February 21st, 2009 by Jason Roe
Last week, I went to a really interesting session about hotels and bogging set up by Ciara Feely. Keith Bohanna was speaking to a group of hoteliers about promoting themselves via blogs / twitter.
I found it quite interesting that the first barrier for most of the hoteliers was the lack expertise to set up a branded hotel blog. With that in mind, I decided to come up with this offer.
For a limited time, I am offering a number of Irish hoteliers the chance to get a blog installed / customised* free of charge. To top that off.. If you are a small hotel / b&b , I will also give you a free one-to-one crash course on twitter.
If you are in the hotel space and looking for a blog I would love to hear from you. If you know anyone in the tourism space who might be interested please pass this ton to them.
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October 26th, 2008 by Jason Roe
For the last 3 weeks my blog has been running really, really slow. With the long weekend upon us, I decided to take some time to try and find / fix the issue. After 4 hours of poking around, it turned out to be a number of issues…
I assumed that when I moved to a blacknight VPS about 6 months ago something went a bit AWOL. I had a look at the server for CPU usage, memory, write speed & mysql and everything seemed to be fine. The main issue turned out to be with wordpress or a WP plugin.
When I looked at my wordpress database tables and noticed that I had 14,000 rows in the wp_options table. The rows consisted of rss requests from magpie. After I cleared them out I have seen an instant boost. The mysql query to do this is
Delete from `wp_options` where `option_name` LIKE ‘rss_%’;
This got me thinking about how I can speed up the blog a bit more. First port of call was wp-supercache.
Second thing I looked at was moving all my static files over to a CDN (content delivery network). I already had an Amazon s3 account setup, so I set up a new bucket with a CNAME’ed sub domain. I kept the same directory structure and redirected all css, gif, jpg, png & js files over to the s3.
PS: S3 is not a true CDN .. see amazon cloudfront for a real CDN solution.
After all the tweaks I have reduced page load time from 15 seconds to 4/5 seconds.
Let me know if you spot any issues.
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April 6th, 2008 by Jason Roe
Many web sites are built around the concepts of features, benefits are often overlooked. Site owners/developers some times confuse features with benefits and this results in an array of complications for the end user. Read the rest of this entry »
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May 19th, 2007 by Jason Roe
It’s been a very busy month for me. Fear not, Im back!
Coworking Ireland has really taken off over the last month.
We now have 4 active bloggers contributing to the project. Pop over to coworking.ie and take a look at some of the interesting topics being discussed. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Coworking blog.
James Corbett (EirePreneur) reports on Business Class Network looking for locations.
The inside track on Adam Street – Private Members Club in London.
Paul Campbell, Reported from Citzen Space San Francisco!
Irish Independent also got a facelift!
A lot of work went in by the team to get the site up and running. The site migrated fairly smoothly from unison to independent. Personally I don’t see the guardian resemblance with the new indo design.
The layout is much better than the 7 year old design. The site is a lot more accessible and each section now has an RSS feed. Mandatory registration has been removed unlike some other papers.
With a fairly bold move for traditional media, public comments opened up on the site! Make sure to post your feedback on the We Have Changed page. Your opinion is very important, Bad or Good.
LoadzaJobs changed a bit too!
I’m not sure if anyone noticed but Loadzajobs also got some minor cosmetic changes on the front page. The site now has a clearer Featured Recruiters, Popular categories & locations, and a handy list of Industries / Categories down the bottom of the page. I have dug up a snapshot from April of last year to help you compare the changes, Before & After.
More to come next week!
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April 3rd, 2007 by Jason Roe
I have been toying with the idea of coworking for some time. For anyone that hasn’t heard of coworking yet, the concept is fairly simple:
“Coworking is a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents”
The concept itself is nothing new. Freelancers and small business have always teamed up for office shares. What makes coworking any different to typical office share? In my mind the definition of an office share would be simple “A closed group of people spreading the cost of an office”. Whereas coworking is the next evolution of this model.
Think of it this way, what if you could not only spread the cost of your business, but quickly and easily pool resources with a larger community of likeminded individuals? Your office share is limited to a stagnant pool of talent that will rarely change. What if your community was more fluidic? How would that affect your business model?
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February 9th, 2007 by Jason Roe
Voting has now opened over at the Irish blog awards.
It seems that I was nominated for Best Designed Blog!! Thanks guys!
Voting will close at 5pm on Friday February 16th. A shortlist will be announced soon after and judging will decide the winner of each category. Winners will be announced at the Irish Blog Awards 2007 event in Dublin on March 3rd in the Alexander hotel. You may be contacted via your email address to verify your votes.
Keep an eye on my blog for more info!
PS: I would appreciate your votes under Best Designed Blog – “Jason Roe’s Blog”!
Full List of nominations:
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January 19th, 2007 by Jason Roe
Just to give you all a heads up. I will be heading down to Barcamp Tomorrow. Barcamp will be held in the ArcLabs Research and Innovation building in Waterford IT.
If anyone wants to buy me a drink, It would be more than welcomed!
More information can be found over at the Barcamp Wiki and Blog.
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January 15th, 2007 by Jason Roe
Looks like a well known marketing consultant’s site has been hacked. Be warned! The hacker redirected all of Stuntdubl’s feeds to his own wordpress blog (has offensive language) Full list of sites hacked!
To quote the hackers wordpress blog:
Anyways, I just started the first hacking cruzade… The easy targets (Wordpress blogs with register_globals=on) using a custom PHP script based on this code
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January 6th, 2007 by Jason Roe
After doing a bit of research on Wordpress blog security I stumbled upon a wordpress Ticket #3142. This ticket describes an issue where every registered user that has logged into our blog can spy on the metadata of all other users by typing in a simple URL (This is after they sign up and activating an account). One comment said “I believe this affects 2.0.4 and 2.1″, This basically means versions before ver 2.0.5.
So what does this really mean for your wordpress blogs?
Your blog meta data includes all of the e-mail address of every registered user & also ever person who has commented on your blog (if public registration is enabled). This has a potential to cause huge privacy concerns relating to email addresses. A Smart email spammer could latch onto this exploit and spider your blog and all of your users email accounts.
After doing a bit of Google magic I found over 819 Irish blogs and over 292,000 other blogs with the potential to be affected by this problem. Out of the 5 high-profile Irish blogs that I tested, all of them seemed to be vulnerable.
So how do I fix this problem?
There are some blogs that don’t seem to be included in this group. All of them have public registration disabled. So a quick fix would be to disable registration and jump over to Ticket #3142 and get the patch ASAP.
DIGG THIS STORY NOW!
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November 30th, 2006 by Jason Roe
Dole.ie provides a one stop shop for job hunters, the site spiders and indexes many of the larger Irish job sites. One of the notable features that dole.ie provide is a RSS feed. Many of the job sites that it spiders do not offer this service.
According to a post over on boards.ie Webmaster/Flash forum, Irishdev.com has been hammering dole.ie with requests for its search RSS feed. As a result dole.ie was forced to shutdown temporarily for about 12/24 hours until a solution could be found.
The interesting fact behind this saga is that irishdev.com seems to have passed all of the content off as its own, with no reference to Dole. Ok come on you steal their content … hammer their box … then pass the content off as your own! Cop on lads!
On the bright side .. IrishDev now say that they will only grab the content once every 3 hours. How nice of them! No mention of credit for the RSS or content.
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