Irish Internet Entrepreneur - Smemon

I spent a good 2 hours yesterday coming up with an idea and putting together a promo video for BeerChief. Here it is…

It’s only 19 seconds long, but it’s worth it as it’s another bit of promotion for BeerChief. It sums up what BeerChief is about but leaves you wanting to know what BeerChief really is and that was my aim when creating it.

• Total Time: 2 hours
• Budget: $0
• Cost: $0

Hollywood here i come!!!

I like creating videos and have many more BeerChief related ideas for videos, most of them much more elaborate

I went for the ‘family fortunes’ sounds as people recognise them as ‘no’ and ‘yes’ and together with the images it shows what BeerChief is about and what it isn’t about and we want to make that point very clear from the off.

What do you guys think?! Suggestions, improvements, criticism welome

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When browsing around PC World yesterday i came across some Asus 7 inch laptops at about €300 and for a split second i thought about it But i came to my senses and realised i can’t afford that sort of impulse buy at the minute

Now ok, there’s only so much you can fit inside them, but the reality is they’re more powerful than a desktop would have been 4 or 5 years ago.

There are more and more professionals in IT and due to the nature of the business, everyone is moving about more and more. The demand for a truely ultraportable, affordable QWERTY laptop is definitely there imo and it’s just waiting to be tapped in to.

I’d pay €300 for a decent ultraportable. It would mean i could take it comfortably to hotels / college / on holidays etc without being weighed down and i’d also be able to browse the net / check emails etc… using wifi plus do basic tasks like wordprocessing, view/store pictures off an SD card, VOIP calls using integrated cam and mic etc..

That’s all i’d need… that would be my ‘emergency kit’… i don’t need a quad core with a 500 gig hard drive when i’m on holidays or in college, as i’m only there temporarily. I just need the basic stuff, but in some sort of ‘normal’ package… i.e QWERTY keyboard and windows OS, rather than an iphone or some patched up job like that.

So yeah, i believe most serious IT nowadays would ideally want a top of the range desktop, decently spec’d 15.4 inch / 12 inch laptop and then an emergency ultra portable 7″ for basic tasks. Plus of course an iphone or n95 or some other cool phone

I headed in to PC World today in Dundalk looking to spend my €30 in vouchers on something random. The reason i was up in Dundalk (on my week off college) was to hook up with a few classmates and kill each other in Call of Duty

Anyway, i spent a good 20 minutes walking around the shop just browsing.. for a change nobody came over and asked if i needed help (i hate that - if i want help i’ll ask you). I’d narrowed it down to 3 or 4 items - a new wireless router (my current one is 3 years old), a fancy ‘face recognition’ webcam, a set of headphones & microphone.

I chose the latter. Mainly because the other two were more expensive But i didn’t just pick up any old headphones, i picked up €50 creative ‘fatal1ty’ headphones. I could tell they were in demand by the dust on the top of the packet I figured there’s no way in hell i’d pay €50 for a pair of headphones but in reality they only cost €20 so it was a good deal

And what a buy they are… the bass on these babies is phoenomenal. Crystal clear sound and thumping bass. So when will i ever use them? Good question. I’m not exactly a ’serious gamer’. I do however like my music and i do intend to do screencasts / video posts in the future so the attached microphone will come in really handy then.

I’ve literally just spent 5 minutes testing these out but so far they’ve blown me away… here they are, being modelled by my XPS.

P.S. To my horror, the college was FULL when i arrived about lunchtime - WTF people!!! It’s study week, i didn’t think anyone actually came in on study week… i guess college means more to most people than it does to me

I couldn’t get a parking spot and had resigned myself to walking a bit when all of a sudden two cars pulled out of spaces side by side (typical!)…

I always thought the logitech mx600 mouse looked pretty cool and looked like the sort of mouse that would feel nice in your hand.

I wasn’t wrong Having spent the last week or so now using it, along with the mx3200 keyboard, i have to say they were well worth the €40 extra they cost me

It’s wireless, laser and along with left/right and scroll wheel, it also has 2 buttons of the side of it, plus ‘zoom’ buttons which enlarge text / zoom in.

The real advantage though can be seen in cod4 I’ve programmed these buttons on the mouse to throw grenades and knife people. It’s very difficult to do that on a keyboard when you’re busy moving around with one hand and aiming with the other using the mouse. But thanks to these extra buttons all of a sudden i’m killing more people and dying less

The keyboard is also really handy for 1-click opening of programs and files. I can also control volume and close windows, plus accept/reject VOIP calls all from the keyboard

I get asked this question quite a bit so i figured i’d make a post out of it. As you’ll all know, wordpress is nothing without the free plugins that make it so dynamic and useful. Plugins are probably the reason why wordpress is the biggest blogging platfrom out there currently

Anyway, i’ll run down through some of the plugins i’m currently using;

• Akismet - this plugin stops spam comments and thus far, it’s stopped me having to manually edit over 55,000 comments….. i owe these guys a pint

• All in One SEO Pack - this plugin helps SEO your blog to make it rank highly for keywords in search engines. Always worth having installed as it makes SEO simple. About 60% of my traffic comes from google and that’s largely thanks to this plugin.

• cforms - this a really cool free contact form plugin. You can check it out on my contact page.

• Feedburner Feedsmith - this converts all your email and RSS subscribers and combines them to help boost you RSS feedburner chicklet count. Give it a go and watch your subscriber count rise

• XML sitemap - This plugin creates a sitemap for your blog with the click of a button. Sitemaps are a good SEO habit to get in to and combined with the all in one seo pack i mentioned earlier, you’re already climbing your way up google rankings.

• Impress - This plugin can be seen in action at the bottom of my page on the footer… it’ll give you a few stats on this blog including word count, post count etc…

• Lightbox - this plugin makes images appear in an AJAX based pop up-like window. Just click on any image on this blog to see it in action or check out the link for a demo.

• Login Lockdown - this little baby automatically stops anyone logging in to my blog if they get the user name or password wrong 3 times in a row. So any chancer out there doesn’t stand a chance trying to log in as an admin to this blog *cue some crazy russian hacker getting in & deleting everything in sight*

• Optimal Title - another SEO plugin, it’ll make sure your blog post title’s are seen first by search engines and not your blog’s name - which is usually the case.

• Popularity Contest - Lists your most popular posts on your sidebar or footer, wherever you want… my ‘popular articles’ section on the top right of this blog is courtesy of this plugin.

• Rthanks - this plugin gives a custom ‘thank you’ message to visitors from social networks or bookmarking sites and asks them to subscribe to the blogs RSS feed if they feel it’s useful.

• AJAX comments - this plugin allows me and my readers to edit comments after posting them without refreshing the page. It looks cool and saves a bit of time so it’s a nice little extra for any blog.

• WP Grins - displays a list of smileys which can be used in comments or blog posts.

I’d imagine most of these are fairly common, but if you have any little gems of plugins you think i’ve missed, feel free to add a comment