Dan Rooke’s Blog

Well there has been much discussion since the landrush period for the new .eu TLD began. By all accounts, it appears as though there have been some underhand practices used to register a large number of domains. Even though EURid, the body overseeing registrations, were made aware of loopholes in the system, it appears as though they were and are still unwilling to take action.

The net result of this is that many valuable .eu domains lie in the hands of unscrupulous people who are more likely than not to be Americans. These domains are now being auctioned for ridculous prices. The domain I was after, rooke.eu, doesn’t appear to have fallen victim to this practice although we have yet to see anything published there other than a holding page.

After talks with GoDaddy’s support team, it appears that once they acknowledge that the domain has been registered by another party, they will refund the registration charge I paid. A simple check on the EURid whois database can confirm that! All in all, it’s been a frustrating experience.

For those of you who didn’t know, the .eu TLD was opened for public domain registrations on Friday 7th. I had wanted to get a hold of the rooke.eu domain as I’ve always wanted a Rooke domain. Looking at all of the other major TLDs proved useless as they are all registered for a good few years to come. The newly introduced .eu TLD was a chance to get a reasonable Rooke name. Read the rest of this entry »

I have now switched to using Wordpress as opposed to pLog (now Lifetype) to run my blog.

This has resulted in a few changes. First off the gallery has gone. Secondly the theme has changed. Thirdly I have some additional static pages available from the navigation at the top of the page.

The switch involved me writing an importer for Wordpress allowing all content to be transferred from pLog seemlessly. You can find more about that on the software page.

Hopefully this will allow me to produce more interesting content - we shall see!

If you weren’t aware, the Buncefield fuel depot explosion knocked out several servers at Northgate Information Solutions’ data centre located close to the site of the blast. The servers affected included those hosting The Labour Party’s and Richer Sounds‘ web sites.

I thought it was a little odd that all backup for these two servers remained on site, and hence unobtainable/possibly destroyed. This has caused problems for both sites getting back on their feet. However, at the time of writing, Richer Sounds’ site is now back up whereas The Labour Party’s is still just a temporary page. A quote from The Register sums things up nicely here:

‘[This] provides us with some kind of lesson in disasterrecovery. If there’s a terrorist attack, nuclear war, avian flupandemic or whatever, who are you going to turn to to sort things out,the people running the country or the hi fi box shifters?’

I was pleased to read a post over on the official Internet Explorer (IE) Blog detailing how the major browser devlopers are beginning to work together to develop some common standards.

The post covers security issues including phishing along with Microsoft’s proposed solution. I believe that this kind of co-operation will be received well by all and should be built upon to bring about the introduction of further standards.

As any web developer will tell you, developing feature rich websites which are cross-browser compatible is not the easiest of tasks. This is due to different methods which are used by each browser resulting in browser quirks. Personally, I would like to see a common rendering engine used by each browser with unique features and user interface built on top of that. This is a long way off, but I believe it would reduce repetition of work, improve user experiences and help develop standards while still allowing each browser to have it’s own identity.

This is a step in the right direction in my book, hopefully the developers will keep working together in future.