Hugh Durkin, Irish Internet Guy

Fine Gael TD George Lee in double-jobbing scandal

Hugh — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:13:37 +0000

Ex-RTÉ journalist and current Fine Gael TD George Lee must not be content with being a shining, rising star within the Irish government. Clearly he’s become tired of Enda Kennys regime, and is seeking out further opportunities to push forward his career in politics. I’m sure Enda Kenny won’t be happy when he finds out his superstar TD has been double-jobbing!

He’s now defected to the Conservative Party in the UK, under the guidance of leader David Cameron. Looking to spice up his image, George has done away with his glasses (who wants to hang out with a four-eyes anyway, sure I got laser eye surgery meself), but his wardrobe remains the same judging by initial press photos.

Here’s a leaflet doing the rounds in the Holborn / St. Pancras constituency at the moment. Visit his website at http://www.mygeorgelee.com.

Best of luck George!

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Mad Mimi - a fantastically simple email marketing tool

Hugh — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:50:25 +0000

The internet has been paying my bills for over a decade, and in that time i’ve seen email marketing tools come and go. From open source to paid, there have been massive developments in the space over the past few years, and now the choices are greater than ever. Recently, however, I took the step to migrate all my email marketing lists (double opt in of course!) to Mad Mimi, a fantastically easy web app for managing email lists. Here’s why.

First of all, Mad Mimi is insanely simple to use. After migrating my lists over to Mad Mimi (also stupidly simple), I had one of our website managers trained in about ten minutes. It really is that simple to use. Every single button is where it should be, the workflow is perfect, and if you mess up at any point along the way, it’s easy to go back a step and make changes.

Mad Mimi comes with a variety of templates by default which are simple to customise. You simply point and click to select new colours, upload a header for your emails (or multiple headers), the app resizes the headers to fit, and you’re good to go. It’s possible to customise and save as many templates as you wish - total presentation flexibility.

Throughout the app, two main tabs have pride of place - ‘Promotions’ and ‘Audience’. The ‘Promotions’ tab allows you to create, edit, and most importantly clone emails, and also view extensive stats on each mailing (more about that later). The ‘Audience’ tab allows you to view subscriber figures, and if your ego needs a boost, it shows you at a glance how many new subscribers you’ve gained since the last time you’ve logged in.

When viewing your list of promotions (or mailings), you’ll see a list of links for each mailing: Scheduling, Send, Edit, Clone, View, Stats, and Delete.

Send, edit, and view are pretty much self explanatory. You use these to send, edit, or view the mailing.

Scheduling allows you to schedule the mailing for any point in the future - super handy for getting future mailings ready when you have time, and letting the Mad Mimi app take care of the delivery when the time comes.

The clone feature allows you to clone previous mailings - this saves soooo much time, it’s hard to get across unless you start to use the app regularly. It’s such a simple feature that most other mailing list management solutions don’t have, but it’s incredibly important.

Now we get to the stats link. Click on this, and you’ll get a lovely pie chart showing you at a glance how that mailing went. You’ll see open rates, click tracking stats (you can opt to switch this off, but why would you?), the number of times the mail was forwarded on (hello viral happiness!), the number of bounces (bounced email addresses are removed automatically), and critically the number of members who unsubscribed from your list after opening this particular mailing. See? Everything for the stat hungry marketeer.

As well as all of that, you can opt to switch on extra tools - some paid and some free. The include a ‘drip feed’ feature, to automatically send subscribers a set of pre defined emails at specific time increments after signing up with you. A multi-user feature allows you to add extra users to mange particular lists, or a particular set of lists. An RSS to email feature automatically creates mailshots at specific time intervals, parsed from RSS feeds - really handy for news websites, or if you’ve a regularly updated special offers blog.

Obviously you can create web forms to handle signups, and once again creating a web form is super simple. If the built in stats aren’t enough, a simple integration with Google Analytics is possible. Mad Mimi also have a Mailer Api if you’d like the system to handle registration emails for an app of your choosing, or even ‘lost password’ emails.

There you have it! Mad Mimi is the best email marketing tool i’ve ever seen. The best part? You can try it out for yourself for free - click here to give it a go.

