Archive for the ‘news’ Category
.co Domain Names
For as long as I can remember I’ve tried to secure a domain for my surname, the obvious candidates were either a .com or .co.uk but both of these are taken by huge companies. The .com company leaves a particularly bad taste in my mouth, as they are only forwarding the domain to an internal page of another website, with no mention of the URL on the page. I’ve tried several different methods of contact to see if they would be interested in selling; phone, email and blogging but as you would expect, I have not received a response.
Unfortunately it seems like I won’t be able to secure either of these domains, so I’ve been looking at the options available to me. For a good while I was very interesting in acquiring a Niger domain, which would look like osbor.ne, but I decided after much deliberation, that no matter how much I wanted it, a £300 outlay every two years was just too expensive.
In the last few months there have been more people mentioning the latest domain extension to be brought to the masses, the Colombian TLD, .co. At first I thought it was just going to be another pointless domain, something that wasn’t going to catch on, much like the .me domains that came out two years ago. I pondered over this decision for a few weeks to help me decided what I wanted to do; forget about purchasing it or try my luck with a pre-order. In the end I decided to go ahead with the pre order and I now own osborne.co.
To be honest, I’m not really sure if a .co domain will ever have the same weighting as a .co.uk or a .com, or even if it will catch on, but it will definitely be interesting to see what companies lean towards it. There were two reasons which lead to me pre-ordering the domain:
- People make spelling errors all of the time and a .co domain is only one letter shorter than a .com. Obviously this doesn’t mean anything but perhaps something like this could help a site climb the ranking quicker?
- As I said above, I wanted a domain for my surname for a good few years now and I wasn’t prepared to let a suitable alternative pass me by. If a year passes and I haven’t used it as much as I thought then I’ll simple let it expire.
What do you think, is this new domain extension a waste of time or indeed something that could prove to be quite valuable?
Tweet in the Park featured in the Scottish Sun
If you managed to pick up a copy of todays Scottish Sun, make sure you flick through to the music pull-out.
In February I wrote up an article on my first foray into the world of web apps, where I detailed how I went about building a Twitter mash-up site for Scottish music festival T in the Park. As I’m incredibly witty I decided to call it Tweet in the Park.
The site is a Twitter feed aggregator which will pull in any instance of the festival being mentioned, so that people who, like myself, are not in attendance this year will not miss out on a thing.
Late last month the Scottish Sun got in contact with me asking if I would be interested in doing a small interview to talk about the site and why I decided to create it. If you wish to download a pdf version of the page then feel free to do so — Tweet In The Park pdf.
Project 52 relaunched
It looks like I’m a little late in discovering the news that project52, which I’m currently taking part in, has been relaunched. Incase you are unaware of what project52 actually is, it is a challenege that bloggers can take up where they will publish one blog post a week for a year.
Initially the challenge was to run from 1st of January 2010 – 1st January 2011. However, upon checking the website today I have discovered that the project has been restarted as of today, St. Patrick’s Day. It appears to me that they are looking for everyone to wipe the slate clean and start again.
However, I feel that this a little unfair on those of us who were more than ready for the start of the year and have so far managed to publish a blog post every week. I have therefore decided to take the decision that I will be continuing as I had originally planned and I will finish on the proposed date of 1st of January 2011.
If you’re interested in finding out more information then visit – http://project52.info/
Project 52
Last week I signed up to this new idea called project 52. For those of you who do not know what this is about
Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!
Writing is something that I wish I could do a lot more of but for some reason or another it just always seems to go on the back burner. If I’m being honest, I think the reason that I don’t publish regular content on this site is because my grasp of the English language is poor. I’m still not really sure how I managed to write my fourth year University dissertation.
Another reason that I don’t publish content to this blog as often as I would like is because I try to make this blog tailored more towards what I do, instead of just talking about myself and what I’ve been up to. I just don’t think that anyone would be particularly interested in reading about what I have been up to. However of late I’ve started to change my thinking. It’s 2010 next year (which is a pretty cool number) and next year is already shaping up to be quite an important year for myself. Therefore why shouldn’t I write about what I’ve been getting up to?
So how will I tackle project 52? I think it’s probably going to be easier to do if I use a structure for each month, although this may change by the time 1st January rolls around. My structure might follow something like this
- A tutorial post
- A discussion post about the web
- A guest blogger
- A monthly round-up with next months goals
If you’re interested to see how I fair, why don’t you follow my RSS feed and see if I’ve been able to tackle this task I’ve set myself. If this sounds like your cup of tea and fancy giving it a go then sign up to the site and get the ball rolling so that you have a few ideas by the time that the New Year comes around.
The Glasgow Geek Nights
Let me introduce you to Weegi.es the Glasgow Geek night.
