The most recent articles from Personal Computer World

Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router

Will Stapley — 2009-07-03T09:00:00.000Z

Will Stapley, Personal Computer World, Friday 3 July 2009 at 09:00:00

Fast speeds when channel bonding, but no 5GHz mode

Buffalo’s latest router is a sleek-looking device, aimed at cable broadband users, since it has no built-in ADSL modem.

It is surprising that the WZR-HP-G300NH doesn’t feature a 5GHz 802.11n mode, relying on the more congested 2.4GHz spectrum only. But we still experienced some decent speeds during testing.

When using the router with Buffalo’s Wireless-N USB adapter, we transferred a 349MB file in 63 seconds, giving a throughput of 44Mbits/sec.

Switching the channel bonding mode on, the same file transferred in just 33 seconds (an impressive 85Mbits/sec), however your neighbours won’t thank you for hogging two wireless channels. These speeds were achieved at close range, and when we moved to around 30m away speeds dropped to under 15Mbits/sec, which is still respectable.

Buffalo has furnished the WZR-HP-G300NH with a few useful extras, including a Bittorrent client that allows for peer-to-peer downloads requiring a PC to be switched on. To use this feature, you will need to attach some form of storage to the USB port at the rear of the router. Once attached, the router will also function as a basic network-attached server (Nas) device.

A switch on the front of the router lets you turn the Movie Engine mode on. Essentially a quality of service (QoS) feature, this prioritises media traffic to reduce the likelihood of video stuttering. However, we had no trouble streaming HD video through the router, whether the setting was enabled or not.

There’s plenty to like about Buffalo’s latest router, but it’s rather disappointing it can’t manage 802.11n on the less-cluttered 5GHz spectrum.

Low-cost no-brainer websites for small firms

Kelvyn Taylor — 2009-05-18T18:06:00.000Z

Kelvyn Taylor, Personal Computer World, Monday 18 May 2009 at 18:06:00

£9.99 a month with free .uk domain and design aids

Internet service provider 1&1 has just launched a low-cost website creation service for micro-businesses.

Aimed at companies with five or less employees that lack the resources or know-how to design their own websites, the 1&1 MyBusiness Site offers intelligent template-based sites tailored to over 100 small business sectors.

The service costs £9.99 (ex. VAT) per month, with no set-up fee, and includes a free .uk domain and 10 email addresses. There are no limits on web pages or traffic.

The websites include feedback forms, location maps, product catalogues and photo galleries where relevant, but do not yet include e-commerce facilities. That should be available in future versions of the product, 1&1 chief executive Oliver Mauss told a press briefing.

A five-day free trial is available to anyone with no need to register any payment details. During the signup process, a series of questions about your business are used to create the initial website from a large template library.

These designs can be easily modified later using simplified web-based tools, and pages are pre-filled with editable boilerplate text. The whole focus of the product is on ease of use, with technical details kept to a minimum.

With this new product, 1&1 is trying to tap into the vast market of almost 4.5m UK businesses with between 0-9 employees (2007 data).

Ordnance Survey offers free use of map data

Clive Akass — 2009-05-15T13:15:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Friday 15 May 2009 at 13:15:00

About-turn follows years of criticism over restrictions on publically owned data

Britain’s Ordnance Survey (OS) mapping agency is making its data freely available in a major about-turn caused partly by increased competition from the likes of Google Maps.

It has launched an enhanced portal, OS Openspace, which allows businesses, government organisations and individuals to use and application programming interface (API) to use data on sites and other media.

The site includes sample Java code that can be incorprated into web pages and for the first time boundary information on areas such as wards, boroughs, constituencies is freely available.

An ‘innovation network’ called Geovation has been set up to allow OS users develop ideas, collaborate and get financial backing.

Also OS co-ordinates, which are owned by the organisation, can now be used in GPS systems – something that should result in fewer people getting lost when walking across countryside.