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Why Vazumo and Yourlocal.ie need to be scared of Qype

Hugh — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:22:04 +0000

In the last two years or so, the classified listings directory market in Ireland has been hotting up, with the launch of Vazumo.com, and Yourlocal.ie. Both started out by pretty much using exising data (Vazumo.com the business listings from Eircom, and Yourlocal.ie using information from the Independent Directory), and both have been ramping up their sales efforts of late. Essentially they provide the same service - a generic Ireland-wide business directory, where you can search for something (a taxi, doctor, whatever) and the search engine will throw up relevant results in your area. In the case of Yourlocal.ie, users can rate and review businesses, and both sites charge for enhanced listings. Both sites have been taking chunks out of each other of late, in the hope of eventually taking chunks out of the Golden Pages. However they all now have a serious competitor to deal with in the guise of Qype.

Qype was founded in 2005, and have been spreading their wings since then to become the largest user generated reviews website in Europe. They’re pretty much following the format as Yelp in the US, aside from the fact their growth has been quicker, and they seem to be doing a far better job when it comes to site usability, community building, and seo. Yelp have launched in some European territories (including Ireland), but don’t seem to be matching their success in the US with similar results in Europe.

The range of information on offer is vast, up to date, and localised by Qype. For instance you can look for a great restaurant in Dublin, but when you’re looking at the results pages you’re also offered information about the area - places to shop, events, local attractions. You could plan your day around Qype - it’s a fantastic tool. So fantastic they hit 10 million unique users across Europe in May. No doubt that figure has grown since.

They’re also big on innovation. Qype hold localised events for community members, allowing these users to connect in the offline world as well as online. It’s a great way to encourage users to keep reviewing businesses, add events, and keep the site ticking over. Another recent innovation is their Geome Integration, allowing users to see where their friends are in relation to Qype listed businesses - handy if you’re looking for a cheeky last minute pint somewhere good.

So why are Qype a serious competitor to Yourlocal.ie and Vazumo.com? First, let’s look at traffic.

Alexa can be quite hit and miss when it comes to stats at times, but check out this graph which compares the three sites side by side. Qype is the green line which has - in the space of just over six months - almost passed out both Vazumo and Yourlocal. Vazumo have been engaged in affiliate marketing and other promotional techniques, and Yourlocal is sponsoring everything under the sun, splurging out huge amounts of money on marketing. But I bet you’ve never even heard of Qype till now? And yet they have so much traffic - why?

Because they’re know how to generate traffic quickly, and for free. Qype are a lean, mean, traffic machine - hence their rapid growth.

As well as all that their basic listing contains everything the premium listings on the other sites offer. Their basic listings are free and contain:

Corporate website
Location map
Advertise special offers
Opening times
Detailed information
Owner contact email
Unlimited image uploads

Not bad eh? Their premium offerings allow you to advertise across the site, but if you maintain your page well, you’ll get plenty of leads from it.

Keep an eye on Qype. You’ll be hearing a lot more from them.

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Taxi Drivers - and plenty of the Irish - finally get a kick in the hole thanks to the recession

Hugh — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 03:12:25 +0000

It’s 2.43am and i’m back in my rented gaff in Dalkey, Dublin, Ireland after my first Friday night out following my first two weeks living in London. To be honest i’m gagging to get back to the UK asap to get back to what is now becoming a taste of reality after a big dose of Celtic Tiger horseshit. We, as Irish, have been living the high life over the last ten to fifteen years, totally taking for granted our financial offerings from the EEC (now the EU of course), and the help so many states have given us since our formation as a nation in 1922 (1937 if you want to be pedantic about it), and we desperately needed a kick in the hole. Now we’ve had it.

I just went out tonight in Dalkey. You know? The place where Edge from U2 lives, Enya, blah blah. They really live in Killiney but Dalkey’s where it’s at, and the place that claims them as residents. Damon Hill (the F1 Driver) lived here, as did colleague Eddie Irvine. Neil Jordan lives here. Lisa Stansfield lived here for a while when she was trying to kick the booze habit, and our wonderful Irish celeb economist David McWilliams lives nearby.

A hub of celebrity activity, and therefore wealth you may say? 12 months ago you may have been correct, but not so today.

There were no celebs in Dalkey tonight. Just the regular inhabitants of an increasingly jaded south Dublin, drinking away their recessionary woes and pains. Some of those out tonight are on the dole - of these, a huge amount enjoy being on the dole. Why bother getting a job when you and your impregnated missus can gather every social benefit known to man, and come out with €40,000 a year for doing absolutely sweet fuck all?

