Here at AUSWEB we have a huge number of users running WordPress websites from personal blogs, to business oriented websites and even us here on the AUSWEB Blog!
Thanks to the huge community of WordPress users there exists a huge pool of custom scripting, plugin and theme/design resources out there for you to add various features to your blog. Often overlooked however are some of the more recent in-built features for WordPress such as shortcodes which allow you to easily call php functions within your posts, thus saving time by speeding up repeated tasks.
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Blogging, CMS, Scripting & Coding, Web Development, Wordpress
API, Blog, Blogging, CMS, php, shortcodes, Wordpress
The 404 Not Found error page is probably the most common error most web users will come across. Most designers and webmasters however, often choose to leave the default settings for these error pages, resulting in the generic unimaginative 404 Not Found error text we’ve all seen many times.
These basic error pages are automatically served up by the web server. However, if you prefer you can create and edit custom error pages from your cPanel. Once logged in you will see the option for “Error Pages”, which will let you easily manage and edit all your available error pages.
There are many roads to take, from the stylistic approach, matching the aesthetics of your site’s design, the informative, with custom search or suggestion options for where the visitor should be looking or even taking the humorous route with custom images, it’s all up to your imagination. The folks over at CSS-Tricks have compiled a handy guide with several ideas and tips for adding a little extra flair on your site, head on over to their 404 Best Practices post for some ideas!
HTML, Scripting & Coding, Web Browsers, cPanel
404, Apache, cPanel, css, HTML, Not Found, scripting, web server
If you’ve ever had those times when your website or emails are just not working how they should, the first thing you can do to see where the problem possibly resides is to get a DNS report on your domain.
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DNS, Domain Names, Domains
DNS, Domain Names, ip address, MX records, name servers, reporting tools
What is Greylisting?
Greylisting is a new method of blocking significant amounts of spam at the mailserver level, but without resorting to heavyweight statistical analysis or other heuristical (and error-prone) approaches. Consequently, implementations are fairly lightweight, and may even decrease network traffic and processor load on your mailserver.
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Email, Security, Spam Protection
greylisting, mailserver, Spam Protection, spamassassin, spamdyke
Miscrosoft’s new search engine Bing has generated another successive week of healthy buzz, with usage in Australia leading the way. The numbers creating all the buzz come from online metrics firm ComScore.
According to ComScore “Bing continued to increase its position” throughout the week of June 8 with usage interest mainly coming from Australia, with India and China not far behind.
It does look like the service has successfully passed the tentative launch stage and decent numbers of users are giving it a try. Good news for Microsoft you might say as the search market (ie. Google), has been one of the bigger mistakes made by the boys at Redmond.
Only time will tell and of course the quality of Bing’s search algorithm, if search leader Google should be worrying about any market shifts out there. As always though, extra competition is always a good thing and testing the variety of a few search results on both services might lead to some interesting results! Give it a try here: Bing
Search, Web Browsers
bing, Google, Microsoft, Search Engine, SEO
More helpful tips for all you web designers and developers out there. Google has recently introduced a tool called Page Speed which tests a web page based on a set of rules and best coding practices for fast-loading websites. It then gives you advice on what you can improve to make your website faster. It works as an add-on to Firefox and needs the Firebug extension (mentioned in our last post) to work.
Google’s new service is uncannily similar to Yahoo’s YSlow tool, another add-on for Firefox (with Firebug) which tests web page code based on fast-loading criteria and gives suggestions accordingly. Funnily enough Steve Souders the guy who created the first version of YSlow, now works for Google, although his involvement on the project if any is unknown. Of course more options are always a good thing and both services might offer valuable advice for improving the speed of your website.
Plugins, Scripting & Coding, Web Design, Web Development
firebug, firefox, Google, optimization, page speed, performance, tools, Web Development, webmaster, yahoo, yslow
For both the budding and seasoned web designers out there, here is a list of 20 useful tools that will make your life as a coder/designer a little easier and hopefully give your website that winning touch over the competition.
From in-browser CSS/HTML coding plugins such as FireBug for Firefox, to sites like IconFinder that will help you find exactly the right icon graphic for your needs, or the excellent FontBurner for embedding custom fonts in your site, there is bound to be something useful for everyone!
