My first impressions of Technorati are not that great, ok but not great. I have been hearing about Technorati for some time now, so I guess I had high expectations.

The site is a little slow some times (for example, it takes around 5 seconds for me to to get a response when I click on “sign in”). My guess is that they are going through some growing pains, no big deal, we should all have that problem.

What I did find a little surprising was after I added my first two favourites, Silicon Caribe and Jamaipanese, I got the following error message:

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My Favorites

We know you have a lot of favorites, we apologize that we aren’t able to show them.

There is a known bug where the favorites feature is disabled for accounts with a large number of favorites. We are currently working on this and hope to have this resolved within the next few weeks. In the meantime, you should still be able to view your tagged favorites. Please note that your favorites are not lost. They just cannot be displayed. Thus, when the fix is in place, you should be able to access your favorites again. Thanks for your patience!

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I find this error surprising because I only have two favourites and both of them are tagged. Anyway, I am still impressed with the idea and the implementation, I can only imagine how much effort it took to create this site. I am hoping for good things from Technorati in the future.

I want to attract more more readers to this blog, so I joined Technorati. Joining was quick and relatively easy. Now, I suppose, comes the hard work of actually getting the Technorati to visit. Speaking of which, if you are a member of Technorati and you want to add this blog as one of your favorites then why not click on the link below.

Add to Technorati Favorites

This is just a quick update to let everyone know that Irie Tools Limited is now a virtual tenant of the Technology Innovation Centre at the University of Technology. I just need to change the official company address at the Office of the Registrar of Companies and I am all set.

Latest News

It has been a while since the last time I posted to this blog. Below are a few of things that have been happening with Irie Tools.

Incorporating Irie Tools

At first I thought incorporating a company would be simple, I had heard how the new Companies Act of Jamaica made incorporation in Jamaica so much easier than before. Well, that may be true but after doing some reading I decided I needed to get some legal advice. I eventually got a lawyer to handle the entire process for me, and everything went smoothly. I still think the process was unnecessarily complex and costly, but Irie Tools is no longer just a business name, it has been incorporated as a limited liability company (Irie Tools Limited) with the Office of the Registrar of Companies. There are still some loose end to tie up, I need to change the corporate address (I used a temporary address to start), and I have to appoint a company secretary.

Technology Innovation Centre

I am about to apply to the Technology Innovation Centre for Irie Tools Limited to be a virtual tenant. Assuming that my application is accepted, that should solve my corporate address problem. As a virtual tenance, I will not actually have an office at the TIC, but I can use them for my corporate address. The TIC is a really beautiful looking place and one of these days I hope to be a full tenant.

Please take my advice, do not design your own logo (or if you have already done so, get up right now and find a professional to do it over). Unless of course, you happen to be a graphic design professional (in which case, never mind, there is no need for you to read any further).

We have all heard the advice “concentrate on your core competence and buy everything else”. Well guess what, this is good advice. I ignored this advice when I started Irie Tools, and just went ahead and designed my own logo, even though my core compentence was not graphic design. So why did I do this? Simple, I thought I had two very good reasons.

1. I did not want to risk paying for a logo design and then not liking it.
2. I did not want to go through the effort of finding a professional graphic designer.

I have used my little homebrew logo ever since then. It’s not a terrible logo (at least I don’t think so), it’s just boring and does not represent what Irie Tools is all about (except for including the name). I know I am not the only person who started a business and decided to just “do a thing” and design their own logo (you know who you are).

Today, I realized designing my own logo was a big mistake. So what made me realize this. One look at the new professionally designed Irie Tools logo, and my mistake was obvious.

The New Logo

Recently I decided to redesign the Irie Tools website, and as part of that, I wanted to redesign the logo. I started to do some sketches of what I wanted, thinking that I would do it myself. After about a week I realized that I just could not create the kind of logo I wanted. So I contacted (or tried to contact in some case, because many of them have not yet got back to me) some local graphic/web desigers. I selected IGD Jamaica and brought them my sketches. After a discussion with them I went away, and crossed my fingers, hoping for the best.

