v1.0.1 uses the new URL and normal service is resumed.

OK, the video’s not up to much, but I had been trying to take a photo instead!

Regarding our comparison site, the redesign we’re working on at the moment will actually change the results table ranking, to being ranked by first year cost rather than introductory offer cost.

I’ve come across this before and complained (to no avail, but the vent was worth it) but today I discovered that Ofcom has an accreditation scheme for broadband sites. This sounded promising so I checked out the two sites that I was advised had received said accreditation: SimplifyDigital.co.uk and BroadbandChoices.co.uk.

Long-time readers (pretending there are any) will know that misleading advertising broadband is a major pet peeve of mine. Not misselling speeds, because there’s no reliable way an ISP can accurately predict what speed your line will take (if you don’t already have broadband).  This mis-selling is much worse; I’m talking about the companies who lie in their headline speeds by advertising broadband “from £4.99 a month” for the first three months, £14.99 thereafter, 12 month contract applies, not inclusive of compulsory phone-line rental.

Of course companies will continue to advertise lies like this as long as they get away with it, even the once-honest Plus net (who I do otherwise like) have now jumped on the bandwagon claiming they need to compete with scum like Tiscali and BT. Until someone takes them up on it they’ll continue lying and cheating customers with scant regard for concepts like honesty and integrity, but surely we can expect more of the broadband comparison sites who are, after all, fighting for a fair deal for the consumer, right?

Wrong. It seems the comparison sites get all caught up in the headline figures and thus actively encourage the misleading advertising that broadband companies seem so keen on.

Broadband Choices are easily the better of the two – their default display is sorted by “first year cost” (which would also include activation/connection charges), but they still display the monthly charge as the introductory offer figure.  In fact, they don’t display the actual monthly charge at all.

SimplifyDigital, on the other hand, is a complete joke. Not only do they default their display to sort by the “monthly” cost (of the first month) they don’t even give you the option to change that. Worse still, they don’t display a first-year-cost at all. It’s got me so annoyed that had I the time I’d give serious consideration to starting my own broadband comparison site that did a real comparison. They also seem to only list the big names (who presumably pay big commissions!), ignoring smaller providers like Plus Net (sorry to sound like a broken record, but they really are quite good).

An example query at Simplify Digital reveals 5 providers who meet “1 of 2″ of my very loose criteria. As it only sorts results by price, the cheapest should be at the top, however the ordering we actually get is:

1. Tiscali: £4.49 × 3 + £12.99 × 9
   Actual first-year price: £130.38
   (inc. line rental = £256.38)
2. BT: £7.95 × 3 + £15.99 × 9
   Actual first-year price: £167.76
   (inc. line rental = £293.76)
3. AOL: £9.99 × 3 + £19.99 × 9
   Actual first-year price: £209.88
   (inc. line rental = £335.88)
4. Orange: £10 × 3 + £20× 9
   Actual first-year price: £210
   (inc. line rental = £336)
5. TalkTalk: £15.49 (inc. line rental) × 12
   Actual first-year price: £185.88

It looks ok at first glance but you’ll quickly notice that if you look at the whole year instead of the first month things are not what they seem.  Include line rental and TalkTalk is the cheapest, not the most expensive. Even excluding line rental TalkTalk should leap ahead of AOL and Orange into 3rd.  What’s the point in a comparison site that only lets you rank results by price and doesn’t even do that right?  (By the way, I’d personally steer clear of all 5 of those companies, but that’s just my bad experience with Tiscali coupled with scare stories about the rest).

So there you have it: broadband comparison sites that instead of siding with consumers actually encourage introductory offers and misleading headline figures – practices designed to confuse consumers and make comparisons more difficult. Thanks guys.

Update: I’ve just had a response to an email I sent to SimplifyDigital.

Thank you very much for your feedback…

Regarding our comparison site, the redesign we’re working on at the moment will actually change the results table ranking, to being ranked by first year cost rather than introductory offer cost.

Yay!

As appealing as it might be to shift this site from SteveFerson.com to Steve.Ferson, it hardly seems worth the confusion of creating an infinite number of domains for the same company. At present you can usually find a site by typing companyname.com or companyname.co.uk into your address bar. Under these plans, even Googling for a company name could theoretically bring up hundreds of results all pretending to be the ‘real’ site.

That said, it was worth it for this headline from ZD Net.

Good news for existing proposals like .nyc for New York City and .xxx for adult sites. Depending on the costs of setting it up, I could also see a new TLD appearing for Northern Ireland (.nir ?) and am sure some enterprising spirit will attempt to register .blog.  Feel free to leave your suggestion for a new TLD below.

Wee Niggles

First the bad. When you view Page Info from the context menu it doesn’t give a link to the CSS file in the Media tab any more. I was sure it was there in 2 and a quick google confirmed this. This really sucks – I can’t see why they’ve taken it out.

Secondly, when I was looking through the options to try and return the aforementioned CSS links, I discovered Firefox had decided it was going to automatically download any future updates when they were discovered (I promptly switched the option to “Ask me…”). Bad Firefox.

Magic Address Bar

The good is good though. It doesn’t seem like it at first, but to my mind the biggest improvement of all is the address bar. Sure they’ve added a “Most Visited” folder to your bookmarks toolbar which (shockingly, given the title) contains a list of the sites you visit most frequently, but the address bar has some great, if not immediately obvious, usability improvements.

