Barry McGee

Now that I use a Macbook Pro solely for developing on, testing webites in any version of Internet Explorer is something of a pain in the posterior.

If you've any experience of developing sites on OSX, you'll know that testing Internet Explorer is far from straightforward & probably the most reliable way is to download a huge VM (Virtual Machine) image from Microsoft and run it using something like VirtualBox or VMware Fusion.

However, these are typically unreliable as they are a huge memory hog, prone to regular crashes and you have to keep them maintained and up to date. The Microsoft provided images are also time limited and have various licencing restrictions.

Searching for alternatives, I stumbled upon Vaasnet IE9 Virtual Machine which can be connected to using the free Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection For Mac client.

The full instructions (all four steps!) don't take long to get you up and running.

There are a range of Virtual Machines on offer including IE6-9 - all of which can be used for a very reasonable $0.99p/h.

You can then launch a VM, suspend & save it for future use (though you are charged for storage) or delete the VM entirely which emans you pay nothing until you next launch a new one.

Quick, cheap and easy to use. IE Testing on a Macbook sorted.

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About 18 months ago - I owned no Apple products. However, once I purchased my first iPhone, the downward slide into the inescapabale lair of Apple ownership began. I now have an iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro & as of this morning, an Apple TV box.

I didn't start this week wanting to own an Apple TV box - in fact, I didn't start this week wanting to own any TV box at all, but then I disocvered that the recently launched iPhone/iPad BBC iPlayer app & the RTE Player app have Airplay capabilities. It was then rather inevitable that I would own an Apple TV box soon.

However, the main point of this scribe is not to extol the virtues of Apple products but the ease with which I was able to purchase an Apple TV box from the store this morning.

Being Christmas Adam, I had expected the throng of people in that temple of consumerism that is Westfield to be nothing short of disgusting and queues mandatory.

However, upon eneritng the Apple store I found a very well staffed "Express Purchase" table to the right of the door as I went in, less than three and a half steps in the door.

I uttered the words "Apple TV please", a card reader appeared, my receipt was emailed to me and before I knew it, roughly 55 seconds later, I was on my merry way.

You may be thinking, well, of course, that's how the modern shopkeep works these days, isn't it? Well, to that question, I beg of you to try and purchase an electrical good from Currys or Dixons where you'll have to brace queues of people, fight for the attention of a retail assistant and invariably at some stage be forced to provide a myriad of information that will almost definately include your postcode & shoe size. I was advise you to allocate at least 30 mins of your time for this excercise.

On a related note, I almost bought a DVD in HMV yesterday - I had it in my hand, having already made the decision to purchase. I then caught sight of the snaking queue of roughly 75 people being served by three underworked tills and thought better of it. I'll just get it on iTunes.

 

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I had my bike stolen this week from outside my place of work. As annoying as this was, it's kind of my own fault (in a way) as I skimped when buying the bike lock whereas if I'd invested a little more, I'd still be enjoyed a two-wheeled commute as opposed to my current two-legged affair.

I thought I was saving money at the time but having no insurance (it wasn't actually worth insuring to be fair), I've now lost the £40 I could have got for it on Gumtree, which I had actually planned to do next week as I'm moving (typical!).

I was also asked to look at a website this week, as the owner was having alot of issues with it. I had previously quoted this person for a new website but had heard nothing back from them.

As it turns out, they had opted to go with someone else who had agreed to build their site for a considerably cheaper sum. Now, six months down the line, major cracks are starting to appear and I had to gently tell them they've paid for a steaming turd.

"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair

There is a well known saying, "You get what you pay for", yet many people still seem to believe this does not apply to web design & development. If it looks ok, and it seems to work, job done!

However, I would say to any serious business owner who is offered a website for a seemingly "bargain" price, if it looks to be good to be true, it probably is.

Similarly, I've found that when stuck in the throng of a project, with impatient stakeholders and impending deadlines, it's all too easy to slip in a couple of quick hacks to achieve the desired effect.

