No More Art Notepad

Werk it

2009-04-23T10:11:00.004+01:00

You may have heard of Co Working Belfast. Co Working is a concept that's been successfully piloted in many cities the world over and now Belfast has its equivalent. What it's lacked for a long time is a premises but it seems that the search is at an end.

I'll let Andy and David have the fanfare and make the big announcement in the coming weeks but in the meantime here's a taster of what's in store...

Coworking Viewing from Andy McMillan on Vimeo.

Cloud Around Folks, No Pushing

2009-04-10T17:48:00.005+01:00

It's a big week of change down here in the No More Art HQ. Anyone who knows us knows that we've always been very committed to the idea of keeping all of our business local including our website hosting. It's something we've been intensely proud of being able to do over the last few years, and we feel like we've been able to give our clients a great localised service.

However with the new possibilities presented by cloud computing we're having a rethink and have just taken the plunge into trying out Amazon Web Services. Within a few minutes we'd created our server in the cloud, and within an hour we had it configured. A few more tweaks and tucks and we'll be ready to roll out there in the big scary electric cloud of computer land. And to our joy we then realised that our little slice of the cloud exists in a datacentre in Dublin, so not quite in Belfast, but it's not Dubai!

So far the speed is phenomenal and the costs looks to be excellent also. In fact the costs look to be a fraction of any quote we were able to get from local companies to host our own hardware, maybe that's something local hosting companies should seek to address.

One thing learnt thus far is don't shut your server down, it deletes it! Scary moment until you realise you can boot up a new virtual machine in a few minutes and carry on.

Ah cloud computing. Where you been all our life?

Imagine Create 2009

2009-03-30T15:56:00.005+01:00

We've been approached to harp on at length about two of our most favourite things in Derry this Friday. If you're up in North West country and wish to listen to us harp, the details are below.

Imagine Create 2009 Music and E-Media Panel

Title A New Model for Music – the music industry and the use of electronic media in promotion, distribution and sales

Date 3 April 2009

Time 12:00 – 14:00

Location City Factory Theatre, Patrick St., Derry

Panel

Keith Cullen (Setanta Records)
Andrew Ferris (Smalltown America)
Nick Fitzsimmons (Penny Distribution)
Melanie Foster (Mastercuts)
Martin Neill (No More Art)

Themes During the 2 hours of this panel discussion there will be 2 main themes:

Theme 1: The Music Industry Past, Present and Future
Theme 2: The Use of New Media in the Music Industry

Schedule
1. Introduction to the panellists by host (Tony Talbot) (5 mins)
2. Presentation by individual panellists on Theme 1 (5 mins each)
3. Group discussion on Theme 1 (15 mins)
4. Audience Q&A on Theme 1 (10 mins)
5. Presentation by individual panellists on Theme 2 (5 mins each)
6. Group discussion on Theme 2 (15 mins)
7. Audience Q&A on Theme 2 (15 mins)

This event will also see the debut of our Gay for Andrew Ferris t-shirt range, available only in XL for us big lads. See you there...

Killing is our business, and business is good...

2009-03-17T11:52:00.006Z

A while back we wrote about the very timely demise of our old and sick friend Internet Explorer 6. Really it's been hobbling along for a long time, spilling beautiful website's guts all over the web and refusing to clean up the mess like some CSS serial killer.

Well the good folks over at .net magazine have taken this heartfelt prayer to a very welcome conclusion and got together to create Bring Down IE6, a website dedicated to offing this sorry browser quickly and letting us all get on with building a better web. We couldn't be more supportive and we'll be proudly displaying the logo and link on our homepage for all to see.

You should do the same. Instructions for doing so are on the Bring Down IE6 site. And there' s source code too for displaying a warning to your users who are still using IE6, to help them clamber out of their self imposed half arsed web.

As the site says together we will win...

Digital Circle

2009-03-09T09:39:00.003Z

Thanks to everyone who nominated me and subsequently voted for me, I've been elected on to the committee of the Digital Circle, an umbrella body for the digital media sector in Northern Ireland.

Along with Davy Sims, Andy McMillan, Adrian Lennon and Aidan McGrath I will be decamping to the Malone Road tomorrow to get the Digital Circle ball rolling, exciting times.

