I know I harp on about open source, but really are people listening ,

Denmark dumps Microsoft

Another government department is starting to use open source,

http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/article890196.ece

Now County Council’s in Ireland, are you listening?

Anyone, anyone , Beauler, Beauler, Fry,  Fry . . .

Ok, now I know I said I wouldn’t rant anymore and try to keep this area for news and products launches etc, but I just have to mention “browser compatibility” and websites. Yesterday we had an existing customer ask why their new website we are creating looks weird in Internet Explorer 6.

When I checked the site in Version 6 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer I did see differences, now as it turns out when I talked to our developer she told me the client was looking at a “draft version” she was actually working on as the call happened. So really it was like standing beside a builder working on a wall as he’s laying each block. It’s better to come back after lunch and see the final product!

Anyways, What I’m getting to is that fact that when we design a website we design a site to be compatible with a number of browsers, and in fact we do what we call in the business as “future proofing” the website. So her site will in fact be compatible with smart phones and iphones etc.

Microsoft no longer support older version of Internet Explorer including version 5 and we can go a step further by telling you that Google too are discontinuing support for version 6 later this year too. So really if you want to have a website that is compatible with all the major Internet browsers and all the versions and revisions, I would ask you to think about a few things.

Who are you aiming at, the people using older versions of browsers are people who don’t move with the times, who are happy with what they currently have and I could nearly guess might not trust the Internet enough to even shop on-line, where as people browsing using newer Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above will be the type of people you want and need.

Think about the future folks, . . . . . . .shhh . . . . don’t tell anyone but . . . . It’s coming !

Just a short note to our readers to say that due to the volume of work we have on at the moment we will be unable to continue writing as often as we would like and will be using the blog for news updates about our new products and services we are launching in February and March.

I’ll miss this old girl and her daily stats about life online in Ireland ! sniff sniff.

Definitely our biggest inquiry so far this month has been people asking to set up an online shop or payment gateway for their business using the net. We had a business from Kildare in with us today going over all the options available to them. We looked at VISA machines for their shop to maybe using an online virtual VISA machine going through a secure server on https://pay-here.bla

This would mean that as a shop they could take payments over the phone using any Internet connected pc or using their own website in the shape of an online shop. Today’s meeting is the 7th meeting of this type since we came back after the holidays. No other year has shown such a push for online sales. Maybe people are finally understanding that business and money is not all about bricks and motar and that just because a business using the Internet does not take away from what people preceive as the real world,

The Internet is the real world and that’s where your potential customers are looking for your services, now let us take you through the next stage and be able to take a payment off them for a product or service you supply.

Call Dave Jordan from Cada Media Ltd on 053 9430748 to start getting your business online.

Great news for Ireland that one of the worlds leading online transaction companies are expanding their staff from 1100 in Dublin by a further 100 new jobs, announced today. So listening to people talk about the recession and saying that no one is hiring is wrong.

Business has not stopped it has just moved online.

If your business is not online yet and taking advantage of being able to accept payments via gateways like paypal or realex or worldnet then we would suggest starting restructuring your business soon. For help using the net for online payments call us today.

We would like to let any of our clients who have accounts on Boards.ie to change their password on other sites if they use the same password.

boards.ie is one of Irelands most popular bulletin boards on the net in Ireland. There are thousands of members and today their central database was hacked into and the site administrators shut the site down to prevent any loss of date.

A holding page with the following was viewable

***********************

Fellow Boards Members,

Today, Thursday 21 Jan 2010 at 11:20 GMT the Boards.ie database was attacked by a source external to Ireland. This triggered our security response policy and as a result we are sending you this warning email.

In this attack, part of the database which includes our members usernames, email addresses and obfuscated passwords was accessed. While our investigations indicate that individual user accounts are not in danger we have taken the step of changing all user passwords.

We also recommend that if you used the same username/email and password on other sites that you change your password there too as a precaution.

What happened:

• This morning our database server was accessed by an unauthorised source.
• We discovered this intrusion and took the site offline.
• As a precaution We contacted the Gardaí, the Data Protection Commissioner and an independent security consultancy.
• We have followed the advice we have received on how to proceed.
• Like all large sites we are regularly the target for disruption and take continual actions to proactively protect your data.  This particular attack was completely unprecedented despite our rigorous security measures and while we have no idea if this data will be used for any malicious reasons, we felt it vital to tell you this immediately.