A few months ago I wrote a post about the severe lack of geek nights up in Scotland for the web enthusiasts. However, if the truth be told, since I wrote the original post I’ve just been too busy to get anything up and running but now I’m ready to get the ball rolling. With your help of course. Without you the night will be nothing.
You might be wondering why I’ve choosen the name Weegi.es, well if you have a quick look over at the urban dictionary they define weegie as:
A person who comes from Glasgow
Pretty simple eh? The cone also symbolises one of Glasgows most famous landmarks.
Right now the website is just a holding page with a quick explanation basically telling readers exactly what you are reading in this post. I’ve also hooked up a feedburner subscription box, so you can sign up and see all the news regarding the site.
The plan is simple, I’ll leave the holidng page up as it is for now and drum up interest through many of the different social networks, primarily twitter. Please feel free to retweet as many times as you want. I’ll also set up a google group so we can start talking about what we want to do with the night, probably arrange a first meet up for next month in a pub somewhere and then finally get a site pushed live.
If you have any questions please leave them here and remember to sign up to the feedburner on the main site.
Blur Tickets for Sale
Friday 3rd July 2009 – Hyde Park
Ticket RRP – £50
Number of Tickets – 4
First of all let me apologise for this random blog entry, I promise I’ll keep it short. I’m in a bit of pickle and I’m hoping my blog/readers will be able to help me out.
At the start of the year I waited patiently for the Blur reunion tickets to go on sale and I was chuffed to bits when I got them and I immediately started counting down the days until the concert. However, due to a turn in events I am now no longer able to attend this concert and as such I am having to sell my tickets.
If you are interested in purchasing these tickets, please get in touch with me through the contact form. If you are a regular contributor to the site I’ll knock some money off the price of the ticket for you.
Support includes Vampire Weekend, who I’m sure we are all familiar with after last summer. And my new favourite band, who I’m actually more upset about missing than Blur – Florence and the machine.
Disappointment
Before I start writing I’d just like to make it clear that this article is not aimed at anyone other than myself and I hope that by publishing this I won’t allow it to happen again.
A few weeks ago I agreed to start working on a project and although it wasn’t paying anything it managed to get me very, very excited. It was one of those rare occasions where before you have even sat down with a pen and paper you know exactly the route you wish to take.
Immediately I knew this project was going to be a pleasure to work on and before long I had already mocked up the page using some lovely CSS3 elements, infact I’d probably go as far to say that it was my best piece of CSS work to date. After a few hours of constructing the page I was very happy with the outcome, which was apparent due to the fact that I wasn’t spending hours tweaking parts of it.
However for a combination of different reasons I was unable to continue at the pace I had set at the start and when I entered the second week of the project, it had sadly almost ground to a hault. Thankfully, it wasn’t all doom and gloom, I had in-fact been able to incorporated a few more elements into the site and spent a little time refining some aspects that I wasn’t completely happy with.
With the end of week two approaching, I decided to show what I had created, letting them know that it still wasn’t completely finished. The feedback I received was very encouraging and the design seemed to go down well enough. However, as with many thing, especially when you think you are progressing nicely, a setback cropped up. It turned out that the highly customised pages that I was working to were to be altered and that I would have to edit my CSS to get everything to fall into place again.
I spent the the next couple of evenings, altering my CSS to fit the template but due to the amount of changes it proved to be very time consuming. However, on Monday, two weeks after starting this project, I recieved an email stating that another template would be going up for now due to time constraints as the event was edging ever closer. I was gutted, my code was nearly finished and I didn’t think I was that far away from sign-off.
On a positive note, there may be another chance for me to showcase this design, as it was still under debate whether the the design of the site would change for each event. For now though, I’ll need to keep my fingers crossed.
Chi.mp Invite Wanted
I heard about this site a while back and I’m pretty sure I signed up to get a beta invite but as time goes by I’m not so sure that I did because I haven’t recieved anything. I’m really interested in trying this service out, I’ll probably also write up a small review of the service when I get my invite.
For readers who do not know what the chi.mp service offers here is a brief explanation taken from their own website
Chi.mp’s service lets you register your own .mp domain and gives you a free Web site that serves as a hub for your content across the Web. Your chi.mp site also gives you one place to bring together and manage all your contacts in one “Ultimate Black Book”. Chi.mp lets you own and define “digital you” and to share different versions of “digital you” with your selected contacts. More than a life-stream or an aggregator, chimp allows you to take control of how you share your self with the world.
With chi.mp, you own and control your identity, your content and your contacts. This is not the case with typical social networks.
If anyone can help me out with a beta code/invitation then please leave a comment or alternatively send me the code through my contact form
Barack Obama