Firstly there’s support for Extended Validation certificates. These are new forms of SSL certificates being issued (mostly to big companies due to their expense) and are used by IE7 too. A normal SSL certificate will turn the background of your favicon section (far left of the address bar) a bluey colour. An extended validation certificate turns it green and displays the name and country of the organisation. The aim is to tackle phishing, but that only works if people know what the colours are for – so consider the above publicity my good deed for the day.

The best feature by far though (IMHO) is that you can now search your history just by typing in the address bar. So if you’ve been looking at sites about the Maze stadium just type Maze and it brings up a drop-down list of all the sites you’ve visited with the word Maze in the domain or the title.

Better still it works on multiple words. So to find wikipedia articles you’ve looked at recently containing the word maze, just type “maze wiki” (no quote marks) and voila!

Overall it’s definitely worth upgrading. Aside from the address bar search there’s nothing that’s really, really impressed me (although I’ve been told the bookmarks management dialogue has been improved too) but it’s a step in the right direction and there’s nothing showstoppingly bad.

Oh yes, and they are claiming success for Download Day’s record attempt with figures quoted as 8 million.

Good work Mozilla.

Anyway, that meant manually creating the accounts, setting up the mail accounts and subdomains in them, extracting the root folders (public_html, mail etc) individually and manually importing the SQL backup. Everything was relatively painless (if dull) however Fantastico wouldn’t recognise my WordPress installations (I had two). To persuade Fantastico that there really were a couple of WordPress blogs I had to do two things:

1. Extract the \.fantasticodata\WordPress files from the zip (in this case it was called nerd.steveferson.com| ) and upload it to the same location in the FTP server. Of course that bar | made Windows barf, so you’d need to rename it (e.g. using an underscore instead) and replace the bar after uploading it via the FTP client (FileZilla didn’t seem to have a problem doing this).
2. I think this is might be because the blog’s in the root of a subdomain, but I also had to upload a file called installed_in_root.php from \.fantasticodata to that location on the server.

Once I did this, Fantastico picked up the blog and allowed me to upgrade WordPress to 2.5.1 – no hassle.

I hart lolcatz.

I hart lolcatz so much dat wun dai I thoughted “I can has lolcatz wen I makes teh pooter turn on?” So I maded a Vista gadjit an now I has new lolcatz every dai.

If u hart lolcatz liek mee an wants lolcatz in ur pooter makin u laff, downlodes mah gadjit. I has tested it 4 liek rly long time. It rly works, srsly. An evry1 needses moar lolcatz.

Kthxbai.

* If you think that was hard to read, you should see the lolcat bible.

When I logged into the backend of the new subdomain there were no images – including no buttons on the rich-text editor (TinyMCE) and no WordPress logo on the login screen.  I later noticed there were also background images missing on the public part of the new blog.  When I right clicked “View background image” on the missing image, it took me to an HTTP 403 (Forbidden) meaning there was a permissions problem. The strange thing was the problem didn’t occur in the nerd. backend.

And the solution…? In this instance it was because I’d enabled hotlink protection in my server to stop other people using images stored at steveferson.com on their sites, because this eats up precious bandwidth.  When I created this new subdomain, I had forgotten about the hotlink protection and so hadn’t added it to the list of sites allowed to link to images at SteveFerson.com.  When I added it everything went back to working as expected.

How It Works

I read some time back of a plugin that allows you to sync your Thunderbird/Lightning calendar (or Sunbird if you prefer to use Mozilla’s calendar in a standalone application) with your Google calendar, which I’m sure is useful for some people, but not me. I’ve never used a Google calendar really. However that memory proved useful when I heard that a Google have released a utility to allow you to sync your Google calendar with your Outlook calendar. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this…

If Google calendar can sync with Outlook and can also sync with Thunderbird/Lightning Surely it would be possible to sync your Thunderbird/Lightning calendar with Outlook via Google. For once, I was delighted to find out that it works just like you’d expect. Download Google’s little sync tool and it does everything very intuitively. Next, on your home PC the one with the Thunderbird calendar) you’ll need to download and install the Provider for Google Calendar Thunderbird add-on. You’ll need to share your Google Calendar (login and go to Settings then Calendar. Choose your calendar name and get the “Private Address” for the XML feed (copy it to the clipboard).

Back to Thunderbird go to File -> New Calendar. Select “on the network” and if you’ve installed the Provider plug-in properly there should be an option for Google Calendar. Choose this and then paste the URL of your Calendar’s XML into the Location field. That’s pretty much it (just name the calendar). Everything should sync up automatically from that point. Wonderful! If you’ve done something wrong, there are more detailed instructions available.

How It Doesn’t Work

Sadly it’s not that wonderful. You see, Google Calendar doesn’t support tasks, only events. So you can get reminders about upcoming events, but you can’t create tasks. Of course you can cheat and create events instead of tasks, but one problem with this is that you can’t mark events as “completed”. Since I’m only a low-level minion at work, most of my use for Outlook (besides email) is to remind me of what tasks I need to do, not meetings I need to go to. There is a petition to have tasks added to Google calendar and it seems there are plans to include them, but were not there yet. When they are though, hopefully the provider for Lightning will be updated and this ability to sync via Google will be really very useful indeed.