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The auDA Foundation is a charitable trust that was established by auDA in 2005. Its general objectives are to promote and encourage education and research activities that will enhance the utility of the Internet for the benefit of the Australian community.

auDA staff currently process grant applications and the Foundation typically offers grants in the range of $5,000 to $20,000 to not-for-profit organisations, students and research institutions.

There have been five grant rounds since 2006, totalling $1,286,338 in funding to 72 projects.

The auDA Board is conducting a review of the Foundation.  The purpose of the review is to:

• evaluate the effectiveness and reach of the auDA Foundation grants,
• evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the auDA Foundation operations, and
• provide recommendations to the auDA board about what changes (if any) should be made to the auDA Foundation charter and the operations.

auDA have drafted a Discussion Paper to set out the current situation and invite comments and suggestions for change.

The closing date for submissions is Monday 16 January 2012.
More information is available at http://www.auda.org.au/about/foundationreview

When you are searching for hosting for your business there are a couple of things to consider and price is not always the deciding factor.

Shared V Dedicated

Shared.

Often cheapest form of hosting, trouble is most businesss will start onsell at full price. Shared infrastructure can be bought for as little at 5;.95 a month for 1gb. Often hosting companies will carve that up to 100+ accounts charging 9.95 each. Makes good business sense, until some on the shared service uploads damaging code and the servers IP’s are blacklisted. This not only affects your site, but any one on the server. Think about it a server could have 500gb + of storage space. So simple maths that is 500 resellers, each selling 100 accounts, thats over 5000 websites out there that are sharing the same resources, same IP, same name server etc etc… The potential to go down hill very quickly is there.

Too often have we seen clients websites offline due to this issue.

Dedicated.

VPS Virtual Private Server. This is for all purposes your own server, though without the physical casing. We will most often have direct access to the administration of the box and more control over the resources and how they are used.

When you are buying hosting from your web development company, simply ask them. Where is my site being hosted and what is the configuration of the hosting? You as the business and site owner have the right to fully understand where your site is being hosted.

We have seen too many clients come unstuck in the shared world and have been offline for sometimes up to 48hours, while the IP is being cleared from the blacklists. At 101 we have a dedicated server with our own IP range, this means while there are multiple sites on the server, we have written each one of them and understand the code that is up there. Within minutes we are able to identify problems and have them resolved in a timely manner.

There is a sence of security that comes with a company that understands that your business is dependent on the reliability of your providers and that is why we will not recommend a shared reseller environment to our clients.

Let me set the scene, I had just updated to the new version of iOS 4.3 (Best feature is home sharing is now enabled on your iOS device), had to restore from backup, when I restored all my apps were no longer organised into folders. How annoying?

When managing y0ur Apps on the device, using the COMMAND + Click (Mac) or CTRL + Click (Win) you are able to select the grouping of multiple apps and drag them to a new group or page.

This is very handy from me as moving them 1 by 1 was getting a bit long. Is this a new feature or have I never found it because you can only select 1 app at a time to move on the iOS device, so I just naturally thought managing the device in iTunes would work the same way? Unsure but it does start me thinking about a new article to write.

I hope the above tips helps when managing your device.

Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search are now available – at no charge – from Apple’s Australian iTunes store.

Dragon Dictation is an easy-to-use voice recognition application powered by Dragon NaturallySpeaking that allows you to easily speak-and-see your text or email messages on the iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch instantly.

You may download Dragon Dictation now by clicking here
[http://app.marketing.nuance.com/e/er.aspx?s=274&lid=3410&elq=cd05531c226d4d41bbf6c34a7e5acf00].

With Dragon Search, you can simply speak-your-search queries and get simultaneous search results from a variety of top websites and content sources using either your iPhone or iPod Touch.

You may download Dragon Search by clicking here
[http://app.marketing.nuance.com/e/er.aspx?s=274&lid=3411&elq=cd05531c226d4d41bbf6c34a7e5acf00].

Both Dragon Dictation and Dragon Mobile will support Australian accents and include Australian vocabulary making them the perfect productivity tools for Australian customers.