Plugins, Scripting & Coding, Web Design, Web Development
css, design, guides, HTML, Plugins, scripting, tutorials
One of the most common descriptive notes people have to write using text when they post links or images to blogs, comments or anywhere in HTML is to say “this link is not safe for work” or simply “NSFW”. By adding the <NSFW> tag, this could be made much simpler and standardized. Browsers could then have an option to automatically hide all <NSFW> content. A tag is preferred to an attribute since it could then also be used around content and not just links.
Examples:
<nsfw><a href=”http://www.example.com”>Pics here!</a></nsfw>
<nsfw><img src=”badkitten.jpg”></nsfw>
The use of tags (rather than CSS and JavaScript) to hide or show content is an intriguing and controversial aspect of HTML 5. It’s intriguing because using a standard tag—instead of writing custom CSS and JavaScript that someone else may someday have to maintain—potentially simplifies web development and maintenance, bringing advanced techniques of content presentation to more sites for less money. It’s controversial because it sticks presentation and behavior back in markup, after we all just spent a decade separating site structure and semantics from behavior and presentation.
Taken from: zeldman.com
News, Scripting & Coding
HTML, HTML5, NSFW, Tags, Web Standards
With Apple’s latest WWDC developer conference event held earlier this week, most of their announcements were of course overshadowed by news of the latest iPhone 3GS. Amidst some other major announcements such as Mac OSX SnowLeopard, and some shiny new MacBook Pro’s, Apple also released the latest version of their Safari web browser. Bringing it up to version 4, along with the status of “the fastest browser in the world”.
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News, Software, Web Browsers, Web Design, Web Development
apple, browser, Chrome, CoverFlow, firefox, javascript, safari
Latest reports are that retail giant Woolworths have recently contracted Watpac Construction to build a new datacentre facility in Sydney’s Eastern Creek district. The project’s cost is currently estimated at $50 million and the new facility will house three data halls.
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News
datacenter, watpac, woolworths
An increasing number of Australian Internet users are growing wise to Stephen Conroy’s ill-thought $44.5M Internet Censorship experiment, but spare a thought for net users in China. Millions of school children are currently the first to test China’s latest innovation in mass censorship technology, compulsory filtering software installed on every computer!
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology instructed Chinese schools to install the censorship technology by the end of May and will also be enforcing that computer makers install the software on each computer sold in China from July 1st.
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News
censorship, filtering, firewalls
A fair few people know what DNS lookups are, Even without having to work in the IT industry. It basically converts the pretty, familliar and easy to understand (for us) “www.domain.com” into an IP Address, which computers can understand and direct traffic to.
The Image below is from Verisign, and to make the understanding a bit easier, it ignores the process of caching.
Image source: Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, June 2007 (PDF), last page.
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Domains, PHP Applications, Science & Tech
DNS, Domain Name, Lookups
Verisign recently published it’s quarterly domain report – “The Domain Name Industry Brief“.
As to be expected from a report dealing with numbers of that size, the latest report is a little on the boring side for the average person, with a lot data and statistics to wade through.
So we’ve picked some of the more interesting figures, which you can see below!
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Domains, Web Hosting News
Domain Names, Verisign
Recently we made a post about our new cloud computing infrastructure and the hardware we were using to build such a platform. Well, our servers have been delivered and we are in stage two of this set-up which is the install and configuration of the ‘cloud’.
As previously discussed, we have purchased a number of the new Dell PowerEdge R710 servers, and we have since configured these in the data centre and commenced the complex process of getting these servers working in unison. The reason why this stage is so important, is because this is the base building blocks of our cloud. These machines will be doing the hard work of computing the extreme amounts of data we intend on pushing through the cloud. They will also be configured so that in the case that one server (Server A) was to fail or go offline, there would be no downtime for the end user, The other servers (Server B, C & D) in the cloud would compensate and manage the tasks that server A was doing. The data would autonomously be mirrored across the active servers, in the case that another server was to fail. The way that the servers do this, is via a backbone gigabit network.
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News, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Ausweb, Cloud Computing, Dell
