The rest of the mile markers seemed to be placed reasonably accurately (well, mile 3 seemed a little long) but I finished the race a full minute faster than last year (29:47 vs 30:50). I was suspicious – I felt that something must be wrong.

Back home I was reading the boards.ie thread on the race and someone questioned whether the course was short. A number of others soon followed with the same conclusion, with Garmin and similar data to back it up.  My Polar HRM measured low too (it normally measures low but this time it was extra low).

One guy developed a chart for people to use their chip time to extrapolate their time for a full 5 miles.  The chart only listed whole minutes so I wrote a PHP script to extrapolate any time.

I posted this on the thread and it was well received. I then posted it to the Dublin Marathon page on Facebook and I saw a jump in visits to the page during the day.

Nice looking site.

I clicked on ‘Maps’ at the bottom of the page. Nothing happened. The url in the status bar showed a ‘#’ so I waited for a popup window. Nothing happened. I looked at the source code (no tables – good stuff) and was quite surprised to see:

<a href="#">Maps</a>

for all 15 links in the footer! (i.e. no url, no javascript for a popup, no nuthin).

I did find the directions via the Contact Us link at the top of the page. Unfortunately the directions seem to have been copied from the AA Route Planner – they are horribly verbose. The M50 and M1 toll prices are out of date too.

The page also mentions getting their by rail but omits which Leixlip station to use and directions from the station to the hotel (it’s Leixlip Confey and it’s about 1.25 miles from the station to the hotel).

It then lists three Dublin Bus routes to Leixlip but gives a link to CIE’s website instead of to the timetables of each route.

I reported the links, directions and train issues a week ago. Nothing has changed except for a typo (City Center -> City Centre) being fixed.

This omissions violates item 7 (Hidden Contact Details) in 10 reasons why your website sucks. In the list it gives Amazon.co.uk as an example. From a web development perspective, the site is horrible – look at the source code. Shudder. It appears to have been generated by Adobe GoLive 4 (AFAIK current version is GoLive 9).

The thread started off without a link to the site. As soon as that was rectified the massacre started. The site is so bad that some thought it was a joke.

Are you tired of being quoted ridiculous for the design of a site. Nowadays, with the cost of internet access getting cheaper, it’s of the utmost imporance that a company have it’s own web page(s) presence.

That’s where we come in! Here @ WebPagesIreland, we have many years of combined experience to help you achieve a web page that’s Quality, Ingenuity, Ubiquity, & Design.

Tired of being quoted ridiculous what? “imporance” is spelt wrong. “it’s” should be “its”. “page(s)” should be omitted. The guy in the photo on the site looks sleazy.

Off too ntl.ie and to their broadband help centre. Cool, FAQ 7 has what I need – Broadband customers click here for details of changes to ntlworld email addresses. There is a link to what I need – but it just generates a 404 error. As the 404 handler seems to be a non-default IIS one, with a helpful message (“404″ is the only text returned!), one might expect it to email someone. I did.

Edit 20 Aug: The PDF document is now on the site. No thank you or acknowledgement