Ordnance Survey, which has it roots in 18th century military survey projects, gave Britain some of the best and best-loved maps in the world. But it has been widely criticised for charges and restrictions on use of its data since 1999 when it was set up as a so-called Trading Fund, which meant that it had to pay its way like a business.

It was widely perceived as having a monopoly on UK geographical data, though this position has been undermined by DIY sites such as OpenStreetMap and PeoplesMap that allow you to build maps from aerial photos.

A government review last month, called the Trading Funds Assessment, outlined a strategy for creating simpler and easier access to geographic data, though it concluded that the quality of OS data was more likely to be maintained using a commercial model rather than through public funding.

This means the OS still needs to fund itself. So users will have to pay for the use of data from which they are then directly making money, for instance by charging for a service. And sites getting more than a threshold number of visitors will incur charges – see the OS site for details.

The new strategy is unlikely to settle one irritation. Local authorities are unable to superimpose on to Google maps OS-based information on the location of local facilities. The reason, according to an OS spokesman, is that Google claims the right to reproduce any such information freely worldwide – effectively taking ownership of it. “We don’t have that problem with Microsoft maps,” said the spokesman.

Mr Site Takeaway Website Beginner website builder

Tom Royal — 2009-03-13T10:00:00.000Z

Tom Royal, Personal Computer World, Friday 13 March 2009 at 10:00:00

A simple website in a box that is ideal for novices

For many people the process of buying a domain name and building a website to go with it is so simple as to be second nature. What these people tend to forget, though, is that for the rest of the population the whole business of domains, hosting and page creation can be baffling. Mr Site has been selling ‘in a box’ websites to novices for some time now, and has recently released this newer, cheaper edition.

Takeaway Website Beginner can be purchased online or in a box. The whole process of making the site is done online, but the box includes a CD of handy free software and, most importantly, a clear

92-page manual.

Building a site is, appropriately, easy. After entering the activation code you’re prompted for some personal details, and then asked to choose a .com domain name. Having done this you can start building the site. Mr Site sets this out as a six-step process that begins with choosing a design. There are more than 100 to choose from, ranging from the slightly gaudy to the pleasingly inoffensive. With this done you can simply add pages, type or copy in some text, and publish the result in seconds although, as always, it will take a day or two for your new .com name to start working.

There’s a surprising abundance of advanced options, from editing HTML code to adding Google Analytics tracking should you wish, or it’s easy to add a simple gallery, blog or discussion forum. You are, however, limited to just five pages and 75MB of storage for your website files.

Overall, Mr Site Beginner does what it sets out to do well. It’s simple to use and, at £20 for the first year and £1.69 per month thereafter, it is reasonably priced. For absolute beginners, it’s easy to recommend.

Hands on: Costs of browsing the mobile web

Nigel Whitfield — 2008-10-27T10:00:00.000Z

Nigel Whitfield, Personal Computer World, Monday 27 October 2008 at 10:00:00

The choice of a light page layout to keep download costs low

Browsing on mobile phones has become much better in recent years, with quite a few phones making a decent stab at downloading pages and rendering them on a small screen.

But there are still data charges for downloads; while you can pay £15 for 3GB of downloaded data at home, venture across the channel and you’ll pay a few pounds per megabyte - hundreds of times the cost of downloading the same information a few miles away, via a network that in all probability is owned by the same company as the one you use in the UK.

As a web designer, you can probably help by detecting common mobile browsers and using a different style sheet, or even not sending graphics. A page from The Guardian’s website, even using the subscription no-ads version, can still amount to 600-800KB of data.

And surprisingly, turning off the loading of images in the browser doesn’t save a huge amount more. A mobile browser image on Barcelona’s bars still clocked up over 400KB to download. With roaming charges of a few pounds per megabyte, neither of those two screens is cheap.

If your pages are generated on the fly by scripts or a CMS, it’s worth checking the User Agent, or simply offering people the choice of a ‘light’ page layout.

