Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

One of the surprising things is how naff many computer shops are when you’re looking for something even marginally out of the ordinary.

We decided to upgrade the maps on the listings sites a while back and when I saw the prices being asked for what was, in almost all cases, a fairly primitive map for use online I figured that the best route would be to buy a graphics pad and run up custom maps myself. After all, they’re not particularly intricate for the most part but with custom maps it would be nice to be able to add special features to the maps – points of particular interest for example.

So off I went to untold numbers of computer shops and the best that they could come up with was a fairly naff A5 pad at best and in most cases just the A6 version which is rather small to be drawing maps on.

In reality there’s only one graphics pad to go for and that’s the Wacom Intuos range yet not one single computer shop had them so I ended up ordering from Amazon.

Google’s widespread dropping to zero of the pagerank of sites that accepted payment for links has kicked off quite a debate on the issue on various sites including their own webmaster blog.

For technical reasons, they would much prefer that all links between sites on the Internet are purely for altruistic reasons with no payment or other persuasion used. That was, to some extent, the case when Google Inc started up and when the initial university research project that led to the creation of Google Inc began but that’s eons ago in Internet time.

As we all know, the Internet is full of commercial sites these days with numerous sites selling everything from books to bookings for holidays. With this in mind many personal sites are approached by commercial ones asking for a link and offering money for it. Sure, there are commercial sites that ask for a link with no money on offer, but they don’t usually get too far unless they particularly stand out from the crowd in some way.

And then there are various types of directories that abound these days. I have a particular interest in the accommodation directories in that I run several of them myself. Much as I never considered these as selling links (and my sites don’t) it would seem that in Google’s eyes even the likes of Gites de France is selling links. After all, they charge something like EUR 1000 per year for a listing and isn’t that just selling a link?

Sure, GdF and the many other accommodation listings sites have a lot of text around that link but at the end of the day, how is that different from a blog that accepts sponsored posts?

1and1 have something of a reputation of making it difficult to transfer domains away from them and rightly so as no matter how much you look around their website, you’ll not find how to do it.

It’s actually fairly easy once you find the site that you need to do it from.

1. login to your 1and1 account and unlock the domains that you want to transfer (you’ll find the unlock option on clicking the info tab on your domain management screen);
2. it’s a good idea to change the name servers at this point to point to those of your new hosting service and, of course, to upload your site to it’s new location if you’ve not done that already;
3. if you’re using whois privacy you’ll need to disable that before proceeding; 
4. register the domain with your new registrar and acknowlodge the request when you receive the e-mail (this is sent to the e-mail address recorded for your domain so check that it’s correct by looking up the domain on whois);
5. go to the 1and1 contracts site and cancel the parts of the contract referring to the domains that you want to transfer (set the cancellation options to “as soon as possible” and “on “change provider”;
6. acknowledge the e-mail that 1and1 will now send you.

OK, so it’s a bit convuluted but once you know the address of the 1and1 contracts site at least you can do it.

How long does it take? It’ll take you about 15 minutes to work through all that plus a few minutes per additional domain. The transfer itself can take anything from a few hours to several days.

I’ve been moving my domains away from their previous host and now have all the easy ones moved over.

Stage two is starting as you read this and involves re-registering the domains with the new registrar.

The snag is that there’s obviously a period when things are in limbo between the two so the idea is to reduce the extent of that as far as possible. You can pretty much eliminate that limbo stage if you take care in the move and do it in three parts.

1. setup the domain on the new hosting service and load all the HTML, databases and whatnot (add a little note to yourself on the homepage of the domain to the effect that it’s on the new host);
2. login to the old registrar and set the name servers to point to the new host;
3. initiate the domain transfer to the new registrar and setup the nameservers to point to the new host.

If you follow the three steps, the transfer should be seamless which is why in step one it’s handy to add a note to the homepage so that you know the transfer has happened.

I say, “should be” seamless because, of course, chances are that the software on the new hosting service isn’t exactly the same as on the old one. Typically, I get caught out by my use of globals in PHP and I nearly always forget to set the relevant option which has somewhat peculiar effects on the sites. To avoid this, it’s best to have a test domain which you can try out on the new host before moving over the live sites.

One of the perennial problems that you have when trying to use information from someone else’s database is that they never code the information in quite the same way.

If the external database is one from an unrelated company on the Internet then the only way around that is to create a little translation routine or, if you’re lucky and it’s only the names that are different, a translation table.

From a purely practical point of view, the table is the way to go if that can be accomplished and that’s what I’ve done in stage one of the roll-out of the integration of a propery feed for my listings sites. Simple things such as my use of the proper name for the Algarve (ie “Faro”) whereas they use the more popular “Algarve” are easy to allow for like this and indeed just doing that this morning as bumped up the percentage of information that I’ve been able to include quite considerably.

Why not just rename things in my own database? I could do that at the moment but the problem is that I intend to integrate other databases in due course to improve the coverage of my own site and at some point I’ll need to be able to translate terms as there’s no common usage of terms across the various databases that I’m looking for.

Where things get much more difficult is if the basic structure of the information provided by the external system is radically different from that which your own system uses and then you can potentially be talking of quite a bit of work. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way around this.