What you need to know and do:

• If you use the same password on Boards as you do on other services, you should change it on those other services to be safe. Boards passwords are NOT stored in plain text, they are obscured with the standard vBulletin “Hash”. While this provides strong protection, we have altered all passwords on Boards as a precaution and suggest you take this time to allter other similar passwords.
• If you are a subscriber, please be assured, we do NOT store credit card details or any payment details on our servers. Nothing of that nature is held on our site and as a result such data was not compromised.
• We apologise for this inconvenience. We do not want to over stress the problem, however we felt the situation requires full disclosure.

Tom Murphy.

Things to check out:

• Boards.ie on Twitter

Great news from RTE about their website and it’s great player allowing you to catch a show up to 20 days after it was aired. The website is now available outside of Ireland so that should really crank up the hits and i’m sure their advertisers will be delighted with the news.

Well done RTE.

http://www.rte.ie/player/

On a side now, the BBC website that does not allow Irish viewers to view it’s shows online. They explain that it is due to legal issues regarding “rights” etc.

Just to let our spam filtering clients know that next week we are upgrading our servers again, (yes i know a pain in the ass but hey it’s for your benefit!) These new servers will mean new IP addresses and so we are informing you that you can update your firewall rules with the following IP addresses for our servers.

To do this you need to block all SMTP transactions from outside the following:

Filter 4: 77.95.34.194 to 254
Filter 5: 195.97.252.82 to 92
Filter 6: 86.54.206.48 to 55

Your network manager will know what to do with these, If is important that you take action on these firewall changes before Tuesday 26th January 2010.

Dave Jordan
Cada Media Ltd,
https://secure.spamfilters.ie

Its great to see new businesses starting up all the time and we often have to remind people the life has not stopped and this is apparent as we learnt of the investment in building and security that David O Sullivan has recently completed in his new massive buildings near Gorey in Co Wexford.

Storage Facilities in Wexford.

Storage facilities are often for self storage for small items like a barbaque or a few boxes from the attic, where as here at Self East Storage they store big stuff, Antique cars, motor bikes, Camper vans, Motor homes, dingy’s and even Yachts from the local Sailing clubs in Wicklow and Wexford.

Services included:

• Website Training
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Link Building
• Web Marketing

www.SouthEastStorage.ie

We would like to wish David & Aine the best of luck with the new website and hope they keep it freash and up to date with the Content Management System.

Before you get upset or to stop any confusion amongst the people to read this blog, it’s actually really simple we are looking for a “Flash Animator” to work with us on a number of new projects.

If you are experienced Flasher we are looking for you. Experience is a must, we get many Multi media students applying for jobs and they have created one or two flash elements in college, and that’s great, we need people with examples of their work please.

Call Dave Jordan 053 9430748 for details

I was browsing facebook and a friend of mine who works in a Media company in Sweden posted a link to a blog from a social media company in the UK. The post was about the percentage of tweets that contain brand names or organisation names. So what you may say,but like everything on the net you have to read between the lines to fully understand the benefit and reason for something.

We often get asked, why have a twitter account for business as most people just put some rubbish on it about what they are doing rather than actually using it for it s real purpose.

Conversation.

Twitter is a mini blog of types that give you the ability to ask questions, people will ask where a restaurant is, what shampoo do others use, what time is Metallica on stage, what ever the question is you must remember it is logged and search-able.

Twitter is a search engine that if we really think about it. It logs the real-time conversation that pople have online and you can search it to get the latest information.

http://search.twitter.com will show you what people are saying right now and don’t forget twitter is mobile so its not just nerds like me writting on their blog in the office on a dark evening, Its people standing outside supermarkets, sitting in restaurants, they are all around us telling us things using their mobiles.

19% of tweets mention brands

We are often asked if we can sponsor a website or give a free website to people. We do sponsor websites sometimes, but it depends on the site, if its a registered charity or maybe the local lost pet group then yes we might be in a situation to help, but if you are a small club or group then maybe you could look at using on online web site building tool. We have looked at these before but one that we see being used a good bit in Wexford is one called Weebly.com

Built the website yourself.

