through and fix but this might be because theres nearly 1,000 pages in my site which is probably not typical!

Prices are per year of access to your site results and you can re-check your site when you want.

Leon.

Just noticed the download link for the new Google Chrome (Beta) on my Google.ie hompage today and decided to check it out. Knowing Google, I expected it to be excellent!

As expected really, Chrome is pretty minimalist like the google site itself and it has a clean, fresh interface which seems pretty fast to load sites. Unlike some browsers (IE6 are you listening!?) most sites I browsed while testing looked exactly as they should and as they do in other browsers such as IE 7, Safari and my own beloved Firefox.

On first run, you’r asked if you’d like to import favorites from your default browser which needs to be closed first. It placed my firefox toolbar bookmarks in exactly the same order as in firefox which was cool and it has tabbed browsing which is essential these days and something that all the good browsers have.

When you first start chrome it shows tabular thumbnails of the most visited sites you’ve hit as well as a list of your recently bookmarked sites, handy features.  You can also open a new ‘Incognito’ window which won’t be saved in your visited sites list. Handy for the porn mongers amongst us!

What I didn’t really like was the lack of features and options. How do I use the google toolbar?, what about my Alexa rank plugin?, etc.. So I won’t be switchin to it any time soon for that reason but for ease of use and freshness I give it the thumbs up!

Leon.

Just been trying out a new Desktop Statistical package to measure hits and a plethora of other info on your website’s performance. Its good!

Woopra is a fairly new program/service and its still in beta. Signing up on their website is free but unfortunately it took weeks (yes weeks!) to get my website approved for analysis and I ended up having to email support a couple of times to remind them I was still waiting!

When your site is approved you can access the code required from the Members section and paste it into the footer of whichever pages you’d like tracked. This aspect of the services is similar to Google Analytics or Statcounter. You then download the desktop client and login to see your stats. Heres a screenshot:

After about a week of stat-gathering I had enough info on my main site and blog to show off Woopra’s features & capabilities. It gives the usual statistical breakdown including:

• Visits & Hits
• Countries/Locations/Languages
• Top Pages
• Bounce Rates
• Operating Systems & Browsers
• Screen Resolutions
• Referrers
• Search Keywords & Phrases

However, the thing that makes this program interesting is the fact that it has a ‘Live’ button which when clicked allows you to see people who are actually on your site right at that instant. You can tell:

• Who they are
• Where they are
• What page they’re on
• Their operating system and their browser!!

Apparently you can also initiate a chat with them but I havn’t been able to get this to work yet apart from talking to myself and theres a serious delay with that!

The program is very nicely laid out and attractive and has a ticker tape running across the bottom of the screen ala sky news or stock prices showing your site’s trends, eg – page visits up 20% etc… You can also add more than one site and export your data.

Leon.

Zoho.com offers a HUGE set of online Office, Productivity and Business applications that are very full featured and affordable if not free. I’ve been using Zoho Invoice mostly and would like to sing its praises as an affordable (from €3 per month!) and professional online invoicing system here.

Firstly, a quick explanation of what Online Invoicing actually is as opposed to traditional methods. Zoho online invoicing is actually a website ‘cloud’ service that you sign up to. To manage and send out invoices, you need to login to a website. The benefits of this are:

• Login and do some invoicing wherever you have access to the web either via phone PC, Laptop or Phone,
• Security,
• Backup,
• No large up front software costs,
• Flexible pricing depending on your usage levels,
• Constant updates and support.

I’ve been using Zoho Invoice for about a month now and am pretty impressed with it. Previously I’d been using a spreadsheet for the business finances with entries linked to crudely formatted word invoices – a bit inefficient! I also recently downloaded a free application that is a cross between a database and an email program but that was a bit cumbersome to use and it crashed a lot. I’d also used other online systems but found them a bit expensive.

On first signup Zoho invoice takes you through a step by step setup process that lets you define all your necessary business and invoice parameters and choose/edit invoice templates.

Here is a list of the main features:

• Add company details,
• Add company/country tax settings,
• Add customer and recurring product/service details,
• Choose Estimate and Invoice templates,
• Convert Estimates to Invoices,
• Add your Business Logo and details to Invoices,
• Setup Automated Payment overdue email reminders (very handy!),
• Email, Print or Remotely Post invoices and estimates,
• Use Paypal, Google Checkout or Authorize.net to receive auto payments,
• Send thank you emails for payments received,
• Add a standard signature to all outgoing emails,
• Add terms to outgoing Estimates,
• Set up Interest fees for late payments,
• See Invoice Reports and totals by time or customer,
• Import and Export invoices in Excel format,
• Track Businesses Expenses,
• Quick home page stats on Payments received, Due, etc.