And then we have the taxi drivers.

For so long the taxi drivers of Dublin have been trying everything to squeeze the last little cent out of the needy and financially raped Irish customer. They even decided to lash a ‘fuel levy’ onto cab fares about six months ago when fuel prices went skyward for a month or two. Clearly they missed out on the business studies part of secondary school, if they bothered to attend the education they were given for free. You can’t peddle ice to the eskimos, specially when it’s already overpriced and you want to charge for keeping that overpriced ice cool.

In the past i’ve left the Queens in Dalkey - at a time when I didn’t live (rent) in Dalkey - and couldn’t get a cab home for love nor money. Tonight… well, let me give you a visual perspective on my amusement. Here goes: http://twitpic.com/apt0b

No, you’ve not just looked at a Carlsberg ad from 2004, you’ve looked at a posh south county Dublin suburb from summer 2009. Twelve months ago, at 2am, each and every one of those taxi drivers in the picture you just looked at were in their leabas havin a little snooze - when consumers needed them most. Now that they’re fucked like the rest of the country they’re bothering to queue up for business - as they should have done twelve months ago.

I’ve not lived in London long - in fact i’ve not yet moved full time - but what i’ve noticed is that London today is the exact same as it was 5, 7, even 10 years ago. The dole is shit, the incentive to work is great, and the place is relentlessly buzzing. I went for dinner at a French restaurant at Spitalfields market on Tuesday and it was jammed - I could barely get a table, I had to wait. On a Tuesday! Why? They bothered their hole to cut their prices during a slow period, do two for one specials, and get people through the doors.

In comparison heaps of Irish restaurants have decided to simply half arsedly do ‘lunch specials’ at two courses for €23 (fuck off please, it should be a tenner) and give up, going out of business and leaving the banks with their bad debts and egg on their faces.

Hopefully in years to come the Irish will look back on the early part of the millennium and roll their eyes to heaven. ‘What the fuck were we thinking’, they’ll say. And hopefully they’ll realise for a little island in the Atlantic we had it good - very, very good - and we fucked it up.

Not our government. Not world markets. Ourselves.

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Me in twenty years

Hugh — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:23:20 +0000

Sometimes it’s good to step back and appreciate what you do for a living. When I was younger I used to spend my days playing with my computer, and luckily I managed to find a career doing something that I love.

But then again, so did Bill Gates. Check out this cheesy pic!

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Adsense now allows publishers to increase font size - get ready to earn more!

Hugh — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:47:45 +0000

Wahey! Google have finally released a feature which allows Adsense publishers to change the default font size in their ad units. This is probably the biggest improvement in the service - ever. Why? Because you’ll get vastly increased clickthru rates on your formats, translating into extra revenue. It’s also a sign that Google is giving smaller publishers the same tools larger publishers have access to.

For quite some time you may have noticed larger publishers are allowed to access tools which allow them to style the placements and look of their ad formats, including font size. No doubt they saw increased revenues and clickthru rates because of this.

Get ready to earn more - but don’t forget, keep creating great content too!

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Don’t just change your Adsense font - try the colour too!

Hugh — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:50:40 +0000

If you’re a blogger or digital publisher, you’ll generate your revenue from loads of places. Once of the most consistent revenue earners is Google Adsense, which i’ve discussed several times already on this blog. However if you’ve optimised your ad colours and placements, and have your eCPM’s and clickthru rates optimised to the hilt, what more can you do to increase your earnings? There is at least one thing you can do - not just to your adsense placements, but to your whole website - play with the fonts!

I recently did a test over the course of about a week, and changed fonts on one of my sites - site wide - from an Arial standard, to Verdana. I also made the font size a little smaller to account for the fact that Verdana is a little chunkier than Arial. I made no other changes to my adsense placements or website, and at the end of the week discovered something very nice.

My changes had resulted in an increased clickthru rate of almost 1%! Bearing in mind my CTR across all my sites is quite high in comparison to other users i’ve been in touch with, a gain of this size for very little effort was extremely welcome.

Have you experimented with fonts within your adsense formats?

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Will paedo priests be prosecuted? I bloody well hope so.

