The Columbian TLD of “.co” was originally delegated on December 24th, 1991, to the Universidad de los Andes, which is located within Columbia. During 2001, the University explored the exploitation of the domain for commercial purposes, attempting to treat it as just another “.com” domain name.
Due to these actions, and in response, some legal action and activity was taken to prevent this, and the Minister of Communications wrote to the University asking them not to proceed with this course of action.
On February 12th, 2002, the current delegate of the TLD (the university) wrote to ICANN stating that it had “terminated the .CO country-code top-level domain commercialization process and has further decided not to appoint a new registry operator.” It further went on to say that the University was experiencing “great difficulty” in operating .CO in light of the December 2001 council decisions, as well as the legal actions concerning the commercialization.
A little later that same year, in May, the Minister and Vice-Minister of Communications along with the University parties met at ICANN’s offices in Los Angeles, CA to discuss the future administration of the TLD, the meeting was successful and thus allowed the University to keep control of the TLD.
Due to further problems with the University handling the needs of running a TLD, in late 2009 ICANN begun considering handing off the ownership and delegation of the TLD to a more capable and responsible party, and as of early 2010 the TLD is now owned and delegated by the “.CO Internet SAS (“The Concessionaire”)”.
Also, commercial organizations and personal entities may now register domains under the “.co” TLD, as of around this late summer, big companies such as GoDaddy and NameCheap begun allowing anyone to register domains under the TLD again.
This was a brief overview of what happened with the “.co” TLD, you may read the full length IANA article. This is important to the internet community since you could easily accidently mistype a “.co” for a “.com” and be misled or taken to an entirely incorrect website.
Having been in the web development life cycle for many years, I have learned the reality of trying to stick to HTML/XHTML best coding practices, which include being as much W3C compliant as possible, but in the real world, not all web browsers are created equal, that we can only wish!
It is still most beneficial as a programmer to follow a standard flow of key decision choices, that is to keep future modifications and improvements easier and leads to quicker maintenance of your current website’s needs. It can also be easier for people new to your project or site to get acquainted with how its setup in both the front-end and back-end aspects of it.
While being able to have a nice shiny W3C compliant badge, may be cool, it surely does not mean that your site is going to just simply look the exact same in the currently most used web browsers by your visitors, let alone any really older or non-common web browsers.
In fact, having such a badge, and forgetting to check the compliance results from W3C’s online tools, may lead to a negative effect, where the visitor clicks on it, and because you didn’t confirm every page is complaint, one single html, xhtml or css level error will display a nasty non-compliance screen.
That is something you want to avoid, as it makes your site seem as if it was poorly put together, which is most likely not the case at all. As you can see above, even big name sites, do not follow compliance, and may even have hundreds of erroneous reports from online compliance validation tools, while their website looks and functions without any issue.
The best recommendations I have for people is to keep your code as clean and human readable as possible, along with attempting to follow standards as much as you can, and if you need to utilize some non standard, or non compliance code, its fine, go ahead.
Truly, as long as your website fully functions properly for your audiences needs, you are actually ahead of the curve. A lot of sites still to this day have things that do not work in Firefox or Chrome, and only work properly in Internet Explorer, sometimes even specific older version of it.
Another thing to consider is switching your document type, as typically I utilize XHTML with Transitional, meaning some “older” style HTML is allowed, such a table-specific items, this may allow what you were trying to accomplish and might put you that much closer to compliance validation.
Also keep in mind to always cross browser test not just in each web browser, but also in many different (most commonly used/recent) versions, and on different computers, as things like font sizes and generic style sheet rules may surprise you on a certain combination of browser, version and operating system.
Bonus Tip: Different sites will attract different user types, meaning even further potential browser support that you must maintain, you should utilize tools like Google Analytic’s to identify which browsers your visitors are using.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply. Thanks!
The purpose of Facebook (or any social networking site for that matter) is to connect people together. Ask your aunt, your cousin, your neighbor, your pharmacist why he or she has a Facebook account. Undoubtedly, the response will be, to keep in touch with people and learn what they are up to as well as what their likes and dislikes are. So what is the Facebook open social graph and what does it have to do with other websites?
Picture this: you’re on Facebook and you’re scrolling down the news feed. You see someone wished someone else a happy birthday. You see an announcement that someone is moving. You see that someone “likes” a certain website or a certain group of people. Well, before the open social graph came about, Facebook users had to push the “like” button for that website or group of people from within their Facebook account. The open social graph brings that “like” button to you – on many websites other than Facebook.
