Dublin Paranormal Convention - Update

I've moved the site to a new host (blacknight). I've put in a content management system (CMSMadeSimple). I've added a paypal function to sell tickets to the event. (Buy your tickets here).

I've also started a Google Adwords Campaign. It's been running nearly 2 days now and it's sent around 14 clicks over to the site, so that's not bad. It will be interesting to see if this will turn into ticket sales.

That's it for now!

More Running

I got out for a brief run tonight. I did a 3km run. It felt really comfortable and within myself. I was doing 5.30 kilometres which isn't particularly fast but it was good to go out and run and not struggle.

I put it down to the fact I have been out twice a week for the past 3 weeks, that really helps. Hopefully I can take it up a notch over the coming weeks and months.

I was running tonight, hooked up to my phone and not my iPod. I need to be contactable at all times at the moment, so I was listening to the radio on my phone. I think I might put some more music on it, because it is lighter than the iPod, so I can run with it in my pocket and I don't have to dig out my iPod armband.

I hope to get out tomorrow morning for a small run too. So I'm off to bed!

Things that happened on this date...

I was browsing wikipedia and I notice it is 4 years since The Scream by Edvard Munch was stolen at gunpoint.

It reminded me of a visit to Oslo back in 2005 / 6. I went to the the Tourist Information office (Traffiken) and asked how to get to the Munch Museum. They told me get the train to Toyen and there are signs all the way from there.

So I went and got on a train, got to Toyen, walked through the rain to the museum. When I got there I was soaked and not happy. I was not happy because the museum had been closed since 2004 because of the above robbery!!!!

Things they could have told me in the the Tourist Office. Did they think I wanted to look at the outside of the building!!!

I did get into the Museum in 2007 but I remember the first trip more vividly.

Olympics - Sprint King

The suits have been complaining about Usain Bolt's showboating. Come on!?!? That is sport and that is sprinting. I loved it and was astounded by the guys ability and if you are that good, you deserve to showboat!!!

Usain Bolt will make me tune into athletics again!!!

Firefox Rules

I was just checking the analytics for this blog and there were some surprising results. Firefox is the most popular browser for visitors of this site. Keep it up!

Most visitors come from the UK, so thanks Gary!

And I would like to thank whoever you are in Mexico, and India and most surprisingly Georgia (hope there is some peace for you soon).

Joomla

Yesterday it was Drupal, today it is Joomla.

Firstly I will say that I gave Joomla more time than I did Drupal but I think that was down to the interface and the fact I made some progress relatively quickly.

What I attempted to do was put a site up using a site I had designed and developed in XHTML and CSS. It took 4 or 5 hours to get the homepage up and running and I had to edit a random article that just kept appearing. It looks well but it is not ideal. Creating a template was not too difficult once I found a decent tutorial, but it all felt a little too complicated.

Let's compare results:

CMSMadeSimple: Setup took about an hour because I had to download, upload and install. Creating the site, template and css and all the pages took 30 minutes. It is simple. The downside is the interface isn't very jazzy, but it is easy to use.

Drupal: Setup was quick and easy because it is a built in application on my new blacknight hosting account. That's where the progress ended. Templates or themes are incomprehensible and just downright bizarre. I couldn't get a page up and running let alone the site.

Joomla: Set up was quick again because it is a built in application on my blacknight hosting. Creating a template was not straight forward but there was a decent tutorial. Shame I can't find a good list of the PHP functions associated with Joomla. I had the problem of a random article appearing and i couldn't figure out why. In the end I just edited it to be the content I wanted. It has a nice interface except that the menus are disabled once you are in any of the options so you spend a lot of time clicking close or cancel to get the menu back. I want to like it but it is just not user friendly enough and as with most open source software, there is a lot of documentation but not a lot of useful documentation.

I think I'm going to go with CMSMadeSimple for now and maybe personalise it a bit to suit my needs a bit better. If you have any other suggestions I would be glad to investigate further.

Olympics

There has been a lot of coverage of the Olympics, even with the strange time difference. The Great Britain Team have been doing great, well done to one and all, but today real magic happened! Ireland guaranteed themselves some medals!!!