While this is a short-term win, it is ultimately adding to a mountain of technical debt that will come tumbling down around you somewhere down the line. This will inevitably lead to bigger bugs, increased workloads and more pressingly deadlines.

Quite simply, if something's worth doing, it's worth doing right. I learnt this the hard way, and now so have my feet.

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I have an shared hosting account with Dreamhost on which this website and many others sit. Before Christmas I had noticed that, quite regularly, I would check this site to find it down. I would then check my other sites and they were down too. When I contacted Dreamhost, they would apologise for the downtime and my sites would be back again. However, it did worry me that if my sites were down this often when I was manually checking them, how often were they down when I wasn't checking them? Although this site isn't an e-commerce site, I believe all sites should be treated as though they are, i.e. - if my site is down for 1 hour, what does that result in lost revenue? So, I began to research automated trackers and quickly discovered Pingdom - a little tracking bug which will allow you to monitor your site's uptime. It's quick, easy and free (for a single site). They also have an iPhone app so you can check your website anytime, anywhere. This is an example of the summary you can get from the web interface;

I monitored my site for a month and was amazed to find that my server had crashed over 500 times in one month amounting to over 8 hours of downtime. This was clearly not acceptable but armed with these stats I was able to shout very loudly (but politely) at Dreamhost, and to their credit, they did offer straight away to move me to another server which I was able to do with minimal disruption. They also offered me a partial rebate for my hosting bill in line with their 100% Uptime Guarantee. Since moving servers, my average server uptime has now been consistently above 99.65%,  however, I can now be safe in the knowledge that I'll know very quickly if my server starts to under perform again and take immediate steps to rectify it. If you're a site owner, I recommend you implement similar safeguards as a matter of priority.

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Last week, the Online team at BBC Northern Ireland launched a pretty mammoth project, the new Ulster Scots portal.

This was the culmination of over a years work from planning to deployment and also marked a first for BBCNI in that it was the first site to launch on the BBC's dynamic web application platform. This road wasn't always smooth but it managed to come together in the end without it turning into much of a handlin. The application was built by London based dev house, Airlock, and aims to help complete learners get up to speed with Ulster Scots quickly and easily while also providing more seasoned enthusiasts with plenty to chew the cud over. The foundations of the site were laid by the long running Radio Ulster programme, A Kist o Wurds. As it is a language orientated site, there was a big emphasis on audio. As with Ulster Scots being a very gutteral sounding language anyway, the muckle of audio & video available is a great resource for users new to Ulster Scots. It's quite a colourful language and I was personally very surprised how many Ulster Scots words and phrases I already use in everyday life. Check the site Ulster Scots site out for yourself and let me know in the comments if you have any particular favourite words or phrases.

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This week, Google launched their own Apache module, designed to optimise your page speed. Since Google announced last year that it will, in effect, take into account the page load time when ranking websites, it would make sense for every website owner to take advantage of this. However, most website owners have shared hosting and as such have no way of adding Apache modules to their servers. Google seems to be working closely with GoDaddy as a launch partner but the good news for Dreamhost customers like myself is that they have already made this option available from the control panel. Here is a short video to show you how to turn it on for your respective domains.

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Five days ago, I received my new Amazon Kindle 3. I had no particular wish for a Kindle up until I purchased it back at the start of August. It was a pure impulse buy after they released it for pre-order at an all new low price of £109. I'll admit this shiny promotional video also helped tip me over the edge. (I went for the WiFi version without 3G.)