The system is pretty easy to use and the service is well supported with Forums, Blogs and excellent email support.

Signup here – Zoho Invoice

Leon.

I wrote a review of the original iphone some time ago without having owned one and using articles I read online and off but I’m now happy to say I’m a proud owner and can now present my full and proper review!

I want to get a few things out of the way first:

iPhone Purchase Anecdote:

I had been keeping an eye on the O2.ie forums which had a bit of news on when some more phones were to be available cause they couldn’t be got for love nor money local to me, Sligo Carphone warehouse only got 6 in for example!! So the forums said that there would be a ‘very’ limited amount of phones made available on the O2 website on tuesday 5th august.

At 9:05 am I couldnt see any sign of any so I dawdled around and came back a few mins later and suddenly there they were for sale so I legged it in and bought one. No more then 5 minutes after I got through the checkout process the sales page was unceremoniously deleted from the server and the iphones were sold out!

It wasn’t untill the phone actually arrived that I believed I’d been successful in buying one!

iPhone Arrival Anecdote:

I was able to anxiously keep track of the iphones progress to me via the An Post tracking service so I pretty much new when it would arrive and when the postman approached I hoped on him and demanded my package. When he looked at me dumbly and said there was one in the office for me but that he’d forgotten it, I could have slapped him!

It was friday and I couldn’t wait a whole weekend so a short trip to the post office later and I had it in my possession at last!

iPhone Unwrapping Anecdote:

First off and at no fault of the phone or Apple, the phone arrived minus a few very important things:

1. My authorization form for bringing my Vodafone number to O2 which I had requested on purchase.
2. My O2 phone number!
3. My SIM PIN!..

So I had to call O2 support and have them call out to me the pin, the puk, the phone number and alternative instructions for porting my number. Once I had these I was finally ready to get stuck into my first ever Apple purchase!

iPhone Cons:

I’ll get these out of the way first!

The problems with the iphone 3G have already been well covered so I’ll just list the ones that bothered me here:

1. No Picture messaging.
2. Camera functionality feels rudimentary with absolutely no settings.
3. A little unergonomic – feels like it might slide out of your hand easily.
4. No Video Calling.
5. Didnt pick up my HSDPA/3G signal which I get through my O2 mobile Broadband from the exact same location.
6. The quality of phone calls is not a lot better than vodafone and since this was one of the reasons I decided to move from vodafone, its a little disapointing but obviously not the phones fault, rather where I live – in the wilderness!
7. Slightly sluggish, but I know theres a lot of eye candy goin on!
8. In safari flash content doesn’t work and theres no obvious way of enabling it.

iPhone Pros:

I’ve saved the best till last! Basically the iphone is light years ahead of most phones in design, functionality and user experience and going back to my Sony ericsson after playing with my iphone for a few hours was pretty dissapointing!

Heres what I liked the most:

1. Touch screen of course!
2. The whole look of it which is as I said before so influential to me that I used the theme for my own site! Chrome and black are just great together!
3. The general sound and audio quality of ringtones is excellent.
4. Connectivity and syncing with itunes is great and initial activation is painless.
5. Works straight off with no setup such as time & date, networks, etc..
6. Web browsing is amazing and email is fast.
7. Typing isn’t as bad as I thought for someone with big fingers like me!
8. I love the fact that you can customize it and put buttons wherever you like, even on different screens.
9. Works great on my house wi-fi.
10. Theres some great applications included with the iphone but you can add more. See below…

Standout Feature:

By far the best feature of the iphone for me is the fact that you can download and install additional applications via the phone or itunes. I downloaded several excellent FREE apps including:

• Flashlight – turns your iphone into a torch!
• WordPress – lets me write this blog via the phone!
• Myspace – keep in touch with the myspace gang.
• Twitteriffic – lets you twit.
• Unit Converter – for all your metric/currency conversions.
• Pregnancy Calculater – I need one of these at the min!
• and most impressively, GPS Tracker which lets you accurately follow the location of you and your iphone via a map on the web!!

Basically – GET ONE (if you can!)

Leon.

I’m newish to the relatively recent and currently very popular idea of Cloud Computing and I’d like to add the disclaimer that I’m not 100% sure how best to explain what exactly it is so bare with me in this review!!