However, The Guardian’s no-ads option still shows travel services, sponsored features and other material in the right-hand column of the pages, which may be tolerable at home, but costs more when you’re roaming abroad. The same is true for large chunks of Javascript.

If you’ve been caught out by high bills for roaming, don’t just grumble - use them as a spur to make sure your own site isn’t doing the same to other people.

For all articles on web development click on the tag below

Hands on: Foreign characters

Ngel Whitfield — 2008-10-27T10:00:00.000Z

Ngel Whitfield, Personal Computer World, Monday 27 October 2008 at 10:00:00

Dealing with letters that have accents and diacritical marks in assorted languages

A particular problem affecting websites is letters that have accents and diacritical marks in assorted languages.

One site I work with has a member directory for a professional organisation. The version on the site shouldn’t really go by a name as grand as a database; it’s essentially a text file, in CSV format, that has been exported from a database in someone’s office and uploaded to the website.

A form on the site allows people to specify what they’re searching for - name, city and so on - and then a Perl script reads through the text file, spitting out an HTML page header, followed by nicely formatted information for the matching entries.

It does the job, but as there are more and more international members, there’s a need to make sure that their names are not only presented correctly on the web page but can be found by searching too.

The first issue is solved by a search and replace each month, swapping single characters in Word for the matching HTML equivalents. For example, ö is changed to ö, and where someone searches for a result that includes that character in, say, the address, then it’s displayed OK.

But how do they search for a name with a foreign character? That needs the script changing to look for the appropriate entity. In PHP that’s a trivial thing to do, with specialised functions that work in both directions, and in Perl a little magic with regular expressions should do the trick.

There’s another problem, though. A lot of words become Anglicised, and with a city such as Paris it makes no difference to the spelling. With others it does - Zurich and Zürich.

You probably need to be consistent when you enter information; either always Anglicise foreign town names, or never. In this case, that means persuading the keepers of the database to change lots of information, which isn’t always possible.

My first instinct is to say, “Stick it all in a proper database.” MySQL can take the data and foreign characters, and PHP can manage the translations to and from HTML entities.

But what about the searching? There are ‘soundex’ functions in both PHP and MySQL that will help with finding words that sound similar, but tools such as that tend to be based on English pronunciation. So, if any readers have a solution, I’d love to hear from you. How can you ensure that all the people in Zurich can be found, however the search term is spelt? And how would you deal with spellings as different as Cologne and Köln?

For all articles on web development click on the tag below

Make your website work

Nigel Whitfield — 2008-03-06T00:00:00.000Z

Nigel Whitfield, Personal Computer World, Thursday 6 March 2008 at 00:00:00

Nigel Whitfield explains everything you need to know about building a website but were afraid to ask

One thing often said about the internet is that it’s egalitarian, in that anyone can set up a site or start an online store, and compete with everyone else.

Of course, in real life, things are a little more complex than that. While you might have been able to set up a site back in the mid-1990s and take on established brand names – in the way, for example, that Amazon appeared and became one of the most common ways of buying books and CDs – it’s less simple now.

Of course there will still be the occasional success story but, while it may be true that anyone can create a website and get it online, it takes a lot more than that to make it successful, well known, and able to cope with all the visitors it might get.

We’ll explain what you need to know about setting up or revamping a website, and look at some of the tools and technologies that will help you, whether it’s for a business, a community, or just to show off your new-found skills.

Website woes

So you want a better website? Chances are, if you’re on the internet, you have some web space – it often comes free with an ISP’s package and there are plenty of other ways to get a space of your own, such as the free hosting services offered by Yahoo Geocities, Google’s Blogger, or even as basic as creating landing pages (profiles) for yourself on Myspace or Facebook.

But these basic options have drawbacks – set yourself up on Facebook and other people can only find out about you if they sign up too. Similarly, some features on Myspace can only be used by members and, regardless of your views, many people may simply think “I’m not going to sign up just to look at Fred’s info”.

Free web-hosting services, while providing a page that anyone can look at without signing up to something, have their drawbacks too. Those can include pop-ups, over which you may have no control, a less than distinctive URL, and restrictive traffic limits and/or content controls.