I'd also been an avid reader when I was younger, I'd literally read anything I could get my hands on, even moving on to my sisters books after I'd exhausted my fortnightly library allowance of ten paperbacks. However, I'd slipped out of the habit in recent years, never seeming to have the time as I spent hours whittling away time on Facebook and Twitter. So, I decided to use this as an excuse to get the Kindle. When it arrived in it's compact box and I began to open it, I saw immediate similarities to the packaging of Apple products, from the snug packing of the box to the white Amazon branded charger. Upon lifting the device I was pleasantly surprised at how light it was, it reminded me of when you unwrap a new phone and take it out without the battery. Except this had the battery encased already, and it's not possible to remove. The screen also had what I thought was a film overlay of initial instructions but was then a friend pointed out that there was no film, the instructions were on the screen as it just sat in standby. Thankfully this was pointed out to me as I could have very easily damaged it trying to remove a non-existent protective film! The E-ink really is that life like. Upon initially turning it on, it took about 20 seconds to boot up. Fortunately, that's the only time you'll have to sit for that long looking at it as all subsequent turning on/off of the device takes only a second or two. Unlike the iPad/iPhone, you don't need a computer to activate it, you just turn it on and off you go. However, you'll want to be near a Wifi pretty quick as no free books come pre-loaded, just an instruction manual. Connecting to a Wifi is painless though and it already recognised my account as the Amazon account I purchased it with. If you are buying it as a gift you can choose to de-register yourself which it will do as soon as it connects to Amazon. The first thing I found odd was that the two large buttons on each vertical edge of the device both turn the page over, with the two smaller buttons above them on each vertical edge turning the pages back. While this seems unintuitive at first, you're clearly going to be turning pages forward more than you are going to be turning them back and I later found when reading this means you can turn forward and back with one hand so it ultimately makes sense. As a regular user of an iPhone, it took a little while to get used to the fact the screen is not touch screen and it seems at times a little archaic to be moving a mouse pointer with a 4 way keypad, however, the most used menu options are in simple vertical menus which leaves them pretty easy to navigate. Purchasing books from the Kindle store is a breeze and you can download a sample of the book before purchasing, just like the 'Look Inside this Book' on the Amazon website although you may be given a slightly bigger sample on the Kindle, I'm not sure. Samples are very quick to download, under 5 seconds in most cases. Books are also very quick, the website boasts less than 60 seconds and I haven't seen anything to contradict this. Though not all books in the Amazon store are available in the Kindle store, most of the popular ones are, and I imagine this will only increase as time goes on. The Kindle also offers a web browser, labeled as an experimental feature, and rightly so and it's pretty woeful compared to the majority of mobile browsers on the market today, I can't see myself using it at all. I was slightly surprised by this as it's based on a Webkit engine but there you go. Kindle has worked very hard to make the screen as close to a printed page as possible so the screen is not backlit. While this means you can't read it in poor light as you could a phone, it also means that's it's incredibly easy to read in bright sunlight. The battery life seems to be very impressive indeed, I used it up until this morning without charging straight out of the box, which was I'd guess about 20 hours of reading, but a full charge should lasts up to 3 weeks according to the official spec. On the downside, it has crashed and rebooted on me a couple of time when I've been playing around with the settings, though never when I've been reading. You do get the feeling the processor is sometimes labouring to catch up though, for example, if you click to move forward five pages in quick succession, the screen will sometimes freeze for a few moments before catching up. Hopefully a firmware update in the near future will sort that. Like alot of other e-readers, their is a lot of customisation with how you would like to view the page, with the ability to alter text-size etc. I can see this being a big draw for older people and the visually impaired. You can also bookmark pages, annotate pages and highlight sections of text like below. Further to that, you can then send these highlights to Twitter or Facebook. I also find sometimes when reading that it's very easy to hit the page turn button accidentally. There's not much room along the edge of the Kindle where you can grip the device as you would a book, but it's happened less the more I've got used to it. In conclusion, I love it. I've read more in the past 5 days than I have in the past five months and that can only be a good thing. As you can see from the pics, I was also able to get three chapters read of Tony Blair's new book on the day it was released, which I could have done without leaving bed if I wanted, I love the immediacy of that. In the introduction when turning it on, the Amazon CEO stated one of the aims was that the Kindle would disappear in the hands of the reader, leaving them with only the content they are reading and I have to say in my opinion, they achieved this. Buy Kindle WiFi | Kindle WiFi + 3G

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A few weeks ago, I launched a little website I designed and built for Madden Raparees Gaelic Football Club. My little brother plays for Madden Raparees so asked me to design and build something simple which could be updated easily. I had been itching for a little project to use Frog CMS so I got stuck in.