Thank you to everyone who nominated and then voted for me, it's very flattering to be appointed to such an important position and especially so given the competition for places. If you've anything you'd like me to take forward simply holler, I'll do my damnedest.

Marty

DC

2009-03-03T14:59:00.005Z

It's all DC at the minute, being that my misses is in Washington and I'm having a few feral moments trying to keep on top of things at home and in the office. If you're reading this dear, I unappreciate you hugely. The proposed http://intothewild.nomoreart.com has only been stopped by the threat of job losses, I kid you not.

In other stuff DC (tenuous but hey, it's all fun) I've been kindly nominated for a position on the Digital Circle steering committee and voting is now underway. Digital Circle members can read up on the nominees here and vote for their chosen folk here...

And no we didn't vote for ourselves either so if we win it's 'cos we're great!

Measuring Success is like Measuring a Spoon with a fork...

2009-02-24T16:30:00.001Z

From here on in I'll measure my success by the length of time it's been since I set foot in a dole office.

48 minutes and counting...

The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.

2009-02-17T19:56:00.014Z

"The main difference between Belfast and London is that London values young people, Belfast doesn't..."

The above was said to me recently by a good mate who's lived in London for a few years and was a stated reason as to why he isn't ever going to return home. It was one of those statements that immediately had resonance. It might not be entirely true, but there's a lot of truth to it and in my own experience I can see why he thinks that.

Perhaps it's part of our national mentality but one thing we don't do well is praise (outside of a church anyway) while we're masters of the critical assault for the most part, as various message boards and social networks based here will stand as testament.

With more young people than ever before now staying at home in Northern Ireland since the ceasefires and the subsequent semi-normalisation of the place this is something that we need to change. If we want to retain the obvious talent that is all around us and not break the spirit of those with outlandish and weighty ideas we're maybe going to have to learn to think differently.

We liberally sponsored and went to UnConvention Belfast a couple of weekends ago in the Black Box in Belfast. It was a music based event where people got together to discuss the way forward in the music industry in Northern Ireland and beyond in a room full of their peers and industry folk. It was certainly more relaxed and slightly edgier than other events of this type and got quite lively at times.

It also managed to attract quite a few high profile guests from the UK and further afield. It paid for itself and allowed the public in for free. On its own modest terms it was a success. And the lessons from this year will be carried on to Manchester and other places where more UnConventions are being planned, before it returns to Belfast at some point a more fully realised entity with ideas and concepts from elsewhere appropriated and recycled as people see fit. Its strength is the truly free exchange of ideas, innovations and contacts across a wide range of people and territories. The very idea is made to be copied and reappropriated. There's no trademark or copyright on this, in fact at its core it opposes such ideas. This is its beauty.

And similarly in digital media there's OpenCoffee where people meet up freely to chat about what they've got going on that's now got spinoffs in Newry and Lisburn. BarCamp, a more evolved version of OpenCoffee with speakers and such will return on the 25th April 2009 at the Black Box, Belfast while there will no doubt be another CreativeCamp, there's a Linux Users Group, an XCake meetup and all manner of super techie stuff too. Most of this stuff can be found at the Digital Circle website and at other sites such as NI Creatives. The recent Belfast Twestival managed to raise £500 for charity:water in a single night.

Between all of these events and the others that we either don't know about or have omitted from this list hundreds of people are meeting on a weekly basis to share thoughts, problems, ideas, work and ultimately their lives with each other. Friends are being made. Mad ideas are spawned and forgotten while some are followed through. And the entry criteria is simply showing up.

There's no owner as such, no board of directors or need to know basis. It's as open as some of the titles say. Although much credit should go to people like Andy McMillan, Phil O Kane, Matt Johnston and the many other creative folk behind these happenings. They're not asking for praise, how very Northern Irish of them, but they deserve it in droves for working so hard and for being so infallible in their spirit.

This is also true of people like Lee Munroe and Paddy Donnelly whom you might have heard of as founders of the well publicised Big Word Project, that was such a success that it was mercilessly ripped off and plagiarised, the greatest form of flattery. Lee's been finishing his Masters while working for a bunch of clients and his latest creation is www.lookaly.com, a website that allows people to review and rate places, businesses and more in Northern Ireland. It's wonderfully executed as all of Lee's work is. The fella's an inspiration in terms of following through with the big ideas, long may he continue to keep churning out such great work.

