Jay Hollingum - Works in IT

My better half forwarded on a link to me today, and now I have seen something that has made me question my future career on the web. I just don't think I can compete at this level and will have to retire to a life of solitude on a remote island devoid of all technology. http://superior-web-solutions.com/ Just one example from their portfolio:  http://industrialpainter.com/ Now I'm not saying I'm the best web developer/designer in the world but I'm glad to see companies are still out there keeping the web of the early 90s alive and kicking. It's important we hold on to these important technological cultural milestones, unless we've gone full circle and are now entering a whole new retro-flash movement? Think this is going viral by the stats on the bottom of the page (when it works properly): 3 views yesterday. Over 9800 today and still counting. In case anyone is interested, they do appear to be recruiting  http://superior-web-solutions.com/Broadba...

Adding HTML 5 to the choice of target schemas in Visual Web Developer 2010 Express (VWD 2010 Express) is fairly straightforward, thanks to a download from Mikhail Arkhipov which can be found on the Visual Web Developer Team Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2009/11/18/html-5-intellisense-and-validation-schema-for-visual-studio-2008-and-visual-web-developer.aspx . Download the html5.zip at the end of the above post. Unzip the file. Copy the html_5.xsd file to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\Packages\schemas\html". This is the default installation set up location. If VWD 2010 Express has been installed in another location, the file needs to be placed in the "Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\Packages\schemas\html" folder. This is where there is a slight variation in the instructions detailed in Mikhail Arkhipov 's post. To get VWD 2010 Express to recognise HTML 5 as an option for target validation, a change needs ...

The "semantic web" as a theory has been around for ages and I remember working with people, a decade ago, who were investigating how to build a semantic web. The semantic web, a term coined by Sir Tim Berners-lee, is a vision that would allow automated agents and software to access the Web intelligently, via machine-readable metadata embedded within content. There are a number of standards, tools, methodologies and technologies around that have been created to aid in the development of a semantic web, yet it is still unrealised and alludes the world. There are a number of reasons for this including the physical size of the web, the vastness of knowledge and how to categorise it all into suitable classes, and the completeness, consistency and standardisation of information, to name just a few issues to deal with. I imagine some even question whether it is truly possible due to the sheer scale and requirements involved. Probably the biggest impact of working towards a s...

So the time has come to move to a more advanced blog engine for my blog. blogger.com , Google's blogging service, has served me well. It's incredibly easy to use and to get started with, along with having some great features such as inbuilt stats; however now I need a few more advanced features and greater control over the blog. There's a vast array of blog engines out there, some free, some paid for, some hosted, some self-hosted, and picking which one is best or the right choice could be a little bit tricky. This article from Mashable lists most of the main options and bigger players -  http://mashable.com/2007/08/06/free-blog-hosts/ . There are a few parameters that I've kind of decided on Ease of installation/compatibility and support with web hosts Simple to use. I don't want to spend ages clicking around just to add a post or format it. Feature rich and well supported. Most blog engines should have a fairly standard set of features now such RSS/ATOM fe...

http://www.iia.ie/ As part of my work I ended up at the Irish Internet Association's conference "8 Ways to Sell More Stuff" at the Davenport Hotel in Dublin, last Thursday. http://www.iia.ie/news/item/1627/iias-upcoming-conference-8-ways-to-sell-more-stuff-is-a-load-of-pants/ As a developer I wasn't expecting to learn too much from a conference about selling and online business, but then it's always good to keep up to speed with all areas of your work, and understanding business in relation to IT systems and websites is probably as important as making sure an index is properly optimised on a database table or some other uber-geeky thing like that. An Post http://www.anpost.ie http://www.iloveshopping.ie/ The afternoon started off, after some tea and coffee and very nice short bread biscuits, with a talk from the Conference's sponsor, An Post. They were basically flogging their service for parcel delivery to internet businesses that need a delivery se...

Bing, Microsoft's search engine , comes with a few tools for webmasters to track their websites' stats. These tools are in no way as advanced as Google Analytics , but do let you see how a site is being crawled and indexed by Bing, and also allows for better control of submitting sitemaps to Bing. Setting up Bing tracking and statistics for Blogger, Google's blog publishing service , is pretty straightforward, assuming you have a blog already set up on Blogger!! All that's needed is: Sign in to Bing's webmaster toolbox (you'll need a Windows Live ID). Enter URL and get verification code for your blog. Add the verification code to the blogger template and save. Return to Bing's Webmaster Toolbox and finally verify the blog. Sign in to Bing's Webmaster Toolbox Go to Bing's Webmaster Toolbox at http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/ and sign in. If you don't have a Windows Live ID, you'll need to sign up. Once signed in, click ...

There are hundreds of URL shorteners around these days such as bit.ly tinyurl.com moourl.com tiny.cc  and ow.ly with the bigger websites even creating their own URL shortening services. Now Google have stepped in to the ring with their own URL shortening service, goo.gl . Although goo.gl URLs have been appearing in Google products for some time, they have only just released a website for shortening any URL. The blog posting announcing the release can be found on their social web blog at http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html . Given the resources behind Google, this will probably be one of the most stable and secure URL shorteners, and is unlikely to go the way of some such as tr.im .