These mean any site that becomes too popular may end up greeting users not with your finely crafted home page, but with a message that access has been suspended for a time because the site became too busy, perhaps because Digg or Slashdot users found it interesting.

Sometimes all it takes is word of mouth for that to happen, and suddenly your hilarious animation or song sample gets so many hits that the site goes offline. There may be other restrictions too; for instance, free space may be limited by size, so there isn’t enough space to store all your music clips or videos. You can pop them on other download sites, but then visitors find the experience confusing.

Or you may fall foul of small print in your contract stopping you from using free web space for business, or for the small political party you’re planning to launch.

When it comes down to it, while it has probably never been easier to get a basic web page of some description online, even if it’s just a basic personal profile, whether you’re using a social networking site like Facebook, or free space with your internet access, once you want to do anything more than the basics, it’s time to seriously consider your options.

In fact, even if you’re starting out, if you have an idea for a website and you think it might grow, it’s best to plan for the future. You might not think you need a domain name for your site, for instance, but if it takes off, it’ll be a lot simpler for users if the name or web address doesn’t change after a few months.

Similarly it’s worth researching other things too, to see how they’ll cope with growth – pick a simple-to-configure forum, and you may get up and running quickly now, but face a major headache if you have to migrate hundreds or thousands of users to different forum software when the site is busier.

What’s in a website?

So what do you want your website to do, and what do you need to make it do that? First things first, you need hosting – a web server that will store your pages and make them available to the rest of the internet. For all but the most trivial of sites, you need a suitable domain name of your own, too, so that people can find the site easily.

You need the site itself – and that could be anything from a collection of basic HTML pages to a more sophisticated database-driven site, packed with interactivity, or a multimedia extravaganza, with video clips, audio and the latest Web 2.0 features.

To put all that together, you’ll need the appropriate tools to create and manage all the web content – unless you go down the route of paying someone else to create the site for you.

If you’re making the leap from a simple site hosted on your ISP’s free web space, or on a free service, it might be tempting to sign up for a cheap hosting deal or grab a domain right away and then buy web-design software. But don’t do that just yet. All the decisions you need to make are interlinked and will impact on each other.

It’s far better to plan and decide how you want to build your site than to just grab what looks like a good deal, only to discover further down the road that it’s not suitable for what you want, leading to more expense and hassle.

At the most basic level – and this is something we’ll come back to later – the choice between Linux and Windows operating systems for a hosting server can have a massive impact on how easy it will be to use particular technologies for a website. All these questions have answers, though they might be different for each site.

Ultimately, they come back to the first thing you need to ask yourself about your website – what’s it for? Do you want to share information with people and tell them about yourself or your products? Or do you want to use a site to run a business, allowing people to request information or buy things online? Are you hoping to build a community where people can share information or experiences with each other?

From these basic questions flow others. How often will information need to be updated? Will you need to keep track of users? Will the site need to accept online transactions? Who’s going to design it? Or keep it up to date? How often will it change? How will people find your site? What would make the site a success – lots of visitors, or a few visitors who return regularly, or new contacts for work?

At its simplest, if your aim is a site that’s largely informational and won’t change, then your choice is easy – you can use just about any hosting service, and just about any web design tool – even, if you’re strapped for cash, knocking up the pages in Microsoft Word or Open Office – to create a set of static pages that you can upload from your PC to the website, refreshing the site each time you make a change.

It's pretty much the same as doing a simple home page in your ISP’s space, but with proper third-party hosting. But if you’re reading this article, the chances are you want something more sophisticated than that.

Picture this

Before we look at some of the more complicated options, there’s another type of site that doesn’t necessarily need lots of hard work to set up – a photo site. Whether you want to show off your amateur photography, catalogue the restoration of a classic car, or allow grandparents around the world to keep up with your family, an online gallery is a popular type of site.