Hugh — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:19:25 +0000

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last week or so, you’ll have found it very hard to avoid the publishing of the Child Abuse Commission Report, and the public outcry that ensued. The report merely confirmed what anyone with half a brain already knew - that schools and orphanages run by religious orders in Ireland were rampant with child abuse in several ways, be it rape, physical abuse, or emotional torment for the children involved. However, the report did not name names, nor did it initially look like this would happen. On top of this, the maximum amount the religioius orders could be held liable for compensation for was around €128 million - a figure agreed almost ten years ago. Amazingly enough, even today the religious orders have not paid that full amount to victims of their child abuse.

Religious orders were given money by the state to run our schools. More than enough money, as it turned out, than was adequate to look after the needs of the children involved. Why then did children live in fear and poverty, in a situation not unlike that of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps? Children - imagine these kids are your own - were made to work like slaves, were malnourished, were raped, beaten, mentally tormented, and several received beatings so bad they ended up with broken limbs and scars which would last a lifetime.

And who were the perpetrators of these crimes against children? Who were these child abusers? The very same people who would stand up on Sundays, tell us how best to live our lives in the most morally correct way possible, shove communion in our mouths, tell us it was the ‘body of christ’, and sit in darkened rooms and listen to our ‘confessions’. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those filthy priests were sat naked behind the confessional wall, playing with themselves as young parishoners told them sorrowfully that they’d had ‘impure thoughts’ and wished to repent. No wonder fuck all people go to mass anymore. Why would you?

What of the nuns? If you read the Child Abuse Commission Report, you’ll find all sorts of insane abuses on their part too. Anyone who says that the sexual abuse was limited to some ‘gay priests’ is sorely mistaken. Young girls were forced to massage the breasts of depraved nuns, and were also beaten and tortured. Both priests and nuns were found to have committed ‘digital rape’ according to the report. If you’re not aware of what digital rape is, it is ‘When someone [rapes] a person using their [finger] or [fingers]‘. So hundreds of priests and nuns were molesting children - boys and girls - on an epic scale. Boys and girls just like the boys and girls you and I will cherish and bring up without smacking them or abusing them in any way. I don’t have kids yet, but I do have an 8 year old niece who I love and adore. It makes me feel sick that children her age and younger were having their childhood taken away from them in such a manner. Thousands of children. I count myself very lucky I wasn’t one of them.

The religious orders involved in all of this are criminals. Not just the perpetrators of the crimes, but the people who have harboured these criminals for so long, and I include the vatican in that. We’ve been listening to these abuser idiots go on for long enough about how world poverty is such a scandal, and we should be helping our less-better-off bretheren by donating to them in various ways. At the same time the church was sitting on billions of euro worth of property, and priests and nuns were living the high life.

If you have any inkling of sympathy or support for the religious orders involved, just look at this video. I have insane amounts of respect for this guy - despite the torment he endured at the hands of paedo priests, he overcame it and even managed to become the mayor of Clonmel for a time. The video below speaks for itself.

I look forward to the day when the paedo priests and nuns are locked up and left to die behind bars - alone and outcast as they should be.

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Updating Drupal Pathauto module aliases using Cron

Hugh — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:29:32 +0000

Drupal, as we all know, comes great out of the box in terms of search engine friendly urls and the like. However, the built-in path module doesn’t always handle urls as you’d like, especially on large sites. Pathauto is the module for choice for those of us that are fussy about how our urls are structured, however it does have some shortcomings. One of these is for owners of really, really large sites. If you have a site with tens (or hundreds) of thousands of nodes, updating the url aliases can be a tedius process, only achievable via the admin interface, and you can only create a few (500 or so) at a time. So, how does one automate this tedious process?

After a big long search, I managed to find the solution. I managed to track down various solutions (view post here), but i’ll outline the one that worked for me.

For a background on my Drupal install, i’m running Drupal 6.10 and Pathauto 6.x-1.1. All sites are installed using the Multi Site method, which is a fantastic feature of Drupal, allowing for great power across all your sites on a small footprint.

Ok, here goes.

1. Create a file in /var/www/drupal (or wherever your core Drupal files are located) called cron-update-pathauto.php. Chmod this as executable - 500 should suffice.