Website creations tools are not new, they have been around for many years now, but we hear that weebly.com is an easy to use , fast method of creating a website yourself in a few minutes. Allowing you to update it with images, text and videos.

It’s not what we use and I wouldn’t recommend it for any real business as its just a basic web-page builder. Please don’t mistake this for being the “be all and end all” of website development and think that it’s gonna put us out of business. It’s not. This is for building a basic web-page, its not an online marketing strategy to gain you more sales leads and growing your business over the next 5 years and mentoring your businesses digital strategy. It’s a web-page and only that.

Don’t expect to get support or help in it’s creation or promotion.

It is however a good step for struggling businesses who can’t afford any budget on using the net to help their business.

Once you have the site built you can come to use to help promote it and get it listed in search engines and local directories.

We get asked all the the time about training courses and we do give full training courses to our clients we don’t give general computer training courses to the public. Many people need to understand about emails or attachments,

There is a small IT training company who are part of the Gorey chamber of commerce with us who we currently recommend for training courses.

IT Scape are running the following courses this year

COMPUTER TRAINING COURSES STARTING SOON IN GOREY TOWN CENTRE WITH ITSCAPE

TUESDAY OR FRIDAY MORNINGS, BEGINNERS TO INTERMEDIATE LEVELS

TOPICS COVERED (exact course content will be decided by the course attendees), example topics; File Management, Word Processing, Graphics, Presentations, Spreadsheets, etc.

8 or 10 week courses, PRICE ONLY: €15 for a 2 hour class

(8 weeks €120 or 10 weeks €150)

ONE – ONE TUITION ALSO AVAILABLE AS ARE TAILORED WORKSHOPS IN OUR TRAINING ROOM OR IN YOUR OFFICE AS REQUIRED

See www.itscape.ie for further details

Alternatively you can look at doing a training course at night in Gorey Community School and they run courses each September and January. to see more of their courses go to www.goreyAdultEd.ie for further information.

Classes begin soon in Gorey so book now.

We get a number of inquiries with people looking for small websites to basically just get online. Typically they are just looking for 1 or 2 pages to display their business and usually it might be a plumber or carpenter and even a shop just looking to put an image of their shop and opening hours.

IT Scape

This business is managed by Lisa Stacey and they create such web pages. Whilst we would like to help every business in the area there is not enough time to he helping every single business get online and start doing business via the Internet.

Lisa is currently running spacial offers to help get online. This is her January 2010 offer.

SPECIAL OFFER : GET YOUR BUSINESS ONLINE FOR €150
FREE WEB HOSTING FOR ONE YEAR WITH EVERY WEB DESIGN PACKAGE
So now you have no excuse get your Business online now !
Check out www.itscape.ie for more details, pricing and examples of previous work
Contact Lisa @ 086 0370741 or lisa@itscape.ie

Once you have your website up and running, why not talk to us about getting your new site listed on the business directories in Wexford including GoreyLinks.com, EnniscorthyLinks.com to name a few.

Call Dave Jordan on 053 9430748

We would like to mention to our clients and for people looking to have their website reviewed or redesigned this year to please take in mind that we will need to notice before you wish to have the website worked on.

Website Reviews

Sitting down and going through your site stats, the links in and the general traffic of a website can take a number of hours, then its time to plan the future of the site and the type of traffic you wish to bring in. There are many factors to be considered and looked at.

To this end, I would like to ask you to please make an appointment or email us as we can not just drop everything and look at your request. We have commitments we have made from November and December and they must be looked at first.

January is a great time of the year to look at how you are promoting your business as so is September when the kids go back to school.

If you are an existing client then email me directly and we will schedule in an appointment and if you are a potential new client give me a quick call and I can arrange an appointment for you to come in to discuss you needs.

I dont mean to put anyone off getting in touch, but rather am just trying to be realistic, we can’t get a phone call on Tuesday and deliver a new website to you on the Friday,  not when we have 14 others already being programmed.

Thanks and sorry about the Rant ! Dave Jordan 053 9430748