Thankfully it’s also one of the easiest to make, with plenty of tools available to take the hard work out of tasks such as generating preview pictures or building index pages.

We look at how to make galleries in some detail here but, in summary, many photo-editing programs, including Photoshop, ACDSee and Irfanview, all have tools built in that allow you to create a web album with just a few clicks.

There are also standalone tools like Jalbum, and the PHP-based Gallery. So if your website is primarily intended to showcase pictures , it’s worth looking at tools like these.

The database is king

Of course, the majority of websites rely on words, not just pictures, and it’s fair to say that for all but a few informational sites, if you don’t keep updating, people won’t keep coming back. As a site grows, so the task of maintaining internal links and keeping everything organised becomes trickier, especially if you decide one day that you want to give the whole site a new look.

One way of managing that is to use templates and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); change a template in Dreamweaver, for example, and every page that uses it will be updated to the new layout. Similarly, change the colour or type styles in your CSS, and every page that references that stylesheet will change automatically.

They’re both quick ways to update things, and found in most web design tools; you can also use standalone CSS editing tools to help manage your site. And if you have things like a menu navigation bar, that can be put on every page using standard Server Side Includes (SSI), where the server reads a file based on commands in the HTML.

So, for example, you could have a set of news links that appear on most pages held in a single file; update that file with your web editor and the new set of links will appear throughout the site. But once you get beyond a certain level of complexity, there’s little doubt that basing your website around a database makes a lot of sense.

Adding new information means updating the database, with no web design skills needed. Links can be generated on the fly, automatically ensuring, for example, that the five most recent news items appear on the front page, or that a ‘what’s new’ page shows changes in the past 30 days.

Often referred to as a Content Management System (CMS), once the templates are created and the database set up, anyone can update your website, just by filling in a form in a web browser.

More sophisticated systems can give different permissions to different users, so there’s no danger of a club’s social secretary accidentally changing something else when they’re only supposed to be adding diary events, for instance. There are plenty of open-source CMS packages, including Mambo.

Blogging software such as Movable Type is effectively a CMS but without some of the fancier options that you’ll find in a full-blown system for standard websites.

In fact, strictly speaking, some CMS systems, such as CM Simple, just rely on clever scripts and a load of text files – so too, incidentally, do some photo gallery systems, and blogging software. But if you expect your site to become busy, or want multiple people to update it, a database is a must.

Sticking to the script

This is where you have to start making tricky choices. While a database sits behind your website providing the content, the pages themselves – whether they’re part of a CMS or hand-crafted by yourself – will need to be written in a scripting language.

This typically looks at what the user’s request is via what link they’ve clicked, or a parameter in the URL, and then retrieves the appropriate content from the database, fitting it into the page so that what appears on screen is the list of forthcoming events, or product information for your Super Widget 3.5.

There are more scripting languages out there than you can shake a stick at, with a wide range of technologies, though the choice comes down to your philosophy and what you’re familiar with. For example, the open-source languages PHP, Perl and Python are very popular, with PHP especially good for creating websites that query databases. They tend to be used with Linux-based web servers.

Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) and .Net technologies will be more familiar to people used to programming for Windows, and tend to be used with Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Server) web server. That’s not to say you can’t run PHP on Windows, or ASP on Linux – you can, in both cases.

But the heritage of each language and assumptions made in some of the scripts available on the web mean that, on the whole, if you’re using a Microsoft programming technology, it’ll be best to have a Microsoft server.

There are other technologies that are more agnostic, of course. Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) refers to scripting that runs in the web browser, manipulating data sent from the server as XML, and it can produce some great website effects, regardless of whether your server is Linux or Windows.

To an extent, your choice may be dictated by the web design software you use too – go down the route of using Microsoft’s Expression Web and it’ll be pretty hard to code rapidly unless you want to use .Net.

But choose Adobe’s Dreamweaver and for many tasks you can put together a database-driven site that uses PHP and MySQL simply by running wizards or dragging and dropping, once you’ve entered the details of the database.