2. In the file, add the following code and save:

include_once ‘./includes/bootstrap.inc’;
include_once ‘./sites/all/modules/pathauto/pathauto.inc’;
include_once ‘./sites/all/modules/pathauto/pathauto_node.inc’;

drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);

node_pathauto_bulkupdate();
?>

3. Test by visiting http://yoursite.tld/cron-update-pathauto.php - take note of any unaliased urls beforehand so you can see if the script has worked or not. Remember, this will only execute based on the maximum aliases you’d like created as set in your admin area, so don’t expect Rome to be built in a day!

4. Set up a cron job to execute the script on whichever interval you’d like. If you have lots and lots of content created daily, and you’d like to be totally fussy about them all having the right url aliases immediately, set your cron to run maybe once an hour. Otherwise once a day should suffice.

That’s it! Enjoy Drupalling!

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5 handy tools for selling digital products online

Hugh — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:31:57 +0000

Whether you’re looking to sell ebooks, music, or software, there are two ways to make money from selling digital products online - the easy way, and the hard way. The hard way entails spending thousands on set up costs for your ecommerce website with long set up times and legwork. The easy way simply involves finding ‘point and click’ service providers who specialise in payment processing and digital fulfilment, signing up, adding your products, and promoting them! Here’s a few handy sites which can help you sell your digital downloads and products online.

1. Paypal

One of the first things you need when selling anything online - digital or otherwise - is a merchant account. There are many providers on the market such as Worldpay, Realex, and 2Checkout, but the fastest and easiest way to start accepting payments online is via Paypal. There is no set up fee to create an account with Paypal, but there are fees incurred on a sale-by-sale basis, usually an incremental percentage of the sale value itself. Paypal also provide access to an API, so many ecommerce applications such as E-Junkie and Shopify (below) integrate with Paypal to provide instant payment notifications - perfect for making digital products accessible immediately after payment.

2. E-Junkie

E-Junkie is one of the best digital product fulfilment solutions on the web today, not just for the price (from a mere $5 USD a month for 10 products with no transaction fees) - the feature list is comprehensive and above and beyond what many small merchants will need. Registration is free, and E-Junkie give you a 1 week free trial to check out the service and see for yourself how easy it is to use. Oh, and it integrates with Paypal’s IPN notifications service meaning you can hook up your Paypal and E-Junkie accounts in a few clicks. Seriously cool.

3. Shopify / Fetch

Shopify is one of the easiest ways to get a fully featured shopping cart style website up and running in a few minutes. They provide you with a fantastically easy to use interface, and a massive range of out-of-the-box templates which you can use to get your shop up and running quickly. Search engine optimisation is built in, so no need to pay for an ‘expert’ to help you get the most from your pages.

Like Paypal, Shopify has an API which developers can utilise to build handy addons to extend the Shopify service. One of these addons is Fetch. ‘Seamless digital delivery’ is the mantra of Fetch, and they deliver just that. Their plans start from $10 USD per month for up to 15 items - so slightly more than E-Junkie - but you get the added value of being able to attach your digital products to a fully search engine friendly Shopify website, complete with Paypal integration so you can process payments. If you have big ambitions and want to future proof your digital sales, try this combination out for size.

4. Indiestore

I first found out about Indiestore in 2007 when it was launching, and I even got a great tour of their offices in East London (thank you Tejas) when they were busily working on newer versions of the product. Indiestore is a division of 7Digital.com - one of the biggest music download providers on the internet - and allows bands and musicians to sell their music online, and distribute it through the 7Digital network. The service also allows musicians to use social tools such as Bebo to promote their work via music player ‘widgets’ which can be embedded into social networks or on basically any website or blog. Indiestore have starter packages starting from free (with you earning 70% of the value of your sales), to a pro version (£35 / $50 USD per year) which allows you keep 80% of the revenue, and also makes your download sales chart eligible.

5. Clickbank

Clickbank has been around for as long as I can remember, and there are thousands of E-Books out there which can tell you how to make gazillions from Clickbank. The best way to make money from Clickbank is to create your own digital products and sell them yourself, whilst leveraging the 100,000+ affiliates Clickbank have registered with them. If you’re looking for a ‘one handy invoice’ solutions, Clickbank issue weekly payments but have fairly strict guidelines you must adhere to before being allowed to sell products on the network. Clickbank also has an international, multi-currency checkout which is handy for localisation. In terms of pricing, there is a $49.95 USD once off activiation charge when you upload your first product, and a $2.50 charge per cheque they issue to you.

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