Do you run a blog or use wordpress for your CMS? Do you have an iPhone, Blackberry, Android or some new Nokias?

If so then you should seriously look at getting the app for WordPress. Updating your wordpress site has just become easy and what’s more, if your out and about you have an idea fire up the app and post away. In fact I’m doing it now.

What I like most about this app is the 3 step set up process.

1: Login to your admin area and navigate to Settings > Writing and enable XML-RPC. (101 clients using the 101 All in one CMS solution, this is enabled by default.)
2: Download and install the WordPress app from your relevant app library.
3: Point the app at your WordPress install type in your details and post away.

From the app you can manage, comments, posts, pages, media and it even supports Geo-tagging. The published status is available for scheduled publishing, saving a local draft, or saving a draft to WordPress.

Couple of things so far:
No HTML view. Alot of the time our clients have problems with their content and it’s HTML related. This would not be a feature utilised by the majority, but on I thought would be great.

No access to the plugins, though again would a majority of users need it? All-in-one SEO is one plugin that I think would be great to have access to. Most of the others especially in the 101 CMS solution look after themselves.

No rich text editing or linking to other pages.

Permalinks don’t seem to be available which again is only minor as majority of our users set and forget, leaving the product to take care of them.

All in all this app is great for getting the content into the blog quickly and easily. Its quite purposely designed to not be everything for every one and stays true to the emphasis on simplicity, which is what lead 101 to use it to base our CMS solution on.

If you have all the ingredients I recommend trying it out for your self. You may just find your not tied to that desk any more. (at least for the simple things any way.)

Im out of the office a lot with working onsite and interstate and I have always struggled with keeping everything in sync and having access to my new emails, sent items and drafts on all my devices. The amount of times that I have required a file sitting on the office computer to make a simple change to update a clients website, but had to wait hours until I was back in the office was starting to get in the way of the productivity and responsiveness that 101 prided itself on.

I had to start searching for a portable solution, one that would allow me to be as productive while Im out of the office as I am in the office. Apples’ MobileMe was that solution.

I did look at other cloud services, though why I chose MobileMe was simply that it integrated seamlessly into my existing setup. I simply enabled the service and it was tightly integrated into the Mac OS. To the point where I can now sync my iMac’s preferences to the MacBook and all my settings are familiar and no more sitting the two screens side by side to compare settings. I set once on either and the change replicates.

Accessing files on either machine is now done over the air via the MobileMe service. When network connected the IP address of each machine is authenticated within your account and you now remote in to each machine, via file or screen sharing. Screen sharing is great especially to access applications on the iMac that you don’t have access to on the mobile device. I can quickly access the application open files and save the changes.

Last but not least is how handy it is to be able to update my email, calendar, address book on any of my devices and almost instantly each of my devices are updated.

If you are looking for a portable solution, then MobileMe is certainly worth a look at. However like with every bit of tech do your homework and see how the tech works with your existing processes.

We recently discovered that a clients website was not viewing correctly on the iPad. We thought that was strange so fired up our iPhone to test the site using mobile Safari, the same as on the iPad. The site worked, which was even more strange, doesnt the iPhone 4 and iPad share the same O/S? We thought it strange so without having an iPad in the business (now looking to get one as we have a justified business reason. A small one but lets grab it so we can have more toys.)

After looking around for an iPad emulator and only finding one that is an iFrame surrounded by a picture of the iPad as a border, mostly good for resolution testing. We then started to play around with the User Agent in Safari setting the user agent to iPad still didn’t show the error that was reported on the iPad. This was strange and we kept hunting only to find the answer was under our nose all the time. The Apple SDK comes with an iPad simulator, likewise an iPhone simulator. After installing xCode and the iPad SDK we now have a iPad simulator in the business to test websites on. As we are running a local dev environment using Apache under Snow Leopard we can access sites on our local server. This is great test iPad compliance before the site is in production, got to be happy with that.

To get the iPad simulator running, after installing the SDK simply create a new iPad application and before you even turn your hand to code select Build and Run. This will load the iPad simulator, press the Home button and then you can load Safari. From Safari type in your website address and take a look at the site using a soft version of the iPad.

