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If you live in or travel around Dublin, chances are you’ll be familiar with the M50 motorway - it’s road works, traffic jams and toll bridge.

From today, under a new scheme the toll barriers will be lifted and cars will be free to drive without having to stop. Drivers will instead have to ensure they pay for each journey using the eFlow barrier-free system.

There are 3 options:

- For people who seem to spend half their day on the M50, it’s best to register and buy an electronic tag. Each tag currently costs €1/month. When you drive along the M50, your tag will be detected and your account will be charged €2.

- If you don’t want to rent a tag, you can still register for a normal account. Video cameras over each lane will detect your car’s registration plate and charge your account €2.50. However, if you use the M50 over 8 times a month, you may as well get a tag and save money.

- Lastly, for tourists, and those who very rarely travel on the M50, you can choose to pay each time you use it. The charge for un-registered users is €3. You can pay via the website, over the phone or using PayZone, as long as you pay by 8pm the next day. If you take too long to pay, you will get fined €3, increased to €40 after 14 days and increased to €100 after 56 days.

Tag Inter-operability

All the Irish toll tag schemes are inter-operable. So, EazyPass tags operate on the M50 and eFlow tags also operate on the M1 and M4 tolls, so they could speed up your journey there too.

A reminder that nominations for the Irish Web Awards 2008 close at 23:59 on August 29th. That’s tomorrow night!

The IWA are my favourite awards ceremony in Ireland, as people can have faith in the open and transparent nature of the awards. Also, the rules for nomination have recently been relaxed, so you do not have to have created, built or own the website yourself to nominate it.

There are many different categories, so check them and nominate your favourite websites!

There are major security bugs in some older versions of Joomla and WordPress. We are asking all shared hosting customers and resellers to ensure all the software on their accounts is up to date.

If you are running Joomla, it should be version 1.5.6 to avoid any security risk.

If you are running WordPress, it should be at least version 2.6.0 (2.6.1 is the latest but 2.6.0 is secure).

Software installed through Installatron can be upgraded really easy with only a few clicks in your cPanel. Hosting Resellers can also over-see all software installs through the Installatron Script Installer in their Web Host Manager.

If you have any questions about upgrading your software, please do get in touch.

Art Attack - A Use For Your Old Lotto Tickets

The Irish National Lottery have today relaunched Lotto.ie which they describe as “a major revitalisation of our brand”. There has been a lot of attention surrounding the website re-design after it was tendered for 1 million euros. The company that won the tender has offices all over the world (8+ countries) and will be working with The National Lottery for the next 3 years.

The new site is definitely an improvement on the previous site, but many people will be wondering why it still lacks any e-commerce facilities! Unlike the UK Lottery site where you can buy tickets and play about 100 online games with instant winnings, the Irish Lotto site lacks any facility to play online. The revenue generated by online gambling is huge, and Irish gamblers will be going to other websites. Why would Lotto miss such an opportunity?

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Spiral Hosting are delighted to announce we have slashed the price of all .com .net and .org domain names to €5.75

The promotion runs until 31st August 2008. Simply enter promo code “250offcomnetorg” when purchasing a .com .net or .org domain name!

To check availability or purchase today, please click here.

Small Print: Subject to T&Cs. New .com .net and .org domain registrations only. One-off price for 1st year.

The Irish Web Awards 2008 have just launched. The event will take place in the Radison SAS Hotel, Dublin on October 11th 2008.

The Web Awards are ran by Damien Mulley, the genius behind the Irish Blog Awards. The awards are a lot more transparent than other award ceremonies in Ireland, where it sometimes appears that the amount of sponsorship money a company pays is linked to the award they win. With the IWA Damien assures everyone that “Nominations are free. Your website will be judged without you putting your hand in your pocket.”

Creators, builders and owners of Irish websites are invited to nominate themselves to the different Awards categories. Good luck to all nominees, particularly Spiral Hosting customers!