Monthly Archives: June 2010

Domain Names, Technical

Brusells ICANN Meeting

ICANN Brussels
Promotional items from potential new gTLD applicants

2020Media’s Management team attended the recent ICANN (policy making body for gTLD domains and IP numbers) meeting in Brussels, Belgium. The week long conference is part of ICANN 3 annual worldwide meetings to engage with all internet stakeholders, from representatives of government to non-commercial internet using private individuals.

The main topics for discussion were the release of new gTLD (global top level domain names), and the .xxx domain. The last was rather a moot point as ICANN revealed on the last public discussion that they had taken a decision in principle to approve the application, subject to various caveats. After an independent review which found ICANN’s previous decisions was flawed, the board really had few options left.

New domains like .shop, .canon, .london provoked much more discussion, this time about the various guidelines and rules that ICANN has come up with. ICANN is seeking comment on it’s latest release of the applicant guidebook.

Of note to the technically minded was further steps along the road to secure DNS (DNSSEC) with more top level domain signings. The root zone itself is due to go live in July.

Technical

10 Years of Tomcat

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Apache Tomcat is the world’s most widely used web application server, with over one million downloads per month. Tomcat originated as a Sun Microsystems project, with the goal of providing an example implementation of Sun’s newly created Java Servlet and JSP specifications. Sun developed Tomcat internally through Tomcat 2.x. In 1999, the project was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, where it was developed under the Jakarta project.

Since becoming a separate project in 2005, Tomcat has been developed through version 6.x. The next version of the project, Tomcat 7, is expected sometime in late summer of 2010,  corresponding with the release of Servlet 3, which Tomcat 7 will implement.

2020Media has supported servlet hosting for 11 years now. It was the first to offer shared Tomcat hosting in the UK – before Tomcat, it offered J-Run.

Tips and Tricks

Extending WordPress

Wordpress
Wordpress hosting here!

2020Media has long recommended WordPress as a lot more than a blogging tool. But what else can you do with it? E-commerce is one function many retailers would like to add to their site. A good e-commerce package can also be used as a gallery to generate leads.

One such extension to WordPress is the free and open source Prestashop. Now Prestashop is available as a standalone e-commerce website but if you have a busy website that is already using WordPress, and perhaps leveraging social networking plugins, or a custom template, it makes sense to integrate rather than start afresh.

Prestashop can be loaded as a plugin to WordPress using the plugin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-prestashop/. There’s also a e-commerce plugin written just for WordPress (WP e-Commerce) which offers complete integration with the existing site, although many find this harder to use.

WordPress hosting from 2020Media (www.2020media.com/wordpress) will provide all you need to build  a successful e-commerce website