And so I'm not too sure that my friend in London is right with his appraisal of where Belfast is. He might be right in saying that those with a few shlocks of grey on their temples are suspicious and unsupportive of the young in this city but that will hardly matter as long as the young people are supporting each other.

And the Big Word Project we mentioned above?

Seemed appropriate to buy

It Was A Beautiful Day

2009-02-11T18:59:00.007Z

We've had about a hundred (well actually three) really good ideas for blog posts in the last few days but we've shelved them in order to celebrate the slow and not unwelcome death throes of an old and tired adversary.

Take a look at the top of our blog page, right up under the logo and such. See where it says about tying Internet Explorer 6 (aka IE6) to a chair and cutting its ear off? We meant every word. IE6 has been the bane of every web designers life for far too long. Box model hacks, star hacks, margin errors and such have driven us to quite literally mad. But no more! The promised land is in sight!

A quick blaze around our own and the various Google Analytics accounts of our clients have confirmed what we came across earlier today on the W3 Schools website. Usage of IE6 is in steep decline. This is a great thing for the internet as a whole. No more will we be forced to stuff the unstuffable into stuffy holes just so it renders properly in that awful retard of a web browser. W3 Schools have the following stats over the past year:

2009	IE7	IE6	IE8	Firefox
January	25.7%	18.5%	0.6%	45.5%

2008	IE7	IE6	IE5	Firefox
December	26.1%	19.6%		44.4%
November	26.6%	20.0%		44.2%
October	26.9%	20.2%		44.0%
September	26.3%	22.3%		42.6%
August	26.0%	24.5%		43.7%
July	26.4%	25.3%		42.6%
June	27.0%	26.5%	0.5%	41.0%
May	26.5%	27.3%	0.7%	39.8%
April	24.9%	28.9%	1.0%	39.1%
March	23.3%	29.5%	1.1%	37.0%
February	22.7%	30.7%	1.3%	36.5%
January	21.2%	32.0%	1.5%	36.4%

Honestly, that's a joy to behold. Our own research suggests that of the IE use on our sites IE7 is sitting pretty at about 75%, IE6 at about 20% with IE8 making up the rest. Firefox (at a stunning 45.5%!) might not be perfect either but it's worlds better than IE6. Ding dong folks, the witch is (almost) dead. Hug a web designer, they'll be up for it.

A New Home

2009-02-02T18:36:00.010Z

Over the last year or so No More Art has managed to collect a whole bunch of to do list thingies, project management systems, reminder systems and in general things that are a replacement for actually having a functioning memory and or brain, as we imagine lots of other folk have.

Web 2.0 has brought with it the idea of better, more functional and affordable web apps and we've taken the plunge accordingly in the name of efficiency and being more organised. We've recently heard the philosophy put forward that you shouldn't make lists as ultimately you're only listing your own failures but I'm not wholly sold on that, not yet at least.

Why have a iPhone if you're not going to use it to remind you about things? It's a fundamentally brilliant instrument for doing just that.

Anyhow in short we've been using:

On our PCs and Macs:

Twitter (to Tweet out about what we're at, also to spout nonsense)
Basecamp (to manage all of our projects in a collaborative fashion, which it does brilliantly)
Remember the Milk (to remind us of stuff that isn't project based, such as meetings)
Bluetie (stopped using, using Basecamp instead)
Active Collab (again stopped using after tryout, moved to Basecamp)
Google Apps (as an alternative to Microsoft Office)
Google Reader (for keeping up with subscriptions and such)

We also dabbled in Google Calendar but left that behind.

On the iPhone:

Remember the Milk App (As above in iPhone app form)
Outpost (Basecamp software for the iPhone, excellent, best thus far)
Groundwork (abandoned for Outpost)
Google iPhone App (for using docs, calendar et all on the move)
Tweetie (an excellent Twitter client, well worth the couple of quid)
Twinkle (a decent Twitter client, but inferior to Tweetie)

And now of course you're thinking, "How the hell does having all that help?" Well, it's good but could be better. On the iPhone, click the app and you're in but it's on the PC / Mac that you can improve things.