Here’s an example – the very popular IMDb.com website provides all sorts of data and information about movies. Let’s say you’re looking up the latest blockbuster to find out more about it. You glance to the right of the screen and you see that familiar “like” button from Facebook – although, you’re not on Facebook, you’re on IMDb.com. You click it and you’ve just notified Facebook and all other people who “liked” it that you like it too. Now when you go back to IMDb.com (or any other website that has this feature), you will notice a specific list of your friends from Facebook who have also said they “liked” it as well.
This could work for any website that chooses to have this feature whether it’s an online vitamin store or a national news website. So basically what it’s doing is connecting everyone together outside of the one-dimensional social networking website, Facebook. Basically, any website that chooses to can plug some simple code into their meta data and provide the “like” button on their own website. In essence, the Facebook open social graph brings the interactive qualities of Facebook to any websites that choose to join in with the networking fun.
This is a guest post by Eric Rea. Image taken from blog.joshbarr.com.
There are some major benefits to increasing the speed of your website:
- Google recently announced that your websites response and page load times are now going to be factored into your search engine rankings with them.
- Improve your visitor’s visual experience, by allowing their web browser and your server to handle and process the data in a streamlined way.
- Decreases bandwidth usage and number of simultaneous connections to the server, thus reducing your servers load, allowing you to scale your growing business needs more efficiently
- Faster webpages are proven to lower your bounce rate. If more customers stay, more may convert!
There are several online tools and browsers I use to help assist in identifying what steps I need to take in order to increase my page speed and load times.
The primary one that I use all the time is the Page Speed plugin for Firebug on Firefox, it can perform analysis on any page that you are on, and give you nearly instant details as to what needs to be done, this tool even provides you with some direct SEO tips, along the way.
The Page Speed plugin is made by Google, and it’ll even tell you “Nice job!”, if you have a high score in the mid 90’s or so, once you see that, you’ll know you’re good to go!
Now keep in mind, you absolutely must fully cross browser and user test your site while making specific enhancements, such as the combining of external JavaScript and multiple cascading style sheet (CSS) files, as some of those may need to load in a specific order, or at specific times, and could cause your pages functionality and visuals to need more work, it should not be anything major though.
Another tool I use all the time is the wonderful SmartOptimizer by Ali Farhadi, this PHP tool, allows you to give it a comma separated list of JavaScript (or CSS) files, and it will automatically place them into 1 file, minifying and gzip compressing it, such as:
Those 6 http requests, now get turned into a single line, and a single http request:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/smartoptimizer/?/js/jquery.js,core.js,ajax.js,jquery.ga.js,index_scripts.js,authslider.js"> </script>
Also, with SmartOptimizer automatically minifying and compressing the request as well, your interactive JavaScript will load faster and be available to the website visitor in a quicker time; their browser doesn’t have to wait as long to finish loading the site.
SmartOptimizer’s CSS minifier also will take small-sized images via URLs out of your CSS sheet and actually put the image data directly within the CSS file, thus even furthermore reducing the number of requests your web browser and server have to process.
I’ve seen all of these tools working together, on fairly large projects (websites) reduce the number of calls to clients servers by nearly 50%, sometimes even more, it is very beneficial to your business, customers, and servers!
Bonus Tip:
If I could only do one thing to improve site speed I would turn on gzip compression. Make sure your server admin is at least doing this because it is a major speed gain!
If you have any questions or additional comments, please respond below, thanks!
There is two redirect codes you may use, the most commonly used and effective one is called a “301 Permanent Redirect”, this will tell search engine robots and browsers to permanently remember that the page requested has been permanently moved and is not coming back.
You may also use the “302 Temporarily Moved” redirect, which tells robots and browsers, to forward you to the new temporary page, and do not remember this redirect, instead they will keep trying the page and be redirected until the temporary redirect is removed or is changed to a 301 permanent redirect.
Typically when using a 301 permanent redirect, you will even notice your indexed pages in search engines will update the URL to the new one pretty quickly, usually within a few hours, although sometimes it will be a few days.
Also, if you are redirecting a specific page on your website to a new one, most search engines should preserve your rankings and indexing positions for the page, since you are directly telling it via the redirect that it has been permanently moved, and thus is not duplicate content.
