All posts by 2020Media Blogger

2020Media is a leading UK web host offering Linux and Windows website hosting. The company specialises in WordPress, Joomla and Drupal support.
Tips and Tricks

Joomla Magazine News

Joomla produce a monthly magazine full of useful news and tips.

Here are a few highlights from February’s issue.

Joomla Resources Directory Updates

When we set out to create the new JRD there were over 350 submissions waiting to go through the approval process. We’re happy to share that we have reviewed of all of these submissions! Moving forward, our goal is to process each new submission within a two week period of time. Read More

WordPress to Joomla Migration Checklist

If you’re planning to migrate your WordPress website to Joomla for the wide range of features Joomla allows, here’s what to keep in mind as you map out the process. Why Joomla? Here are a few of Joomla’s unique capabilities:  Read More

Revealing Joomla’s SEO Secrets – Redirect Manager

One of the hidden gems which appeared with the 1.6 version of Joomla is the Redirect Manager – a simple system which allows you to identify and fix broken links. Before the Redirect Manager was introduced, the only way to find and fix broken URLs was to use a third party extension, an SEO scraper such as Screaming Frog, or looking in your server logs. Now it’s possible to identify and manage broken links within the administrator panel of your Joomla website. Read More

Public Intro, Restricted Article

There are times when the project of a site calls for the introduction of texts to be visible by general audiences, but if the visitor wants to see the full article, s/he must log in to the system. The full content is blocked and only after the visitor creates or is granted an access account will s/he be able enjoy the full content of the article. Read More

Interview: Alex de Borba

Alex was offering his help for anyone who had a question about Joomla. Here is the interview I had with Alex. Alex explains why he chose Joomla over WordPress, why he distains templates and cookie-cutter websites, why his site is green (yes really), and a great quote: “coders are the only ones capable to turn coffee into code”, and good coffee ain’t cheap. Read More

 

Opinion

Migrating from Blogger to WordPress

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This week we have a guest post from one of our clients, Andy Clark. Andy runs a popular blog called “WorkshopShed.com“, which is all about making things in the shed at the bottom of his garden.

Andy writes:

I’ve been running a blog on Blogger since 2008 with a custom domain sourced by 2020Media. I had been using a simple template with a few custom widgets.

The site was due a refresh but I also wanted to get more flexibility and control over the layout and content. There is a lot of power in the blogger templates but I specifically wanted to have different adverts and affiliate links displayed depending on country of visit. Blogger could not easily support that so I decided to swap to a self hosted WordPress.

screengrab of workshopshed.com
The new workshopshed.com WordPress website

I started my migration by learning about WordPress using a locally hosted virtual machine, it had been a few years since I’d looked at this particular CMS.

Next I put together a list of all the things I wanted to move across, posts, pages, comments, images, links and all of the functionality I wanted in the new site.

I checked that the latest WordPress platform was capable and looked at the tools needed for blog migration. Some of the things did not work well on my local VM so 2020 provided me a free hosted site for ease of testing. A simple theme was selected and customised to meet my requirements.

At this point I asked a professional WordPress expert to review the site and we came up with a long list of issues. Some of the issues were technical and some regarding the content and structure of the site.

The issues were fixed and the site were gradually improved. A plan was drawn up for what needed to happen during the switchover. To ensure success, several practice runs were made to ensure the process would work and the posts displayed correctly.

I let 2020 know a week in advance of the migration and cleaned down the test site in preparation for the migration. The transfer of data did not take long and the rollout was finished ahead of plan. The last step was to get the team at 2020 to switch over the DNS and wait for the changes to ripple around the world.

Many thanks Andy.

Andy’s shed is a previous finalist of the “Shed of the year” awards, so we’re honoured to be hosting such a prestigous site.

If you’d like to know more about 2020Media’s WordPress hosting services, you can read about our UK WordPress services here.

We aim to make website migrations as pain-free as possible. To enable a seamless transition we provide free temporary domain names so the site can be fully tested before switching the actual website domain name. In addition, we are keen to help with migration, as we know this can be daunting for the non-technical. So we provide a free migration service – provide us with the login to your existing site and we’ll move it to our hosting, completely free of charge.

Technical

New free services from 2020Media

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This post is a quick preview of some new services we’re introducing for our customers.

Piwik Analytics.

Piwik analytics is not a widely known name, but they offer a private version of website visitor analytics in a very similar style to Google Analytics.

Piwik has repeatedly emphasized ownership of data when compared to Google analytics. Piwik is hosted on our own servers vs Google analytics which is a remotely hosted service. So with your visitor’s data you remain in control.

Piwik WordPress plugin for custom variables
Piwik WordPress plugin
Piwik also boasts of other main features like real time visitors, events, segmentation and many others. The Piwik WordPress plugin make it trivial to add specific variables right on the Page edit screen.

We will install Piwik on any site hosting by 2020Media free of charge – no configuration by users is needed.

It’s included free of charge as part of our managed WordPress service, but we’ll also set it up on Drupal, Joomla, Open Journal and almost all other website content mangement systems.

Piwik Selected Reports

We believe the addition of Piwik Analytics gives our customers a useful tool that will help with their website optimisation and ultimately their search engine ranking.