So today, to escape the general frustration of having to deal with the utterly useless Bank of Ireland High Street Belfast branch among other things, we integrated all of the apps and systems we're still using into an iGoogle homepage putting, as Thom Yorke so rightly warbled, everything in its right place. And it only took about half an hour, which is nice.

So now when we hit the home button on ye olde Firefox, we have all of our pertinent info there in front of us, integrated and looking lovely thanks to an Ocean View theme we adopted also. Ah Google, everything we do we do it with you...

(Feel free to boke.)

From A (Not So) Great Height

2009-01-29T16:01:00.002Z

So I dropped my iPhone today, first time ever by the way, and smashed its screen into shards. It was a moment of unbelieveable horror, like the death of a pet. I dropped it from about three feet high onto a cobbled street; not recommended. That glass isn't as tough as you might think it is folks.

The moral of the story? Buy a f**cking protective case for your iPhone or feel the end of January wrath of £139 for a replacement handset from the Apple Store! Don't be a fool like me! But don't pay O2's scandalous 'you can only get these from us' insurance cover either.

A Perfect Day?

2009-01-27T17:02:00.005Z

A stout man walks into a coffee shop early in the morning. It's raining outside and his brown coat is patchy with wet spots as a result. It's awash with that patented Belfast drizzle outside that seeps quickly into your bones unless you're used to it. He's heavily stubbled and worn out. This is how he usually is at nine in the morning though so no eyebrows are raised.

There's some chat about a wonderful You Tube addition that David has produced, a truly wonderful and inspiring idea. Theories and contacts are thrown around, phone calls are made and some advice is imparted. Matt is ringing lines deep into the heart of the institutions and answers are being passed on.

The most talked about fund in the history of funding is discussed and it's decided that everyone could do with a bit of help in regard to its intricacies. A venue is proposed and secured within the hour. An hour after this the word is out. It's a good idea judging by the response. Tens grow to twenties and beyond. Forms are made and blogs are populated.

Within days like minded people will be sharing views and experiences. Forms will be completed in unison. Some of the projects proposed will go on to change peoples' lives. The stout man heads back out into the now heavier sap and within ten minutes is admiring a fifteen foot tall Gibson Les Paul. His friends go off in the opposite but same directions.

This is the perfect example of democracy without bureaucracy. Come one, come all...

Title: Creative Industries Innovation Fund Hands On Workshop
Location: OhYeah, 15-21 Gordon Street, Belfast
Description: Join us for a hands-on workshop on filling in your Creative Industries Innovation Fund application. Please register using the link below and help us gauge numbers!!!
Date: 29th Jan 2009

http://www.digitalcircle.org/2009/01/27/ciif-hands-on-workshop-thursday-29th-jan/

*Session One*
Start Time: 11:00
End Time: 13:00

*Session Two*
Start Time: 16:30
End Time: 18:00

This event is organised by the Digital Circle and supported by Oh Yeah, nomoreart.com and The Arts Council. More information will be forthcoming!

Enomina Thingime

2009-01-26T12:32:00.005Z

We've been nominated for an Irish Blog Award in the 'Best Blog of a Business' category! Thanks a bunch to you kind nominator, we're not being arrogant or dismissive but we haven't been trying that hard in truth. That's the spur we need. No more predictions though on when we'll finish the new site, we've a ton of new content to get up there, it'll take a while and that's okay...

Also we've entered the top 20 Twitterers in Belfast which again is a shock to us as we're not exactly prolific there either! For those who don't know what Twitter is check it out. You can chat to Stephen Fry in a way, which is nice. His handle is @stephenfry. He travels a lot and isn't exactly chuffed about the Jonathon Ross affair. Oh and you can chat to Jonathon too, he's called @wossy. He's an addict. And if you're on iPhone like me get Tweetie from the App Store, Twinkle's okay but it's worth spending the couple of quid for the far superior Tweetie client. Follow us on Twitter, we're @nomoreart unsurprisingly.

So now that we've finished patting ourselves on the back I suppose the point of this post is that social media and networking works for businesses in spades. We've only really been blogging for five months or so and Twittering for less and have already seen huge benefits. In the financially challenging year ahead it's worth looking into these types of marketing / networking / communicating no matter what type of business you operate. And you might make some friends too, which is the best added bonus that anyone could ask for surely?