Well done to Kenny Egan and Paddy Barnes! Hopefully they can win their next fights and get a silver or a gold!

And congratulations to Paul Hession who came really close to reaching the 200 metre final. It was a great effort!

Drupal... WTF?

I've been playing around with Drupal tonight and so far I could not recommend it to anyone. It is almost incomprehensible.

I am trying to add a new theme. So I copied one of the themes into a new folder and uploaded that. The "help" said it would be auto-detected. But oh no...

So I tried to edit a theme that was already there. Fine, the first edit made a difference to the site, but then all subsequent edits just didn't work. I'm giving up for tonight.

I think CMSMadeSimple stays ahead!

Headline of the year!

I just read a great headline in The Register. Check it out. Genius!

Ryanair Vs. The screen scrapers

Ryanair are cancelling flights booked through aggregator websites. These sites basically use the information made public on Ryanair's website and sell on the flights to their customers and i think they take a commission.

I'd love to know the reason why Ryanair object to this? Is it because they are protective of their customers? Hmmm, maybe not. Is it because they don't won't someone else squeezing more money out of the customers, money they could have squeezed out of them? Or is there something more to it?

I'd say the visitor stats on Ryanair's site would be enormous and this would presumably equate to lots of cross sales, hotel rooms, car hire, credit card products. By lots, I mean enough to cancel all the flights that have been booked through other sites.

I'm not sure which side of the fence I'd go for but I'm veering towards Ryanair and that is saying something. They are protecting their product and brand and their brand is so much more than just flights.

I'm agreeing with Ryanair, oh the shame!!!

Rainy Dublin

We are having a shocking summer here in Dublin. It just keeps raining. Check out my first upload to Youtube. Sad or what?

Global warming... I never want to hear it again.

Living in Ireland we here alot about global warming but I really want that term to be consigned to the recycle bin of life. Let's call it climate change. Global warming may be happening but climate change is what what effects us every day.

76mm of rain in 3 hours, in August in Dublin is a record breaker.

Fireworks about fireworks.

I just read about the fireworks at the Olympic ceremony, some of which were fake. Personally that doesn't bother me, i don't feel cheated but I am impressed that the graphic designers put in a camera shake to mimic the event being filmed from a helicopter. Now that is dedicated to deception!!!

Monkey Business

There were massive traffic jams on the N11 last night. There is nothing new about that but this time the reason was a bit different.

There was an escaped monkey loose on the road!

The AA thought there were a lot of crazy people ringing in last night, but no there was a real monkey on the loose.

If only all traffic jams were caused by monkies!!!

Website Updates

I just made some updates to my friend's website. It's for the Greendoor Accommodation in Drogheda. I added some new pictures of the outside of the house.

It's a great spot for a good session! Oh and you are close to all the tourist spots!!!

Dublin Paranormal Convention 2008

My bro-in-law 6th, is organizing a Paranormal Convention in Dublin. It's going to be on on October 11th in Clontarf Castle. It looks like it is shaping up to be a great event. There will be stands and there will be talks by some paranormal celebrities!!!

I wonder will the dead walk the earth and pay for some tickets?

Oh and you can even buy tickets online! How cool is that?

Leaping Lizards!

This lizard has just become a father at the age of 111. And I thought Julio Iglesias was old :o)

Cuil, not so cool yet!

You've probably heard the hype about Cuil, the new search engine to rival Google. It has somehow gotten into all the papers and even the television news, not to mention The Register.

I thought I would take a look and see if it was worth using and so far the answer is a big resounding no, not yet at least.

I did some random searches, one for Ruud Gullit and it comes up with his wikipedia entrance but beside it is a picture of a dog! Hmmm. The images they show with the results can be peculiar to say the least. A dog and Ruud Gullit, it's not as bad as Jonathon Grattage.

I did a search for "using xml with .net" and got no results about XML or .Net but lots of links to poker sites. I do like the alternative categories it gives you to the right of your results but that's about all I like.

I'm going to come back in a few weeks and see if it has indexed some technological websites and has sorted it's images out.