Piwik reports are available in real time via the customer portal ‘Gems’ section.

Disk Usage Reporting

Website disk usage report
Website disk usage report
This new report gives an at a glance assessment of how much space your website is using in relation to it’s quota. Should a site be nearing it’s quota, alerts are sent to customers giving them warning.

Find out more about our webhosting at www.2020media.com

 

 

Domain Names

New top level domain update

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4 Million Milestone Reached

4 million new top level domain
4 million new top level domain

https://ntldstats.com/ reports there are now (just about) 4 million new top level domains registered – that’s more than a lot of country-code top level domains. The big news in the last few days is that .网址 which means .website in Chinese has gained over 1/4 million registrations in just 3 days.

parked-overviewThere is not a great deal of change in the percentage of domains being parked (unused) however.

67 per cent of the new domains are not yet being used for websites.

Some lay the blame for this on the .xyz promotion. This domain, seemingly meaningless, has been heavily promoted by Network Solutions which has registered them to customers free of charge – controversially without asking the customers. Presumably they hope they’ll end up renewing them in a years time.

Parking growth
Parking growth

Find the Perfect Domain

2020Media offers over 100 new top level domains, and additionally offers an aftermarket negotiation service. Get started at http://www.2020media.com/registrar-services, or contact us at http://www.2020media.com/contact

Some of the new top level domain names we offer:

.academy .company .fitness .loans .surgery
.accountants .computer .flights .maison .systems
.agency .condos .florist .management .tax
.associates .construction .foundation .marketing .technology
.bar .contractors .fund .media .tienda
.bargains .cool .furniture .network .tips
.bid .credit .gallery .partners .today
.bike .creditcard .gifts .parts .tools
.boutique .cruises .glass .photography .town
.builders .dating .graphics .photos .toys
.business .deals .gratis .pictures .trade
.cab .dental .gripe .pizza .training
.camera .diamonds .guide .place .university
.camp .digital .guru .plumbing .vacations
.capital .direct .healthcare .press .ventures
.cards .directory .holdings .productions .viajes
.care .discount .holiday .properties .villas
.careers .domains .host .recipes .vision
.cash .education .house .reisen .voyage
.catering .email .immo .rentals .watch
.center .engineering .industries .repair .webcam
.ceo .enterprises .ink .report .website
.cheap .equipment .institute .restaurant .wiki
.church .estate .insure .sarl .works
.city .events .international .schule .wtf
.claims .exchange .investments .services .xyz
.cleaning .expert .kitchen .shoes .zone
.clinic .exposed .land .singles .中文网
.clothing .fail .lease .solar .在线
.club .farm .life .solutions .移动
.codes .finance .lighting .supplies .公司
.coffee .financial .limited .supply .网络
.community .fish .limo .support

Opinion

Church Wi-Fi and 2020media

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“Every church should have Wi-Fi, says Andrew Lloyd Webber”

By Tracey Nolan from Toronto, Canada (Andrew Lloyd Webber - Colour) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Andrew Lloyd Webber
This was the headline today, and reported by The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and The Sun.  Lord Lloyd Webber, who sits as a Conservative member in the House of Lords, indicated that discussions over installing internet for the general public at churches have already taken place with the Government. He said: ”I want to get every church in the country on Wi-Fi. ”Once you do that, the church becomes the centre of the community again.”

This would make churches a more integral part of the community, he says.

It’s caught the imagination of the Twitter flock too:

Church Wi-fi is being discussed on Twitter
Church Wi-fi is being discussed on Twitter

How do Churches go about offering Wi-Fi in a safe and responsible way?

High Performance Cisco Access Points
High Performance Cisco Access Points

The managed Wi-Fi hotspot service from 2020Media offers a solution that provides value for money and internet safety.

Key Features

  • Enterprise principles applied to a small business priced package.
  • Cloud Managed so no expensive on-site visits are necessary.
  • Capture user logon details to provide compliance with UK legislation.
  • Hotspot page fully brandable.
  • Firewall and Traffic Management built-in with local network isolation.
  • Block inappropriate websites at no extra cost.

2020Media has years of experience offering SME internet solutions and has worked with non-profits to get the best possible value for their constituents.

Call us to arrange a no obligation demo, or to find out more about what we can offer. Tel: 0370 321 2020

Other Benefits of Managed Wi-Fi

WiFi with Facebook Login

  • Build Loyalty
    Guests can post a story to their News Feed, showing their friends they visited your location and promoting your organization by virtual word-of-mouth.
  • WiFi with Facebook Login
    Deep integration between the Wi-Fi hotspot and Facebook lets your customers connect to WiFi by checking in on Facebook, using your organization’s Facebook Page as a splash page.

WiFi with Facebook Login gives organizations access to aggregate and anonymous demographic data Facebook provides about visitors.

Location Analytics

  • Use the cloud control panel to compare visitor trends between sites or after launching campaigns, and to find the effect of actions on visitor dwell time or repeat visit frequency. Customize the display to show data for a specific day, weekend, or even trends over a month.

 Contact 2020Media to find out more

Call us to arrange a no obligation demo, or to find out more about what 2020Media can offer. Tel: 0370 321 2020