I first heard of cloud computing while using Amazon’s S3 storage service which basically offers vast amounts of online storage at nominal prices – you pay only for bandwidth you use and S3 has been the basis for a glut of new online storage websites and services. Amazon’s cloud computing service is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in reference to the flexibility that cloud computing can offer. Cloud computing as I understand it is the offer of virtual computer processing power, that is, the raw CPU power of a traditional pc or network of pc’s, made available via the internet.

The idea with GoGrid is that you can sign up for a FREE or ‘Public Beta’ trial account and setup your own virtual pc servers and operating systems from within your GoGrid control panel. Signing up was a little toublesome as it happens as I filled in all my info and submitted a credit card only to be told that there was an ‘Order Processing error’ with no obvious solution. I had to use the Live Web Chat Support and talk to a pretty rude operator but I finally got my confirmation email and a generous credit of $50 to start me off cloud computing.

From within my control panel I could add a new ‘Web/Application Server Operating System’, ‘Load Balancer’ or ‘Database’ so I added the first since I thought I knew what that was! I had a choice of setting up ‘CentOS’, ‘Red Hat Linux’ or ‘Windows Server 2003′ servers so I choose the latter, again because it was the only one I recognized! You also get to pick the amount of RAM the server is to use (512MB – 2GB) and your own IP address (from a predefined list).

When you’re finished setting up the server you can connect to it via XP’s Remote Desktop facility and actually login to a fresh copy of Windows server 2003 which you can navigate and mess with the same as any other Operating System. With the help of a knowlegdable friend, I was able to setup a LAMP environment on my new server and put up a basic web page with links back to my site.

Cloud computing in general is not for the faint-hearted being as it is quite complex to setup and use a server but the potential of running your own virtual web hosting or application testing server without the need for expensive hardware or running costs is massive and for those familiar with the concepts involved it will be a relevation. GoGrid makes the job of setting up your own virtual server as simple as it could possibly be!

Leon

Cuil.com (irish word for both ‘knowledge’ and ‘corner’ apparently)  is a new search engine set to rival Google in world search domination. It’s been setup in California by an Irishman Tom Costello and his wife Anna Patterson, a former Google employee.

So, intrigued by the Irish name and connections and the boast that Cuil is allegedly the “world’s biggest search engine”, I went to Cuil.com and done a few searches. The site borrows on the Google minimalist philosophy with only a single graphic of the word CUIL and a search box. The site is dark with a black background and while my own main site is dark also, I’m not sure if its appropriate for a site with such lofty ambitions and function.

From what I understand, Cuil works differently to existing search engines in that it indexes page content relevant to your search terms and in a more ‘Semantic’ way. It also grabs an image off your site that it deems relevant and displays it in the search results page which is in tabular rather than list format which might take some getting used to for those of us used to google results.

My search for ‘web design leitrim’ returns no sign of my site or others I know of locally but I’m all over page 1 in google for the same term! The founders are quoted as saying that Cuil can do a much faster job of indexing the internet which is growing too fast for traditional search engines and that it can index much more content. However, if I’m not appearing in the first 4 pages while other web design sites with no relevance to Leitrim are then I’m not sure if its doing a proper job!

It also seemed a touch slower to navigate through results pages than google perhaps because of the images which aren’t necessary in my opinion.

I’ll be sticking with google but make your own mind up!

Leon

Came accross this piece of Open Source, Free software after reading an article about it in a PC Magazine and its the business!

Virtualbox, once downloaded (23MB from www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) and installed allows you to install multiple operating systems on one pc inside a Virtual ‘box’ or environment with no need to mess with your main computers boot record or partitions and potentially screw things up!

Running the software presents a simple interface with obvious buttons for creating, starting and managing virtual ‘Machines’ as they are called. Clicking ‘New’ pops up a wizard that talks you through creating and naming your operating system as well as specifing percentages of the main pc’s RAM and Disk space to allocate to the new system. This setup kinda requires that you have a lot of RAM and Hard drive space to spare though, especially if you want to install a lot of systems.

Once the new system/machine is setup, its listed on the left and you simply highlight the system you want to run and click the ‘Start’ button to fire it up. On first start you are asked to choose either a drive or disc image to use to install the operating system (in my case the free Linux distro ‘Ubuntu’ on DVD) and the operating system basically installs itself inside a small window of the virtualbox program in exactly the same manner as if you were installing it on the main PC.

When the installation is finished, you can simply start the particular machine whenever you want and you have a fully working, virtual operating system. It can use all of your existing computer resources such as USB, DVD/CD, Internet and Shared Folders.