Moral of the story is if you are wanting to test your site fully for compliance with the iPad you need to either have one in the office or get the Apple SDK.

iStock photo is a great resource for getting those generic images that you need to fill space, bit in a banner and even help tell your story in your blog. Now to make that even easier I have just read in my regular newsletter from iStock that thanks to a new plugin by an iStock member gutewolke, WordPress users now have millions of low-cost, high-quality iStockphoto images at their fingertips.

The plugin is able to pull tags from your blog post and into iStocks search engine, from which it uses to suggest appropriate images. The entire transaction can be completed in a matter of seconds. Deliver the strong visual impact you need without a lot of extra effort, and you’ll have more time to start thinking about what you want to write next. The plugin, co-developed by Lee Torrens and Amos Struck, is available in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

What is dropbox?

Dropbox is an application that allows for easy online backup, file sync and sharing. Using the latest in cloud technology, our clients can collobrate with us and have access to the latest files 24/7. We find this service especially helpful when in the content stage of the website as we can maintain an updated log of activity to keep track of the progress, up-to-date to do list and a list of edits that need to be made.

We are using Dropbox at the moment for a new education based website where we are collobrating with 4 different content authors. We find this approach is working really well as we can open the files, see the progress and make use of the updated files.

Do you work away from the office alot or run a a mobile office. Using dropbox you can always have access to those important files and tools when you need them most.

In my consulting role, I find Dropbox is invaluable to me, allowing access to the office while Im out and allows me to have a central repository for all those handy code snippets, templates and useful applications that just make life easier.

So how much does Dropbox cost?
Surprisingly Dropbox is free for 2GB of storage and for each referral of a new clients to your shared files Dropbox will award you with 250mb extra up to 8GB total.

More pricing information is available here: http://www.dropbox.com/pricing

* 101 is not affiliated with Dropbox we just think its a great product, so thought we would share.

When building a new or re-developing an existing website, there is one question we at 101 Web Technology always ask our client.

How much time do you have available to keep this website updated?

As I have written about in other articles “Keeping your site fresh” and “Whats your site up to?” we know that keeping a website regularly maintained is like servicing your car. Yes it will run with old oil and half worn tyres. The old faithful will still get you to the shops and home, drop the kids at school. However would you trust the car to take you around Australia? Some would, though we wouldn’t.

The fact is if you want your website to go the extra miles and really give you a return on investment, then you need to invest into the site yourself. The biggest investment as business owners is time. Time is the one factor that is not tax deductible, time is one factor that you can’t make back. As business owners we do tend to like to save costs and think, yes we can do it ourselves, but are we going to do the same job as a professional? Are we going to remember to dot the i’s and cross the t’s?

When updating a website it is often not only a matter of making the small content changes, but having a holistic view and understanding of your web presence? Updating your content is only a very small part of keeping your website finely tuned. I liken it to changing your cars oil and not using a new filter. Yes you have new oil, but is it effective as it could be?

Keeping a website finely tuned does take time and effort. A Content Management System (CMS) is a great tool to get you off and running updating your own website content with little to no web programming skills and yes its true, if you want simple updates to your site, making them yourself makes sense. However what we find is our clients don’t have time to update the website themselves, we find their websites haven’t been touched sometimes over 24months since we launched the site. Would you not have serviced your car at least once in that same amount of time? In comparison clients making use of our website maintenance packages are more proactive with site updates, usually an email is sent with images, Word or PDF attachments with instructions on what they want the new/updated page to look like. Updates are made within 24hours of the request and the client has saved themselves the time and effort by having the professional look after their website. The client knows that their search engine ranking is being considered by a professional after each change, the site will be 100% error free. Simply it just works the best it can and your site has been tuned.

101 Fact: 9 out of 10 CMS we have deployed (good mix of both Joomla, WordPress and Adobe Contribute), due to time constraints we end up making the changes on behalf of the client.

While these CMS products are great at what they do there are limitations on them and a good web development company will be able to let you know what those limitations are and provide you a range of options that best suit your requirements, budget and availability of time.