Murmurs

I love the new logo for Murrion Software, developed by Gary McGinty of Ion Ltd in Dublin.

Just for fun I wanted to play around with the logo. I have plenty of ideas so I’m planning to have a new Friday Logo Fun ( and even a hash tag! #flf ) each friday for the next few weeks, as long as I can keep coming up with ideas that is.

Logo #1 : Murrion seen in the Wild

The cow on the left was branded too but refused to pose for the photo.

How the Murrion Logo came to be..

Gary McGinty from Ion  came across this tweet from Stephen Crowley on Wednesday saying:

RT @murrion: RT @wubud: HELP: We’d love your feedback on our logo concepts for @Wubud -
please comment on the blog http://twurl.nl/x7f6gz

Gary checked out this blog and saw that Murrion was also designing a new corporate identity.

Taking the initiative on both counts, before signing off for the evening, Gary helped out @wubud with a design draft http://twitpic.com/5n0iy and the following morning he helped out with a draft for Murrion’s logo too http://www.twitpic.com/5ojas

The main logo is a 9×9 square - the lines represent code and an abstracted “M” & “S”.

Gary McGinty from from Ion Ltd got in touch early Friday morning with these designs for Murrion Software.

Gary indirectly  saw my tweet asking if anyone would be able to work on a design for me, which is a story in itself. Its a great example of the usefulness of Twitter.

A couple of other designers, Leon Quinn and Alan McCarthy contacted me too to help with a design. Thanks guys for your time.

Heres what Gary sent to me. The more I look at it, the more I like it. Im looking forward to using it in a few places including a website design, web app UI’s, business cards and letter heads.

Thanks for your work ION!

I recently wrote a PHP script to send me an email when Google refers any visitors to my website. It includes the search terms that a user was searching for and also the address of the page that the user ends up on in your site.

This information is readily available in apps such as Google Analytics though the purpose of this script is to make the information more readily available, to receive updates of visitors in real time via email.

A few people were interested in this little script and so I set up www.whatsgoogleupto.com to host the script and act as a free and open repository where I can upload ongoing changes and improvements.  It was also an opportunity to try out Beanstalk as an SVN repository and SimplePie for showing the RSS feed of recent commits to the Repository.

Since putting up this script I wanted to make it into a Wordpress plugin to make it a little more accessible to people with blogs that didn’t want to be editing the script to add in their own email address etc.

The Wordpress plugin is now done and it can be downloaded from the Tools page. To use it, simply download the plugin, uncompress it, add it to the plugins folder of your wordpress blog, activate it and then sit back and wait to be notified when Google sends any visitors to your blog. Its especially useful if you are trying out specific keywords and to be notified when they work.

The plugin uses the existing blog user details so theres no need to tweak the script to add in your name or email address.

Im looking for a logo to be created for Murrion software. If at all possible I’m looking to get it designed on a budget or in return for some PHP development work / publicity on this blog.

I sent out a message on Twitter late last week and plenty of people were good enough to retweet the message and a couple of designers got back to me, Thank you to all who responded.

Leon Quinn from Reverb Studios asked me a couple of questions and sent me back a design. Here is the design Leon sent back:

It gets to the point and suits my plain tastes. Im worried that its a bit boring though, not a reflection of Leons design, its a reflection of my own tastes and what I described.  Im also not too sure about the icon and I even think it looks good without the icon.

Is it too boring without an icon? I’m developing different types of software but focusing mainly on email marketing related apps and services, should it include some email / communications related imagery?

Last week I attended  it@corks breakfast meeting in Rochestown Park hotel. Ronan Geraghty introduced the Microsoft Bizspark programme which provides Microsoft software and services to start-ups. The slides from the event are available on it@corks blog.

John Galvin from BackUpEarth.Com are currently participating in this programme and John made a presentation showing how their business has benefited from Bizspark. The BackUpEarth slides are also available from the it@cork blog.

Since then, I’ve signed up to the Bizspark programme for Murrion Software. I confirmed with it@cork that the business meets the criteria for the programme and got back an enrollment link to get started.

To be eligible for BizSpark, all of the following must be true. Your Startup:

• Is in the business of software development
• Is privately held
• Has been in business for less than 3 years
• Has less than US $1 million in annual revenue

I filled out a couple of forms and got a welcome email back from Microsoft Bizspark. 2-6 hours later I was granted access to the MSDN using my existing Windows Live ID.

I started out developing apps using ASP a good few years ago and now I have the opportunity to develop versions of software using ASP.NET. I’ve since downloaded Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to begin developing some apps and get back in to ASP.

I’ve been developing using PHP for the last 5 or 6 years so I’ll be fun to get ASP going on the server using Apache instead of IIS.

One thing I noticed though on MSDN  is that the downloads don’t work when using the Firefox browser. It downloads the default.aspx page instead of running it. Switching over to Internet Explorer works  fine which installed an independent downloader to download any apps.

Another benefit of the programme is being able to list your product or service on Bizspark DB.  I’ll add Murrion Software up there soon enough, I’ll be curious to see if there is any resulting traffic to the site.

Who knows, maybe I’ll drop all the open source stuff and go back to Microsoft.

Last week I put together a tool called Keyword Domains to notify a user by email if a .ie domain name becomes available in relation to their chosen keywords.

This app uses Blacknights list of expired .ie domain names. I think this list is a great resource and I wanted to stick with it to make a list which consists of thousands of .ie domain names more useful to a person looking to gather together some domain names.

This week I’ve created a little mash-up of the .ie expired domain names list and Google Trends. With Google Trends you can see what is currently a hot topic being searched for the most on Google.

With Trend.ie Domains (Trendy Domains!!) you can see the current top 100 trends on Google and see if there are any expired .ie domains names along similar lines. Clicking on ‘Buy Now’ takes you directly to Blacknight to get it.

Google Trends and related .ie domain names

I attended the Microsoft Bizspark event organised by it@cork yesterday morning, hosted in the Rochestown Park Hotel. It was definitely worth going. Tea, coffee and even breakfast rolls were provided to wake everyone up before the speakers got started.

On each of the tables there was an it@cork flier showing the upcoming talks and a membership offer of Corporate membership to it@cork until January 2010 for only €60 including VAT.

To avail of the offer, sign up before May 31st and when filling out the online form choose to pay by post, it@cork will contact you to arrange payment.

Later in the morning I signed up and now Murrion Software is a proud member of it@cork (check out the badge on the right) and looking forward to the coming events.

• Visit to EMC, May 18th
• Online Marketing Workshop, May 28th
• Software Testing Event, June 18th
• Midsummer event in Murphy’s Brewery, June 18th
• When Agile goes bad, June 23rd

I’ve put together a useful tool to allow users to search for and get notified by email of  .ie domain names that have expired.

This could be useful if you are watching out for a particular .ie domain name to become available or if you are interested in buying domain names that are somewhat related to your business, products or services.

Domain Keywords

The list of .ie domain names comes from Blacknights website which currently has over 4,500 deleted domain names.

To use the app simply enter a few keywords or phrases relevant to your business. If there are any domain names that might be of use to you they are displayed  with a link back to Blacknight to buy them.

If you add in your email address then you will receive an email as any .ie domain names become available that are relevant to your keywords.

Try it out, let me know what you think. Its the first of about half a dozen useful little apps I’ll be making available over the coming weeks.

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A friend at Apple told me about this the other night, you can change the language on your Facebook  profile to Pirate!

To change to Pirate, click on the current language down on the bottom left.

“What’s on your mind?” is now “What be troublin’ ye?” and “Log Out” is “Abandon Ship”. There are plenty more, try it out!