On another note it's Factory Records Day over at Drowned in Sound (DiS). Well worth a lunchtime visit for some new angles on one of the most important things ever to happen in the history of the world ever (if you believed Tony Wilson anyway.) Enjoy.

Compression Arti(facts)

2009-01-21T16:57:00.004Z

So we had a bit of an ongoing issue with a client site that had been perplexing us significantly. On their website they were seeing what they described as a 'blurry' navigation when they viewed their website on their computer.

"Can you help?" they asked and, thinking that they were using an archaic version of Internet Explorer or similar we said absolutely. Bound to be a PNG problem or images that are being resized by the browser we thought. No problem to us experienced folk.

We tested the site out in all those long forgotten versions of Internet Explorer like 5.5 in the excellent IE Renderer only to find that the images appeared perfectly every time. No dice, it wasn't an IE problem.

Next we trawled through the source code of the website (which we didn't build) and the design was a fairly clean CSS/XHTML build and the images in question were actually JPEGs so transparency couldn't be the issue. Also they were being displayed at 100% of their size so no resizing in the browser was happening either. And that left us stumped.

We then supposed that it was an issue with monitor setup, maybe a field of dead pixels or something similar on the monitor in question, only to be informed that it happened on their laptop too, in Firefox! Bamboozlement!

So we asked the client to send us screenshots of the offending pages, which showed an image of crystal clear image elements surrounding a horrendously blurry navigation. Could the JPEG be compressed so much that it was blocky and pixelated? No, remember that we'd tested the site on a variety of browsers and OS setups prior to this, and it was fine.

It was only upon our intrepid nethead Kieran seeing the screenshots that the problem became clear. This sort of thing happened to him when he used his mobile phone as a modem to browse the net. A quick check around the screenshots showed a tab for 02 mobile, suggesting that the client was using mobile broadband. And eureka! Problem solved.

As web developers we face all manner of compatibility issues with browsers, operating systems, devices, mobiles and all manner of stuff, it's only a matter of time before Microsoft breaks the Internet again with its next version of Internet Explorer. We have enough on our plates in this regard.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back on your netbook welcome to 'compression artifacts.' In short mobile broadband suppliers are using little black boxes on their network to store images, compress them and then serve the compressed, and frankly messed up, versions to clients. This is an effort to make the images smaller and therefore save them money on the amount of data they have to serve.

Thank you mobile broadband suppliers. Maybe we'll start designing sites with massive byte sizes just to redress the balance and watch as your horrible masts strain and crumble under our wrath?

In a word, byte me...

More info for the fellow afflicted on Wikipedia and on Mobile Broadband Rocks

Blue Monday

2009-01-19T17:55:00.004Z

So according to the media, who should know better by the way, today is the most depressing day of the year given that a number of factors are cumulating such as Christmas debts (and subsequent skintness), work related stress ramping up and darkness at four o clock. In Belfast at least you can lump in freezing cold and sleet like rain for good measure.

In our case all of the above has been exacerbated by two emails in particular from collegues and clients saying:

a) Hello from Goa where it's warm, peaceful and there aren't many tourists this year (thank you Pagan Kev) and

b) I'm in Cannes (basically)... (thank you Andrew Ferris).

Only the Merseyside derby can save me now. Please Liverpool, let's make it a Red Monday instead...

Creationism and the art of website maintainence

2009-01-16T18:15:00.003Z

It would be too cruel an irony to think that the person who first invented the book then went on to have some printed atrocity inflicted on them by their own creation, but it might well have happened. Or the first carver may well have got a hiding with their painstakingly indented beech wood that they had for months lovingly finessed. It's a cruel world sometimes and you have to be prepared for that.

I like books. They have spines.

Unconvention Belfast

2009-01-15T17:22:00.004Z

Hullo. Remember all those great events and conferences that were in the boiling pot a while back in our Xmas message? What do you mean no?

To quote the late great Anthony Wilson you should read more. And then when you're done reading get along to the wonderful freeness that will be Unconvention Belfast. We always sound like tubes when we try to describe the Un type events so we'll just nick some blurb instead:

Unconvention is an unconference aimed at the grass roots of the music industry - bringing together musicians and industry professionals for conversation, inspiration and collaboration.

