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

Latest new top level domain name report

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Neustar, Inc. have released a report using New gTLD data to give a breakdown by industry category:

Neustar's new guide: The FAQs of New TLDs
From Neustar’s new guide: The FAQs of New TLDs

Industry landscape overview

There are a total of 1751 new TLD applications, comprised of brands (635), generics (1060), and geographies (56). More than half of all brand TLDs fall into financial and technology verticals. Furthermore, 41% of brand TLDs were applied for by Fortune 500 companies, mostly in financial services, retail, technology and transportation.

You can download the full report here new-tld-faqs

Will Switching Confuse My Customers?

Website owners concerned that switching to an untried domain will lose their search engine ranking need not be concerned.

Popular start-up tech publication Tech Cocktail recently switched from using its keyword inclusive URL techcocktail.com to a shorter name: tech.co. As shown below, it sustained all of its original search rankings
with the new .co extension, and it continues to rank #1 for “Tech Cocktail” in search

tech-cocktailAccording to Jeff Neuman, Vice President, Registry Services at Neustar, a .brand TLD may in fact decrease customer confusion across the globe:
“Today, brands are securing a large portfolio of domain name extensions depending on where in the world their website is accessed. While .com is prominent in the U.S., brands also use a number of country-specific
extensions like .ca in the Canada and .cn in China. Combined names like .com.au and .co.uk make an even more complicated experience for global customers and brands”.

Contact Domain Name Experts

2020Media is an experienced domain name registrar – we can help you make the right choice in the new domain name space.  Review our registrar services and contact us with your questions.

Opinion

Become a Joomla Guru

JoomlaDay UK 2014 is announced for October 4th and 5th 2014

If you are new to Joomla! you are going to love Joomla! Day 2014. And if you are an expert you’ll love it even more!

joomla_day_2014

Come and join us in Ascot on 4th and/or 5th October radically to expand your knowledge of Joomla! whatever your level, meet loads of like-minded Joomla! users, and have a great party if the mood takes you.

Two full days of sessions, workshops, and most importantly opportunities to network and socialise with other Joomla fans from the UK and further afield.

Get up to date with new features planned for Joomla 3.4, discover tips and tricks from the experts, and further your knowledge.

The website for the event is live at joomladay.co.uk, where you can buy tickets and plan your program.

Book now for an early bird discount, and put 4th and 5th October in your diary!

By popular demand we are holding the event at The Sunningdale Park Hotel in Ascot, just outside London. It was mentioned as a plus point on many reviews last year because it is a great hotel, the conference facilities are to international standard, the huge dining room and party facilities are on site and in short it offers the best networking possibilities you can imagine. Lastly, it is easy to get to … just off the M25, M3 and M4, and near a railway station.

Here’s to the best JoomlaDay UK yet!

For more on Joomla, see our website. http://www.2020media.com/shared-hosting/joomla-hosting

Domain Names

dotLondon Launch process

We’re often asked how the .LONDON domain registration process works.

Dot_London_Logo_CMYKUntil 31st July 2014, .LONDON is in Launch phase. This gives trademark holders and Londoners a priority right.

Here are the 4 priorities, in descending order.

  1. Sunrise – Applicants with a trade mark recorded in the official Trademark Clearing House.
  2. London Priority 1 – Applicants with a London address AND with rights for a matching domain name. Eligible rights are
    • Registered trademarks effective in the UK
    • Unregistered trademarks with use in London prior to 1 April 2014
    • Registered names of companies and charities registered prior to 1 April 2014
    • Personal (full) Names
  3. London Priority 2 – Applicants with a London address for any domain name
  4. London Priorty 3 – Applicants without a London address for any domain name.

If a right is claimed in a given priority, then the lower rights do not apply. If more than claim is reached in any priority, an auction will be held. Within a given priority (eg London priority 1) there is no particular order of rights – all are deemed equal.

Claims are validated – applicants will be emailed directly by the validation agent (admin@validation.london)  so do not ignore these emails!

Deadline July 31 2014
Deadline July 31 2014

Applications run until 31st July 2014- Apply here: http://2020.sc/7fR

 

Tips and Tricks

Best of both worlds

WordPress Migrations

As a well known WordPress hosts, we are often asked to migrate sites from WordPress.com to self-hosted wordpress. Thanks to the tools available this is a painless process, at least to copy the posts and pages. But sometimes clients want to keep the site looking exactly the same and this is not always straightforward.

WordPress.com runs on a pretty standard WordPress platform, but it offers it’s users a number of themes and plugins built in (you cannot install your own choice of theme or plugin in WordPress.com – hence the reason websites outgrow WordPress.com)

So migrating a theme or plugin functionality can be an involved process. So far I’ve found the themes that are available to WordPress.com users have an equivalent version available for hosted WordPress at wordpress.org/themes, sothis it not normally too much of a problem – just re-adding the theme specific options.

However the plugin functionality –  which users may not even realise are plugins, so well integrated are they in the WordPress.com experience – is more difficult to move.

Jetpack to the rescue!

Jetpack web page
Jetpack

This is where Jetpack comes into play. Jetpack is a plugin collection maintained by WordPress that replicates the functionality of WordPress.com. For migrations from WordPress, nothing is copied across so each function will have to be setup from scratch, and the admin usage is often different to  how users remember it in WordPress.com. We recently migrated www.cfliteraryawards.org.uk to our WordPress hosting and this involved replicating various functions that without Jetpack would have been a major headache.

WordPress Gallery Plugin

The other difficulty with using JetPack is that it is so big! It’s like a Swiss army knife of plugins, and sometimes it’s only one feature you want to replicate. In www.geolida.co.uk, we wanted to jazz up the image galleries, and the different sized tiles gallery style appealed. This style is also known as Masonry style. We also wanted the existing ease of gallery use built into WordPress to continue – many of the WordPress gallery plugins use a separate management area which we thought would be confusing to the site owner.

Jetpack holds the answer to this with Tiled Galleries. However, this was the only function of JetPack that we wanted to add to the site – not the 27 other functions! We therefore turned to this plugin, which is just did the Tiled Galleries and nothing else. This is the same code as used in Jetpack, just extracted and packaged as a single function plugin. All WordPress plugins listed on the WordPress site are GPL licences which allows and encourages reuse of code. This worked seamlessly and our client was very pleased with the result:

The only drawback is the possibility that the person who released this cut-down version of Jetpack will give up maintaining it – Jetpack is updated every now and again and as with all WordPress plugins it’s very important to kee them up to date – bad things can happen otherwise!

2020Media’s managed WordPress service is used by many of our WordPress hosting customers so they have peace of mind that their website remains safe and secure at all times.

Domain Names

ICANN50 by the numbers

2020media presents a special infographic called ICANN50 by the numbers.

icann50-by-the-numbers
icann50 by the numbers

The ICANN meeting held in London from Saturday 21 to Thursday 26 June 2014 was the largest ever ICANN meeting and was the first ever in the UK.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions. Originally, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and other entities performed these services under U.S. Government contract. ICANN now performs the IANA function.
 
Notes on Stats