Extremely handy for computer tech support workers, you can fire up whatever operating system your troubled client has and work out a solution for them in no time!

Leon

I was asked by John from the BackupAnytime.com site to review his system in response to my review of Putplace.com, so lets see how it measures up.

First thing to mention is that this is primarily a backup service for companies and the corporate sector and to that end they offer a more manual and personal service than other offerings. The service is tailored to your requirements and upon signup for their free trial you will be contacted by a company representative who will discuss the best options for you in terms of your Internet Connection, amount of Data to Backup, Bandwidth Limits with your ISP and your Operating System & Firewalls, etc…

There is no ‘Signup Now’ button or link but the trial registration form is quick and painless – not sure why theres a comments box however – what would anyone have to say at this early stage, I couldn’t think of anything!? Submitting the free trial reg form returns me to a page that tells me my enquiry has been registered and if my email address is real or correct I will receive download instructions. I get an email straight away alright but it just tells me again that my enquiry has been received and someone will be in touch.

I was hoping to get started on the free trial straight away and see how the desktop software they promised actually worked but I was informed later that the download links are only provided after consultation with a rep which is fine if thats what you want but not if you want to get started straight away which I did.

Prices are not listed on the site as the price depends on the tailored package you end up with but apparently prices start form around 3 euros per GB. There is a 24/7 tech support available also.

Leon

I was asked by a client to look for a very simple method of taking a Video File and converting if for the web, uploading and inserting into a blog post or webpage.

I work with video the odd time, enough to know that its a very complex area with tons of different formats, codecs and with horrible conversion times. When you want to put it on the web, a whole new set of problems arise related to file sizes, physical sizes, upload times and download times.

So I blindly searched the internet and found a few sites that did file conversions but they all had certain unrealistic limits before you had to pay out. I came accross https://heywatch.com/ and had a quick read of the home page and it sounded perfect. The home page lists what you can do and has only 2 links (apart from some admin ones at the bottom), Register and Login!

Once you signup, a very simple and intuitive dashboard greets you and asks you to get started by uploading or encoding a video.

Heres the list of EXCELLENT things Hey!Watch can do:

• Upload or reference an existing video on the web eg, youtube,
• Upload almost any video file format,
• Upload any video file size or duration,
• Convert to tons of different video formats for both devices such as mobile phones and regular DVD or web flash format.
• Watermark your encoded video with your own image/logo,
• After Encoding, send the new video file to your website via ftp or to your Amazon S3 account,
• Create your own encoding formats to precisely set video and audio size and bitrate (quality),
• Email video to Hey!Watch,
• Use the Hey!Watch html code to allow your website visitors to upload video through your site to your Hey!Watch account,
• Excellent pricing at 7 cents per encode (under 45 mins),
• Pay via Paypal,
• I’ve saved the best till last, you can setup your account to automatically encode uploaded video using your default encoding profile AND then send it to your site via ftp!! You even get an email when its finished!

I’ve been testing the system for the last few hours and its just the business! – works very well with fast uploads, encodes and transfers to your site. I don’t know how they do it (Amazon services perhaps) but it could be the answer I’m looking for!

Leon.

I’ve been testing out Irish site www.putplace.com today for a client and was quite impressed by it – using it myself now! Its an online Storage & Data Backup website and its VERY easy to use which is refreshing in this day and age when theres a lot of over the top content and functionality on the websites we visit.

You just sign up for a FREE (beta) account giving you UNLIMITED storage space for the duration of the beta. You then download an 8MB desktop application which handles your backups. Both the website and desktop software are very minimalist and very easy to use with only a handful of functions. Basically, you add a folder from your computer to backup, give it a name and click create and it saves it in your list AND uploads it to your putplace account.

The coolest part of it though is – when you modify or add a file to any folder you’ve added to the Putplace desktop application, it automatically uploads the changes to putplace there and then so if you leave it running and have broadband then you have a great, simple & automated backup solution.

Of course if you don’t have broadband then no online backup system will work well for you but don’t get me started on that!

Leon.

Just came accross a fantastic new desktop  application (beta) called ‘Analytics Reporting Suite’ from Nicolas Lierman (www.aboutnico.be). Its built using the new Adobe Air framework and basically lets you add your Google Analytics accounts and look at your stats from your desktop with a much nicer and bit more intuitive interface. Great example of the potential of Air. Visit the authors site to try it or HERE for more info.

Leon.