Today, I saw the designs for the new logo (IGD Jamaica did a couple designs for me to choose from). I liked all of them, but one design really blew me away. Stay tuned for a look at the new Irie Tools logo (prepare to be impressed).

Well, I am one step closer to releasing the next version of Irie Pascal (it’s still probably a few months away so don’t get too excited, but it’s getting closer). I have finished reading two of the four books I just bought from Amazon.

1. “Pro CSS Techniques: Real-world CSS techniques for real-world CSS professionals!”
2. “The Design of Sites: Patterns for creating winning web sites”

The other two books I will read later, but now I can move on to the redesign the Irie Tools website. The current Irie Tools website uses old-fashioned table based layout with just a little Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) thrown in. The new redesigned website will use CSS for doing all presentation (including layout). Besides just being the “right thing to do” I am hoping see for myself the benefits that everyone talks about, namely:

• More precise control over the layout of the site
• Easier site updates
• Improved accessibility
• Improved search engine rankings

More important than these benefits is the chance to learn more about building websites using XHTML and CSS, so that I can take another look at the XHTML engine I have designed and make improvements before I actually start building the engine. By the way, the best book on CSS I have read so far is still the first book I have read on CSS, namely “CSS: The missing manual”. A link to this book on Amazon is below.

CSS: The Missing Manual

Hurricane Dean has passed and electricity supply is slowly being restored across the island. One contract worker, for the power company, was killed while working to restore power. That reminded me that the most important thing in the world is NOT when will I get back electricity. I am writing this on electricity from a generator.

Work on the next release of Irie Pascal has slowed down almost to a stop. Hopefully everything will get back to normal soon.

Hurricane Dean seems to be heading straight for Jamaica. I will have to keep this short because I have some last minute things to do.

It is possible that power and/or internet access may be knocked out for a few days or weeks, so I may not be able to post for a bit. Anyway, that’s it for now. Everybody, be careful and be safe. Bye.

The planning for the next major release of Irie Pascal is moving along nicely. As mentioned in a previous post, this release with be focused on web development. I have done a preliminary design for the new XHTML engine that will be integrated with Irie Pascal (and so far so good). I need to do some more reading on Cascading Style Sheets (or more specifically CSS 2.1). To that end I have ordered some more books from Amazon (I think I am single-handedly keeping them in business). Anyway the books I ordered are:

• The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites (2nd Edition)
• Pro CSS Techniques (Pro)
• The Confident Speaker
• Change Your Voice : Change Your Life : A Quick, Simple Plan for Finding & Using Your Natural Dynamic Voice

The last two books are just in case I find myself doing some kind of public relations. Hmm, maybe I should do a podcast.

Hello again. I am back to share with you some of my plans for the future of Irie Tools.

The future of Irie Tools is all about focus, focus, and focus. Instead of producing a general purpose Pascal programming environment (i.e. Irie Pascal), Irie Tools will focus on web development (both web sites and web development tools). The web development tools are expected to include:

• An open source XHTML engine that will make it easy to generate XHTML pages using any programming language (I think there are ‘better’ ways to do this than ASP.NET and JSP).
• The next major release of Irie Pascal (i.e. version 3.0) which will be enhanced and integrated with the XHTML engine to make it easy to create web sites.

The plan is that the web development tools will support web development on Windows only (at least initially). However the hosting platform (i.e. the platform you would use to host the web sites) will be the Apache web server, running on Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux (Red Hat, other distributions will be added later).

Why did I make the decision to focus? Well, I have been reading alot of business books recently (about product strategy and branding), and they all seem to agree that it is a good thing for a business (especially a small business) to find an area of specialization and focus there.

Why focus on web development? Web development has the advantages of being an important (and growing more important every day) area of software development, but still relatively new (with room for new players and new ways of doing things).

P.S. Of course when the next major release of Irie Pascal becomes available special upgrade prices will be offered to existing customers.