Sinéad

If you’re like me, passionate about everything web related but can’t justify spending €100′s on conferences like FOWA or Build then you probably love barcamps as much as I do.

You’ll also love the free web technology conference – the dot conf - being hosted by the National College of Ireland on July 22nd. It’s a fantastic opportunity to go and listen to some industry experts and a great way for NCI to promote their new MSc in Web Technologies course.

There is a diverse list of speakers, from journalists, educators, web professionals and technology advocates – all experts in their fields. As well as some “deep dive” sessions (hands-on workshops).

Personally I’m really looking forward to checking out the National E-learning Laboratory, who recently published some pretty interesting data on what Irish people pay attention to when using Facebook.

Conferences like these are a great networking opportunity (especially if you are self employed or “between projects” at the moment). Bring you business cards and wear your hottest geek tshirt, you just never know who you might bump into.

NCI is based in the IFSC – possibly one of the easiest places to get to in Dublin, so there’s no excuse not to attend.

Thanks to the Internet I came across a new product called Sugru a mouldable silicone that helps you hack and repair your stuff to make it work better and last longer. Its stops you from having to buy new things when they break and glue just won’t do it justice (when does it ever?).

It’s self-adhesive (sticking to practically everything), dishwasher-proof, waterproof, resistant from -60C to 180C and yet it cures (hardens into silicon) at room temperature. It was created by an Irish woman called Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh and there’s a great set of videos on Fora.tv where she discusses the product in tons of detail, from its development to its applications. The Sugru blog was also a finalist in the Irish Blog Awards 2010, where you can find ideas on what to do with your Sugru.

We’ve been used to living in a world where we throw things out when they get broken, but with less money in our pockets we should now be turning to versatile and practical solutions such as Sugru. It’s also so much better for the environment. It doesn’t just fix things though, it can improve the usability of your crappy mass produced consumer products. People have already done some clever things with theirs and that’s what I’m planning on doing with mine.

Sugru iPhone Stand

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There’s nothing more powerful than asking your users what they think.

With that in mind the Kilkenny Pembroke Hotel are running an iPad competition – for every person that gives them suggestions for their upcoming website redesign they get their name entered into a draw for an iPad and a stay at the hotel. Pretty clever, right?

You’re supposed to come up with 2 suggestions, but seeing as website optimisation and landing pages are of particular interest to me I accidentally ran away with my entry, so much so that Facebook refused to let me post it due to it’s length. Hence it now has a home here.

Some of the suggestions I’ve outlined below can be summarised into the following tips for commercial websites.

6 Basic Tips For Good Website Design

1. Make every call to action as obvious as possible.
2. Don’t give the user too many choices.
3. Never ask for too much information.
4. Don’t have too much text.
5. Remove any visual distractions from the calls to action.
6. Build trust by adding credibility logos.

Pembroke Hotel Website Redesign Suggestions

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I enjoyed writing the How To Get The Best Out Of eBay blog post so much that I thought I’d share another way I use the Internet to save myself money. Booking cheap hotel deals.

The last few years I’ve really taken to going on city breaks, especially to London. The problem is it’s really expensive to stay there. I’ve had some pretty bad experiences of staying in hostels and 2 or 3 star hotels in the suburbs, and spent an absolute fortune on these awful little places and then transport costs to get into central London and back.

Lucky for me I discovered the websites Hotwire and Priceline (who will accept your Irish credit card, but their listings are in dollars), and also realised how wonderful the Last Minute dot com secret hotel deals were. These sites offer extremely reduced prices on hotel rooms, except they don’t tell you the name of the hotel you’re booking into, until you have confirmed and paid for your booking. These sites take full payment for your stay at the time of booking – so you can’t change your mind, which is great for the hotel because they are then guaranteed you won’t go cancelling your reservation.

What’s The Catch?

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Rather than breaking with tradition, having attended and very much enjoyed 3Dcamp in both 2008 and 2009, I will be attending again this year. Luckily the venue is a bit closer to home. The Institute of Technology, Tallaght to be exact. So I’ll be jumping on a relatively quick Luas (instead of the usual two hour train to Limerick) on Saturday (29th of May 2010) and attending some of the great talks on offer.

