Hugh Durkin, Irish Internet Guy

Creating a Drupal 6 theme - not as hard as it first seems!

Drupal 6 has come on in leaps and bounds since I first had a look at it a few years ago.  It’s now powering new projects i’m working on, including Shares.ie, Competitions.ie, and Ewine.ie.  I’ve used the wonderful oDesk to outsource some of the work, and have a contractor integrating Keiths excellent css layout for Shares.ie into a Drupal 6 theme.  Tonight, however, I thought i’d spend an evening multitasking by watching the excellent Munster-All Blacks match, whilst at the same time having a go at integrating Keiths Competitions.ie design into a Drupal theme myself.

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Why PPC, CPA, and display advertising can live happily ever after

There is increased, heated debate about the future of advertising online.  Each and every time I get my copy of NMA delivered through the door, I read articles by ‘experts’ who say PPC is the next big thing, display advertising is dead, and affiliate marketing is a dirty game packed full of dodgy coupon code site owners, and inexperienced buffoons.  Everyone seems to be fighting their own corner, and forgetting the reality of digital advertising - PPC, CPA, and display advertising compliment each other, and always will.

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Compare.ie traffic up 340% month-on-month

Santa is being very nice to Compare.ie so far this year.  The site soft launched about two and a bit months ago, we’re up to about 20k unique visitors per month, and it’s growing increasingly quickly.  Just checking the stats (i’m a statsaholic!), so far this month the site is up 340% from last month.  Happily, i’m seeing lots of returning visitors, and about 1,500 people have opted to receive our ‘Money saving deals’ newsletter.

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Old Quinnsworth TV Ads

One of the most ingenious bits of Irish marketing back in the eighties was Maurice Pratt, the Marketing Manager for Quinnsworth, deciding on a TV advertising strategy that included him starring in their TV ads, highlighting various in store offers.  Some of these (for the time!) were quite ‘high tech’, and i’ve stumbled across one of the best of them via Youtube.  Darth Vader also stars in this epic ad - and some outtakes are below too.  Enjoy!

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Shares.ie - Nearly There!

With the stock markets in turmoil over the last few weeks, I don’t think there has ever been a better time for me to launch Shares.ie.  The site will feature market data, news, analysis, and reports updated several times an hour, and the site will allow visitors to register, create share portfolios, and easily track market news that is relevant to each site user.

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Female Herald journo takes issue with Ryanair 2009 Calendar

Last year, for the craic, I bought a mate of mine the 2008 Ryanair Charity Calendar.  Printed in aid of charities like the Simon Community, the 2009 Ryanair Calendar is ready for ordering and is sure to sell out again.  What a great idea for a great cause - my mate loved his last year, but truth be told I bought it just to have a peek myself.  I’ve ordered a 2009 one for the office already.  Bleedin deadly.  However, some females are up in arms against the thought of such objectification of women, notably Aoife Finneran from the Herald.

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Ryanair have a birdy bloodbath during emergency landing in Rome

Whoops!  Incidents of an accidental nature are few and far between at Ryanair, especially seeing as they carry around 60 million passengers a year.  However it all went a bit tits up today at Rome - Ciampino, as a 737 coming in to land suffered multiple bird strikes.  Totally unavoidable, and a freak accident.  Pilot managed to get the plane back on the ground, but here’s a piccy of the bloodied aircraft.  Messy!  I wonder if O’Leary has issued orders to scoop up the dead birds remains for their inflight meals?

Some stupid emails I get…

When you have a network of websites, and a contact form on each one, it’s inevitable that you’ll get some total crap now and again.  Todays stonker came in the form of an email from an American dude whose name and contact details i’ll keep private for his dignity, but i’ll post the contents of his pointless email here.  For the record, he emailed Fashion.ie, a website we have with a female readership.

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Bebo being hacked to shite

In the last two days i’ve had several of my friends on Bebo send me excellent messages saying that i’m appearing in loads of funny videos from a url that looks not unlike youtube, but totally isn’t.  Seems that some hacker / spammer types have managed to break through the security threshold at Bebo and wreak havoc on some users accounts.  Yet another reason to move my interweb social activity to Facebook methinks…

Installing Acquia vs standard Drupal 6

I’m constantly hopping around between Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal, trying to figure out which suits particular projects best.  Drupal has been promising for some now, but in terms of ‘out of the box’ functionality, it has been limited - on the flipside Joomla! components can be a bit ugly and hard to manipulate, and Wordpress is nice and lean, but very limited in scope.  Increasingly too, i’m giving more and more thought to post-install considerations, like who the hell can I turn to when things go wrong?

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