A few requirements:
You’re going to need to know what URL path you want to redirect (whether it be a specific page, a folder (and all its pages), or a whole domain) and where you would like to have the redirect go to.
You’ll also need to know how you plan to handle the redirect, the most common method is via the “.htaccess” file (on Apache web servers), you may also accomplish the same method via a plugin for IIS Web Servers that emulates “.htaccess” file support.
First off, you will need to enable “mod_rewrite” in the “.htaccess” file, via command:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On </IFModule>
By using the IfModule command, you will prevent any ugly “500 Internal Server” errors from displaying, incase that module is not available, although typically it is available and enabled on almost every apache web server by default.
Now for some example redirects that you can utilize in your “.htaccess” file:
[1] Redirect a single page (on the same domain)
Original Page: http://www.example.org/abc/def.html
New Page: http://www.example.org/123/456.html
RewriteRule ^abc/def.html$ /123/456.html [R=301,L]
If you look closely, you will notice we left off the initial forward slash (/) in the first part of the RewriteRule command, and enclosed in what’s called an exact match container (the ^ and $), this tells the web server to only match this exact page to redirect, then the command is followed by the new page, then the type of redirect code to use, in this case it is the “301 permanent redirect”. The “L” means last rule to follow this time.
[2] Redirect a renamed folder (old => new) including all subpages (on same domain)
Old Folder: http://www.example.org/seo-marketing/
New folder: http://www.example.org/search-engine-marketing/
RewriteRule ^seo-marketing/(.*)$ /search-engine-marketing/$1 [R=301,L]
This example will pickup and match any sub file or folder within “/seo-marketing/” on your site, and permanently redirect the robot or browser to the new folder (“/search-engine-marketing/”) with the same exact file or sub folder name.
This is probably the easiest way to rename/move an entire folder on your site to a new one.
[3] How to enforce WWW (to prevent duplicate content, and keep your links clean)
This will redirect anyone who visits your site via just your domain and not via www., to be taken to the www edition of the page, permanently. This prevents duplicate content issues for your SEO rankings and helps keep all your page links very clean.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Make sure you change out “yourdomain.com” for your actual domain, as this is an example, this method preserves the page they wanted too, so they will be taken to the proper page, via the “www” URL.
Additional Methods – You may want to have a script on your website handle a redirect, here’s a few examples written in common web programming languages:
[1] PHP (Linux most common)
<? Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com/some/page" ); ?>
[2] ASP.NET (Windows most common)
<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com");
}
</script>
Again, be sure to edit the URL that you want the redirect to go to.
If you have any questions about an example or a situation that I did not cover, please post it in the comments, and I will get back to you with answer to your question.
The weakest point of most online accounts are their passwords. This potential security threat can become just that much worse if your password is stolen and you happen to use the same password for a lot of different services.
It is hard to memorize good strong passwords which is why they are seldom used.
Ask yourself if your passwords have the following:
- 12 or more characters
- Lowercase
- Uppercase
- Numbers
- Symbols
If the answer was no for most of the above you need to dramatically improve the strength of your passwords, thus making it much harder to be guessed or hacked.
Luckily there is free software to make this easier on you, such as LastPass.com and PassPack.com among many others.
These allow you to securely store your passwords, and you only need a single master password to decrypt and access your information. Make sure it is a good one though or you will defeat the purpose.
Once you have software like LastPass in place you can start using very secure passwords for all of your accounts.
How do you remember quality passwords:
Step 1: color: yellow
Step 2: symbol: *
Step 3: noun: horse
Step 4: number: 138
Step 5: capitalize one letter: H
Final Password: yellow*Horse138
By doing the password this way you will find you can actually remember it and it is very secure.
How often do you change passwords?
It is highly recommended that you change passwords of importance, atleast once every 3 months, consider making it even more frequently if the data related to the account is of any value to anyone.
Own a website? Ask your server admin when the last time your key server passwords were changed? You may be surprised. You really should make a list of important passwords to change and set an email reminder to change them every few months. Quickbooks, Email, Bank, Server, Paypal, Credit Cards..you get the idea.
Most people do not start thinking about password security until it is too late. Nothing shuts down business like your company bank account or server being compromised. So act now and save yourself the trouble.
Bonus Tip:
The best password in the world is no good if the security questions (for password recovery) is way too easy. In what city were you born? Anyone can find that out! Make sure to write a custom security question whenever possible or at least pick the one hardest to guess.
