The gTLD .NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) was the 500th new gTLD to be delegated, with new domains rolling out at an average of one per day.
The New gTLD Program is the Internet’s largest expansion ever, introducing hundreds of new top-level domain names or “strings” which could become available in the next few years. With the first four strings delegated on 23 October 2014, the Program continues to make advancements and enable enhanced competition, innovation and choice.
A few days ago, ICANN updated delegates at the Singapore ICANN meeting, and the video and transcript is available online:
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
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.
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.
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 pluginPiwik 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
Goals
Custom Variables
User Devices
Browser Resolutions
Time of Day Visits
Piwik Dashbaord Overview
Real time map
Page Title report
Referrers overview
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 reportThis 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.
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.
There 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.
There is not a great deal of change in the percentage of domains being parked (unused) however.