With Huw Stephens from Radio One, an acoustic room, bands playing and an industry-type attachment this should be fun. But like all of these types of events there are bound to be a few welcome surprises that no-one anticiapted or expected which is what makes them so good.

See you there?

All the details are at the Unconventi0n Belfast Website

Web Design

2009-01-13T13:42:00.003Z

I really, really wish that we were this company.
Having a shop-front would be simply glorious, and their pricing system....mmm-mmm!

El Cathedralo

2009-01-08T12:27:00.002Z

One curious side-effect of being in the Cathedral Quarter is the proximity to events. Another one is that you get to know the people who organise these events. And eventually yet another side-effect is that you get free tickets to many of these happenings.
And so we're off to a near-by venue for some free culture.
Excellent.

SNAFU

2009-01-05T18:48:00.001Z

"They should make trousercoats," said the perpetually cold Kieran.

Genius. Welcome back...

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year

2008-12-24T11:08:00.003Z

2008 eh? That'll be one for the books. Highs, lows, spills, thrills and (currently) bellyaches were aplenty and we're sure that they'll continue long into 2009. We met some hugely influential and wonderful people and discovered a whole underbelly of our own industry that previously had been so far underground its leader was a mole.

Look out for Unconferences, Unconventions, Creative Camps, BarCamps, Co-Working and more far into 2009; great events and concepts that are pushing the new way forward in how the Digital Media industry operates and interacts as well as opening up avenues for doing business in new and exciting ways too. And the best thing is everyone's invited to the party, with openness and collaboration at the very heart of the whole ethos. We'll stop trying to explain the unexplainable and just say GET INVOLVED.

Thank you to our wonderful clients who are the only reason we're still around and to our friends and families who have put up with a lot this year as we burned the midnight oil far too often. It'll be worth it, the greater good owes us all.

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year to one and all...

No More Art

Standards just ain't what they used to be...

2008-12-18T11:25:00.003Z

So an interesting debate has broken out among the people we follow on Twitter regarding the importance of web design standards and in particular whether or not site validation is important. For those not familiar with website validation the W3C are its overseers and the idea is to have a published and agreed set of standards for best practice in website design.

The above debate was kicked off after Banjax published a list of student portfolios from the University of Ulster's Interactive Multimedia Design degree course split into those portfolios that validate and those that don't. This quickly divided opinion on their motives for doing so, whether the students or the University are at fault and ultimately on the importance of web standards and validation.

Which then (keeping up?) led to a debate about why Google, the behemoth and shining light of the web, choose to ignore standards in design and validation on their homepage at www.google.com

For comparison's sake the No More Art homepage validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional. Check this link for comfirmation of that.

Meanwhile the Banjax homepage tentatively vaildates as HTML 5 which is massively impressive given that HTML 5 is still considered to be experimental, hence the tentative pass as W3C haven't decided fully on an operating standard for HTML 5.0. Hats off for even attempting valid HTML 5.0 at this stage fellas. Meet you at the bell curve later on maybe?

And then we come to Google who's homepage is (outwardly) fairly basic but does not even come close to vaildation with a whopping 60 errors. By the terms of the standards it's a massive failure and so you have to ask, especially since Google are top notch at everything, for reasons why this is the case. The arguments for HTML vaildation are that the site will appear and function the same across multiple platforms and browsers, be more accessible to disabled users, degrade gracefully in older browsers (not really true) and make for cleaner, faster and smaller files hence speeding up the web. There are other reasons but these are the usual stated ones in our experience.

Yet the only reason we can suppose for Google's homepage being as it is is that it's smaller that way in terms of filesize, meaning that it saves them money given that it has possibly the highest traffic on the whole of the web.

A sample equation would be:

Valid Google Homepage (10K) X 1000000000000 users = £100,000,000,000,000,000,000 per year in bandwidth costs.

VS

Invalid Google Homepage (8K) X 1000000000000 users = £80,000,000,000,000,000,000 per year in bandwidth costs. (Daft figures but you get the point.)

