Irelands(i)

Geansai Gorm SEO Competition

Tom — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:12:31 +0000

Do you think you’ve got what it takes to optimise a website to rank high in Google?

Well if you’d like a chance to prove your search engine optimisation skills Damien Mulley has an SEO competition running where participants must create a website on a brand new domain name and try to get it to the number one spot in Google. The keyphrase to rank for is geansai gorm which is blue jumper in Irish. For full competition rules check out Damiens blog. And if that doesn’t sound like a fun enough challenge Blacknight have made things even more interesting and are offering prizes to winner.

Good luck to everyone who enters!

Search Dublins 1911 Census

Tom — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:26:49 +0000

If you have relatives that lived in Dublin in 1911 you can search for them through the National Archives of Ireland website. At the moment only the Dublin 1911 Census is available online but there are future plans to include other parts of Ireland and census records for 1901. If you’re researching your Irish family tree it’s a good place to start and you can even view scans of the original hand written documents.

3 Free Invoicing Web Applications

Tom — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:50:26 +0000

I’ve been looking around at the various web applications for invoicing that are available at the moment. I must have come across at least 20 or so different ones over the last couple of days, most which require subscription fees. I did come across three that are completely free however and these are the ones that I’ll focus on here. Actually I came across a fourth which looked very good but it lacked Euro currency support and so I’ll leave it out.

www.invoicejournal.com is a hosted invoicing application which means you don’t need to download or install anything, just sign up for a free account and away you go invoicing your clients. This makes it an ideal choice for people who don’t want to get dirty installing files and setting up databases for a self hosted solution. If you consider hosting costs (free hosting isn’t really ideal for something as important as your invoices) then it’s the only option here that is 100% free.

Pros: Simple to use, good looking interface, custom invoice template support, easy paypal integration, pdf export (currently via third party website)

Cons: Doesn’t seem to be any way to backup or store your data locally, worrying if anything happens to the service.

www.bambooinvoice.org is a free open source invoicing application. With this one you’ll need to provide your own hosting and install it before you an use it. The good thing about this is you’ll have complete access to your data and can back it up easily. Because it’s open source the possibility of future growth via community contributions is good. The app is, at time of writing, pre version 1.0 so it is very unfinished although it does look promising.

Pros: Backup MySql database, xml and excel export options, pdf export

Cons: It looks young and buggy at the moment, needs more work before it’s a solid option.

www.simpleinvoices.org is another free open source invoicing solution so again you’ll need to host and install it yourself. The interface is possibly the least appealing of the others listed here although it does seem more mature and functional than it’s closest alternative Bamboo Invoice.

Pros: Export invoices as .pdf, .xls and .doc, backup database

Cons: Ugly interface with horrible slidy effect shortcut page

Firefox 3 sets Guinness World Record

Tom — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:14:16 +0000

Firefox 3 has set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. 8,002,530 downloads were logged on the day it was released. I guess this means I’m part of a Guinness World Record, along with 8,002,529 other people, yipee! I wonder if that’s also the most people involved in a record?

Top level domains open for registration

Tom — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:02:17 +0000

Icann announced the opening up of top level domains for registration this week allowing anyone to register a tld of their choice. A tld or top level domain is basically the .com or .ie etc. that you see on the end of URLs. This means that any person can now register a tld such as .mytld for example.

However to register you’re going to need some deep pockets as the price to register a tld is at least $100,000 and applicants will need to meet certain criteria and have the technical capacity to qualify.

Certain tlds are bound to gather interest such as location based ones .newyork .dublin and others such as .web .xxx for example. It will be intersting to see what new tlds pop up in the future.

Firefox 3 Released

Tom — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:43:47 +0000

Firefox 3 Internet browser was officially released today at 6pm GMT and can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

Most notable new features and improvements include:

Improved performance with faster page loads and less memory usage
New smarter location bar
New page zoom
Better password management

A full list of the top new features can be seen here.

Eircom.net Webmail to be Upgraded

Tom — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:54:46 +0000

Looks like eircom.net email accounts are going to get an upgrade this summer. The new Eircom webmail promises 200 times more storage space, increasing the current minute 5MB quota up to 1GB. That’s a significant amount which Eircom email account holders will be surely glad of. There are other improvements being made to the webmail interface too which include a calender, a spell checker and easier viewing of email attachments.

Welcome to Irelands(i)

Tom — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 23:05:31 +0000

Welcome to Irelands(i). This is our first post so there’s not a lot to see here just yet. In the future we hope to have plenty of Internet related news and features. If you have a website, news item or product you’d like featured then drop us an email and we’ll try our best to feature it here on the website.

Thank you for visiting and I hope you enjoy all the website has to offer (not so much right now but in the future!).

- Tom