As I'm primarily a web developer these days and prefer to hand over the design work to others who can craft a much more beautiful picture, it was a bit daunting to fire up Photoshop again and get designing. However, I soon found myself losing hours playing about and experimenting. I forgot how much fun designing with a blank canvas can be. It's also quite liberating to be able to just push pixels about with a keystroke as opposed to having to code to make aesthetic changes. In the end, I decided to go with a simple layout based on the popular 960 grid layout, supported with a large hi-res image in the background. I also took all the images on the site myself and was quite pleased with the visual impact given by the football in the background. Frog CMS is very easy to install and hack around with if you're competent with PHP and mySQL. Documentation is however limited, but it's open and simple enough to allow you to pretty much manipulate it however you wish. Frog CMS is open source, however active development of the core seem to have virtually ceased but a fork has been made in the shape of Wolf CMS. From what I can gather, this is where the magic is now happening and for any future projects, I shall be using Wolf instead. I have now handed the site over to the football management and it's been well received by the local community which is good to see. Visit Madden Raparees GFC

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The Internet is vast and the mind boggles about how big it will be in ten years time.  It' very easy to think, after toiling away for weeks, that when you launch a website, it's gonna take the Internet by storm (Or maybe that's just me?). Anyway, 99.9% of the time, it will not. It's just a very small little grain of sand in an ever expanding desert. In ten years time, will there be any point in making and adding new websites to the Internet? After all, domain names are already running out, where will we put stuff? How will anyone find it? Will the Internet be superseded by a new platform where all essential services are provided and the Internet as we know it becomes a graveyard of archives that people did in the nineties and noughties? Hmm. Some think the answers lie in semantics, watch this great little doc to find out more...

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

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This afternoon we launched a new website from BBC Northern Ireland, Science on the Ground. This learning based website is aimed at Primary School children (Key Stage 2) to Early Secondary School (Key Stage 3) in Northern Ireland. We have tried to make Science more interesting by demonstrating how it works in the real world and industry. This is mostly achieved through the use of engaging video examples split into 5 main areas - Entertainment, Food, Flight, the Body & Protection. My particular favourite is on mobile gaming.

The website was designed and built by Bluecube Interactive. I provided technical guidance and consultation for BBC Northern Ireland. If you've got a minute, let me know what you think of it...

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How we use typography on the web has changed massively in the last few years. When I first started building websites, there were roughly 5 "web-safe fonts" and if you wanted your text to be accessible, you had to make do with those special five. Things started to change a few years back with the emergence of sIFR. This was very exciting at the time as it basically meant you could use any font you wished on your webpages, providing the user had Flash installed. However, it was and still is quite buggy. If you wish to do anything other than the basics, it can be quite temperamental to manipulate to your needs. More recently, Cufon has appeared as a worthy alternative to sIFR, circumventing the dependency on Flash and more importantly, Cufon is much leaner in page weight terms. It also very simple to use. This has been my weapon of choice for quite a while now. However, Google has now entered the fray and made the whole thing even simpler. Last week they released their Font Directory which essentially means you can install any of their fonts in your web pages with two lines of code.

Google have taken care of all the display issues, even making all their fonts IE6 compatible, and wrapped them up in a nice little Black Box for the web to use. The library is a little limited at the minute but I fully expect it to expand with time. I've used the font 'Reeny Beeny' for my header and navigation on this blog. To see hows it's done, follow the simple steps from Google.

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A few weeks ago, I discovered on the official Twitter Media blog that one of their developers had "scratched an itch" of his and coded a little script that allows you to embed tweets in your site like so;

This hasn't been very widely reported as it's not an official Twitter feature as such, it's just something which one of their developers was experimented with and released on the Media blog as such. This is why it's not quite as slick as it could be and why it will probably need some CSS integration work to sit into your site. However, it's alot more useful than taking a screen grab of a tweet for blog posts and as the tool for generating the embed code doesn't obfuscate the mechanics, you can easily adjust the CSS to suit your own site styles.