Which in turn means that validation only works up to a point, and goes out the window when it threatens to cost extra revenue for very high traffic sites. Which makes a bit of a joke out of vaildation as a whole really when you think about it, as the aim of any good site is traffic and, generally, revenue creation.

We were having a go at building a valid Google homepage but Stuart Gibson has already made one (bit ropey in Internet Explorer but that's what happens when you build to the standards sometimes!) It's smaller but has no javascript so isn't an exact comparison.

So are the value of the standards less important than the value of the site or are there other reasons for Google ignoring validation, along with Ebay, Amazon and a host of the other big sites?

Comment here!

Take The Red Pill Neo...

2008-12-16T16:10:00.002Z

So we went today to the Invest NI seminar on Research and Development at the big Invest building at Bedford Street. The jist was, according to Arlene Foster and the Invest NI folk who spoke, that Research and Development assistance needed to be more accessible, simpler and transparent in order for people to respond to it more positively so as to have a higher uptake in applications for, what we all will call from now on, R&D. They're basing this on some report called the Matrix which probably sounds a lot cooler than it actually is. It's not the most original name for a report ever either it seems!

Now anyone who knows us knows that these types of events can make you glaze over in the blink of a Powerpoint presentation but outwardly at least, this new approach to R&D suggests that Invest might be ready to start listening to the needs of us mere mortals who aren't in industrial sectors and who don't export 50,000 things per year to Boston or Portland or wherever people export stuff to these days.

In our case we've got what we think is a highly innovative product in mind and it's at the good ol' R&D stage which means, hopefully, we can gain some assistance. It seems that there are a few bits of criteria but certainly compared to previous Invest NI offerings, these seem minimal.

You can get support for your project definition (what we think is writing a spec document and timescale but we've been wrong in the past), and then you can get assistance in actually developing the project (up to 75% it seems with an additional 15% for collaborative projects.)

And, contrary to our previous brushes with Invest, you don't need to be an Invest NI client to apply and also if you're a business new to R&D you're positively compelled to get involved! Based on the following criteria:

- Less than 50 employees / An Individual
- Not in receipt of Invest NI funding for an R&D project within the previous 5 years
- May have potential to export at a future date

Now there's that export word again but coupled with the words 'may' and 'potential' it doesn't seem so bad.

What qualifies as R&D? We don't know yet but we're going to try to hook up with a sector advisor soon and get this ball rolling. Invest NI are also promising that decisions will be made fast so we'll hold them to that also.

Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes. More to come...

More info at Invest NI's Website

404

2008-12-05T13:43:00.004Z

So for good reasons today we went looking for resources and general info on the creative industries in Northern Ireland. It's for a project that may start to take shape in the New Year and a wee bit of research could be necessary to make sure it's actually needed.

Any way I thought a good port of call might be the NI Business Info portal at www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk so I hopped on over, typed 'creative industries' into the search box and got the following:

Your search for creative industries returned 147 guidance pages, 24 support/subsidy schemes, 7 publications, 1 form, 71 pages from our partner sites. Good stuff, I'll find a lot here I thought.

And then I clicked on the top result which resulted in FAIL. Check it out at www.culture.gov.uk/about_us/creativeindustries/

I thought that the sparse 404 page might have as much resonance with others as it did with me given the year I've had. I'm not gloating, I know that large sites are difficult to maintain. There is just a certain pathos to it. Maybe you agree?

Too Much Dough!

2008-12-01T14:00:00.006Z

I've been thinking for a while about all the Apple fanboys and fangirls I seem to be surrounded by and in fact have been admonished at length regarding my preference for PCs by the likes of Phil O Kane and Andy McMillan in very recent times.

It's like owning a Macbook gives you entry into some upper echelon of geekdom that even the most ardent PC user is locked out of, not to mention anyone who is horrified by Apple's frankly farcical pricing. And I've been plotting a response ever since, some answer to the Mac porn I'm constantly surrounded by.

If I had the time I might well have gone for a rip off of the Marks and Spencer's ads, you know the ones with the lurid close ups of food and the breathy voice overs.

But alas, and I bow in reverence to them, the Simpsons have come along and beaten the pants off my ideas with the Mapple episode, where Springfield gets a Mapple store. The clips are genius. Thank you so much Simpsons people, you've made me happier than you can ever know.