Though my direction may have changed recently I still have a personal interest in 3D, augmented reality and Location based Services. Also, it’s good business sense to keep up to date with these emerging technology trends.

Talks of Interest to me?

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… My extensive background in Psychology gives me an insight into human behaviour, in particular online, which will be of great use to me during my work at RedFly, which I am very much looking forward to starting.

I just published my first blog post on the Redfly Marketing Blog.

I’m over the moon to have moved into an industry I can be proud to be apart of and a company I know has a fantastic future ahead of it.

As promised the HTC Legend (thank you Meteor) is now up for auction on ebay. Proceeds from this eBay auction will be donated to the Irish Autism Action charity. The reason I choose this charity is because I wanted to highlight the need for the donation and recycling of used iPhones and iPod Touch, for children with Autism, so they can avail of the incredible Grace App:

A simple picture exchange system developed by and for non-verbal people allowing the user to communicate their needs by building sentences from relevant images. It can be customised by the individual using their picture and photo vocabulary with the user taking photos and saving pictures to the app.

The application works in real time and allows the user to select their preferences, then rotate the device to present a full sized sentence to the listener – who will read it with them and respond to their request.

The beauty of Grace is that it ensures the interaction of the user with the listener, and mutual understanding of the user’s real needs help to increase communication opportunities and build trust.

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I had set myself a challenge to swap my iPhone for a HTC Legend for a whole week and I completely failed. After day 4 struggling with what had evolved into over-complexity I just gave up and happily retreated back to the “evil” non-open source iPhone and heavily policed iTunes.

During this experiment I also had to discontinue using the Meteor network due the 2G to 3G handover problem (there’s a neat little video demonstrating this here) which left with me with no signal far too many times, but the phone worked perfect on O2. Hoping Meteor can fix that issue promptly, as many other HTC users are reporting this issue in the customer forums.

Day 4 With my Android

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I went along to a Meteor blogger event yesterday where we chatted about their new pay as you go data charges (250mb free if you top up by €20 per month, as well as free  Meteor texts – not bad at all) and us bloggers got to try out all the iPhone alternatives you could shake a stick at. They also sent me home with a HTC Legend.

Only last week I had tweeted about how I really wanted to try out an Android handset to do a compare and contrast against the iPhone. I usually change my phone on a yearly basis, and my iPhone 3G is nearing its first birthday, so trying out an alternative is a great way for me to discover if I should stick with Apple or not.

Before I got my iPhone a year ago I had always been a huge Nokia fan, what changed my mind was trying out Jen’s iPhone (she’s an avid Apple fan, so of course she had one months before me) as I was simply blown away by the web browsing experience, something that previous Nokia smartphones (running the Symbian operating system) I had owned simply didn’t compare to.

First Impressions of Android

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Twitter is a great place to share and receive information about all sorts of things and each of the users are entitled to control who sees their tweets. This is why you are able to either have a public account or private one. You are also able to block users that you don’t want seeing your tweets. However, this doesn’t work very well with public accounts because all the user has to do is sign out of Twitter and then visit your profile page to read all of your tweets, but I suppose this is pretty inconvenient, even annoying.

Recently Fianna Fáil, who runs a public account (obviously) blocked David the editor of Politics.ie. So, out of spite to Fianna Fáil, I have set up a new twitter account for anyone that has been blocked by them, this account will essentially tweet everything they do, except it will never block anyone, ever. You can follow this new account here.

This works because basically any public account on Twitter is the same as an RSS feed, you can even follow Twitter accounts in a feed reader (which is pretty handy if you don’t use Twitter but are interested in one or two people’s daily mutterings). To follow someone in a feed reader simply find the link to the RSS feed of their Tweets (underneath their followers mosaic) and add this URL to your feed reader the same way you would with a blog.

Now I’m no political analyst and won’t get into how ghastly it is for Fianna Fáil to block any member of the public from viewing their “informative” messages, but let this be a small lesson to them that they’ve absolutely no idea what they’re doing online.

Have you been blocked by Fianna Fail on Twitter? Has any other Irish political party started blocking members of the public online?