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Sometimes, things are so amazingly simple you wonder why the whole world hasn't already been doing them before now. How do you get the attention of top creative directors when looking for a job in NYC? Aside from buying billboard space across from their office window, you could do the internet equivalent for as little as $6.

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Like many others, I was very intrigued by this mornings announcements by Facebook on their steps to venture into the wider web. With over 450 million users worldwide, Facebook commands a vastly powerful social army who collectively have an unrivalled ability to seek out what's hot, right now, on the web. One of the most exciting elements is the ability to add a 'Like' or 'Recommend' button to your site. This is linked to your Facebook profile, so that wherever this button appears (providing you're logged into Facebook), you can just click it and this will then appear in your Facebook profile stream. This badge will also display if any of your Facebook friends have already liked or recommended this page. After getting roughly the code I needed from the Facebook Developer page, I simply added a couple of PHP variables to dynamically insert the current page URL and then added the following code to my PHP page where I wanted the badge to appear. [php][/php] If you would prefer your badge to say 'Recommend'; use this code instead; [php][/php] For those familiar with CSS, you'll see I added some rules to make the badge fit my site, you can fiddle with this as you see fit for your own site. I have no doubt, there will very soon be a Wordpress plugin to efficently provide this functionality but I quickly hacked together a solution to get the 'Like' widget you can see on this post (if you're reading this on the front page of this blog). I simply added the following to the index.php file in my current theme folder. [php] [/php] If you're reading this post from it's own individual page, you'll see a 'Recommend' button which can be achieved by adding the following code to the 'single.php' file in your current theme folder. [php] [/php] As I say, it's quick and dirty but gets your site in on the act sharpish.

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Discovered this sneak peek from Gizmodo earlier and like the look of the new iPhone indeed despite the fact that it doesn't look radically different form the current incarnation. As we've seen before, Apple clearly heed the philosophy to innovate and iterate rather than try anything too radical. Makes perfect sense really, not like their current product isn't selling. I also very much hope Gizmodo's prediction that one of the separate volume buttons may double up as a camera shutter button proves to be true as this is one of the biggest frustrations I have with the current iPhone. Exciting!

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Anyone can build a website nowadays, can't they? Anyone who is any way tech savvy at all can knock up a website in a couple of hours and release it to the world in all it's glory. There's a plethora of tools out there too. Need a simple website? WebEden will sort you out in ten minutes. Need a blog? Wordpress will have you up and going in 5 minutes. Need an e-commerce site? Business Catalyst will have you selling to the masses in 1 minute.

For the more adventurous, willing to get their hands a little dirty with some simple code, try Dreamweaver.  It'll cost ya to buy but you can have a 30-day free trial. Should be more than enough time to build your eBay, Right? At a recent event I attended, one of the speakers was presenting his experiences on distance selling via an online store. One of his top tips was to "...cut costs and build your own website." I challenged him on this point and he argued that the website could be sorted out further down the line once the orders started to flow in. I argued that unless any new business has a substantial marketing push behind them, which most do not, they'll have trouble getting anyone to their site in the first place, never mind converting them to customers once they are there. To me, to not invest in a web strategy when the primary vehicle for selling your product is your website is akin to a butcher trying to sell from the field. He might have set up shop but who's gonna find him? I find that in Northern Ireland especially, there still seems to be a perception with small to mid-size businesses that a website is an afterthought. A luxury. Something to be considered with headed paper and compliment slips once the business is "on it's feet". What these businesses fail to realise is the potential a strong web presence has to expose and advertise their business from the very outset. The Internet is not a passing fad. Regardless of what your business is, you can benefit. People don't flick though a tattered Yellow Pages anymore for a plumber, electrician or garden landscaper. They search Google. Or Yell. Or Lookaly. OK, not everyone does but alot of people do. Certainly more than your business can choose to ignore. In the "current climate", with lots of talk of tightening belts, cutting costs and streamlining outgoings, many business owners could be forgiven for putting a web strategy on the long finger. But I would argue investing in this area could be a vital tool to help your business to ride out the storm. Sooner or later, you're competitors will have a web presence, and it's very likely they will take precedence above you if you're not there first. So, with all these tools available I mentioned earlier, why would you even consider hiring a web designer/developer? Well, perhaps as a by product of the fact it is so easy, there's are literally hundreds of thousands of web pages being added to the ever expanding Internet every day. That's a pretty big swamp to chuck your website into, in the hope it will bob merrily to the top. This is when you need someone who knows what they're talking about. An expert. No two websites are the same. No one size fits all. Your needs, and the needs of your customer are specific to your business and your business alone. You not only need to look at your website but the whole experience of your business in the online world. There are many aspects of this to consider and to explain further is beyond the scope of this post, but I hope you get the idea. It is only when you address this issue can you attract visitors and more importantly, convert visitors to customers. You may not need to be an expert to build a website but you do need to be one to build a successful website.

