Cormac Moylan

Hello to you. I have a question about using MS Word and I hope that you can help!

I have created five copies of the same .docx document for five different people. Each person is going to contribute to their sections in the document individually and then the content will be collected and put into a single document. Instead of doing some copying and pasting I want to simplify this process by merging the documents together using some form of built in function in Word 2007.

Problem is that I can find what I’m looking for

Do you know if and how you can merge documents together in Office 2007?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting! Cormac

Yup. December. The time when everyone and their aunt is compiling their top picks of 2008 lists. Unfortunately you’re going to have to go to this site to check out what tickled my fancy musically this year. I registered album.ie a few months ago and only recently began posting to it. This evening I posted about my favourite albums of 2008. 

Just for the sake of it, this is the kind of malaraky you can expect:

Basically, no more posts about music here. Instead music posts there. :) 

What is Spotify?

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

More nonsensical marketing drivel like that above can be found on their about page but it doesn’t properly explain how great Spotify is.

Spotify is an in beta Peer 2 Peer (P2P) desktop (Win/Mac) music player with, what seems like, an endless catalogue of music presented for your listening pleasure. Think of it as the iTunes store but instead of only getting a 30 second preview you can listen to the complete mp3 and ’surf’ entire albums. You can also create and share playlists with your friends. 

You can’t download mp3s from Spotify but you don’t really need to if you are on broadband and have every song imaginable a mouse click away… 

In a nutshell, Spotify is the doorway to the greatest music library in the World.

The above screenshot is displaying a recent search result for Roísín Murphy while the album work from the Cure’s latest offering 3:14 Dream is in the bottom left hand corner because I’m currently listening to it via Spotify. (great album by the way)

Do you want an invite to test it out for yourself? Drop me a comment and I’ll email you one of my five. One thing to be aware of is that Spotify is restricted to UK IP addresses so you’ll need to use a proxy and a UK postcode (SW18 1TW for example) when signing up for the service.

Yesterday I provisionally muttered that Paul would win the SEO competition, and low and behold; he has.

Congratulations Paul. Hopefully there will be some posts on blackdog in the coming days providing some finer details of the win.

Paul has an interesting few graphs on his winning site illustrating the movement in the search engines of the main websites which took part in the competition over the last 30 days. An interesting thing to note is my jump from 9th to 5th a few hours after the competition had ended for my own geansaí gorm website.

Too little too late it seems..

Tomorrow at 15.00 the winner of Mulley’s SEO competition will be announced by Google! Whichever site is ranked by Google.ie for the term geansai gorm at that time will win the competition.

I’m currently in 9th position with my own entry and I doubt I will be able to do anything to get to the coveted number 1 spot. As a result I’m endorsing Paul’s entry for the geansai gorm competition to win. Paul has consistently ranked his site in the top SERP positions and has ran a good honest campaign. Best of luck Paul.

Every proper search engine provides regionalised search options. One of the ways Google facilitates regional searches is by putting an emphasis on ‘local’ sites via ccTLD Google homepages. For example Google.ie leans more towards Irish results and Google.co.uk presents British results in a more favourable manner. Simple and logical stuff.

You can put even more of an emphasis on regional searches by selecting ‘Pages from X’ where X is the name of the country represented by the ccTLD. This displays results which are either hosted in the specified country or use the ccTLD domain extension. So for example, a website which uses a .ie extension and is hosted in Ireland would appear in Pages From Ireland search results within Google.ie.

Google goes a step further by offering “Google.ie as Gaeilge”. As you can guess by the name, this option presents Google in Irish. It’s a nice touch by Google but the results are odd to say the least.

Take a look at the below screenshot from this search for geansaí gorm.

And compare it for the same search but without the Fada (í) on the search term.

As you can see there are two different search results. The first result presents a ‘more gaeilge’ result than the second because the first search contains a í instead of a i for the word geansaí. I find it odd that Google presents different results if you choose to search in correct Irish and incorrect Irish but they don’t correct the spelling mistake or choose a standard. In the ‘normal’ English based searches Google don’t differentiate between the í and i in the search results but they do in the Gaeilge ones as can be seen in the two screenshots below.

If Google properly supported Gaeilge then surely they would either display a “Did you mean geansaí” response or just show one set of results between proper and improperly spelt Irish words. Preferably they wouldn’t discriminate against geansai and geansaí for Google as Gaeilge and just show the proper spelt results; Geansaí.