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Today is the International Ada Lovelace Day which celebrates women in Science and Technology as she is widely regarded as the world's first computer programmer. If you've ever been to a web/technology conference you'll notice this trend of programming women did not continue as there always seems to be 20 men to every woman, so she is indeed to be celebrated, though many women have made a very significant impact on Science and Technology since, a few of whom are listed here. Incidentally, I had no idea who she was until I found myself sitting in a meeting room in the BBC one day, named in her honour.

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Happy belated St. Patrick's Day one and all, hope you had a good one. As I only had a two day week, this will be a short post but an informative one none the less I hope. The BBC is currently rolling out a single sign on system across all of bbc.co.uk, for some scope on this head over to the BBC Internet Blog to read Why we built BBC iD As I move away from developing websites and moreso to building web applications, the parallels between web development and software development are becoming more and more apparent. I've found myself lamenting a lot of recent that I wish I had undertaken a Computer Science degree at University. As such, I found that a lot of the top 30 mistakes of software development can also be applied to web development. In a similar vein to the above, I could also identity with 10 Things I hate About Software Development I was surprised to see just how easy it is to print your own newspaper, a world of opportunity. If I had something newsworthy to print of course. The dot com top level domain is 25 years old this week, but not all have survived the test of time, 12 dot coms that are dot gone. I do love it when a company throws caution out the window and goes for the big cheese. I also love a big prank. I don't like their beer much but fair play to Heineken for this awesome guerrilla marketing campaign And lastly, a sneak peek at IE9, IE seems to be getting their act together (very) slowly but surely.

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This is just a quick blog post to appeal to all service industries, cafes, bars, bistros etc in Belfast (& beyond) to install free WI-FI for paying customers.

You can install a wireless router and have decent broadband Internet for about £10 per month if you already have a phone line. This is roughly the same as three paying customers buying a coffee over the course of the month. I guarantee if you put a chalkboard outside your door advertising free Wi-Fi, you can get your three customers plus many more because despite the increasing ubiquity of smartphones, netbooks and laptops, very few businesses seem to seize this opportunity. People want to be connected, be they business people on the move, students looking somewhere quiet to finish an essay or just casual browsers wanting to catch up on news while chilling with a coffee. Hotel Ibis in the Queens Quarter is at the end of my street and was great. You bought a coffee in their hotel and were able to avail of their Wi-Fi for two hours. However, I went in last night and was told I must now be a guest of the hotel or pay £7.50 for 2 hours. Considering this is the price of some monthly broadband offers, it's not exactly a sound return on investment on my part. But the thing is, I was the only person ever sitting in the whole bar. It's not like word had got out and the place was jammed with students downloading every episode ever broadcast of Glee, bringing their net connection to the world to a grinding halt. Now, not only will I never pay for their extortionate Wi-Fi, I'll also never buy their coffee as I have no reason to sit in their otherwise empty bar. However, there are some more forward thinking business owners who do kindly offer this service in Belfast. So far, I found free Wi Fi in;

• Charlies
• The French Village
• The Undaground
• Sinnamon Coffee
• Bookfinders

This list is by no means exhaustive and I'll add to it if I stumble across anywhere else. If you know of somewhere, please add to the comments.

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