For a more hands-on approach to coding, tools such as HTML Kit can help you with a wider range of languages, including ASP, PHP, and many others.

Which platform and host?

Sometimes, the decision about which platform to use might be taken for you; if you decide that you like the features of a particular web forum, or you’re familiar with it from another site, and want to use it on your own site, then that may dictate what sort of hosting you choose.

For example, the popular open-source phpBB forum or the OS Commerce shopping package will probably both work best on a Linux server; they use the PHP scripting language, so you could run them on Windows, but when it comes to finding support and assistance, you’ll have an easier time of things if you go to Linux.

Similarly, you may have an application that relies on Windows services. The actual operating system of the web server isn’t the only thing you’ll need to consider – there are plenty of other questions too, like whether you have exclusive access to the server (dedicated hosting), or shared hosting, where other people may have sites on the same system.

This latter option is cheaper but if a runaway script on someone else’s website eats up all the system resources, yours might go down as well. It’s also worth asking what sort of control options you’ll have – for instance, many web servers offer a remote administration interface that allows you to set up the server through your web browser; it makes even configuring a Linux server simple.

But will you be able to access the Linux command line if you find it easier to do things that way?

You need to be clear about other things too – if there’s a particular application, whether a database or CMS or a piece of blogging software, that you want on your server, does it come pre-installed? If not, can you add extra software? Who’s responsible for applying security updates to the server?

Even if you can add extra software, what about more memory? What happens if your forum gets so busy that performance suffers, for example? It might be possible to ease things by putting more memory in the web server, but not all hosting companies will oblige – you may have to upgrade to a different package instead, which could mean a tedious transferring of all your data from one server to another.

Even if you think these issues are too exotic for you at the moment, there are simpler ones to consider when you choose a host, such as how much data you can transfer each month. Some firms offer unlimited data, while others will restrict you or charge you based on how much is downloaded from your site.

In that situation, the joy of hearing your site name-checked on a TV or radio programme can quickly turn to horror when you realise that you’re going to pick up a huge bill for the excess data traffic or even see your site suspended for excessive use.

On the side

Data traffic limits can be a particular problem if you have high-quality images, or want to put video on your site. Bandwidth can easily be eaten up by just a few visitors, so it’s worth bearing in mind that even some professional sites don’t host all their content themselves.

You can, for instance, use Youtube to host your videos or rely on Ebay to provide the infrastructure that backs an online store – it doesn’t have to be auction-based, either. Photos can be shared with Flickr, and mapping information courtesy of Google Maps. With a little work, many of these elements can be seamlessly integrated into your site, rather than sticking out like a sore thumb.

By pulling together these various elements with clever scripting, it can be much easier than in the past to come up with some genuinely useful sites that would simply have been beyond the means of many – for example, POI Editor allows you to create your own database of useful locations for sat-nav systems, thanks to Google’s mapping API (application programming interface).

You can even use Amazon’s vast S3 storage to provide extra space at a very reasonable cost, if your chosen hosting package can’t hold all the information you want it to.

It’s also worth remembering that, just as you can use services like Amazon S3 or Youtube in addition to your site, you can take a mix-and-match approach to hosting as a whole. You don’t need to buy hosting from the same company that sold you a domain name, for instance – and very often you might find the hosting that comes free with a domain name is very limited.

Pay particular attention to very cheap deals, which may simply redirect web browsers from your domain name to an existing web space. For the greatest flexibility, you should look for a domain registrar that allows you to control every aspect of your DNS (Domain Name Service), even pointing web and email traffic at different servers, for example. It may not be necessary to start with, but it can be essential as a site grows.

You’ll also need to make sure your site appears in search engines. Again, some hosting companies will help, and there are even companies that will submit your site to lots of search engines for a fee. Our advice? Don’t bother. With a few simple extra tags, and filling in a handful of web forms, you can ensure your site is indexed by the search engines that matter, such as Google and MSN.

For more on search tags and Google’s webmaster tools, take a look here and here.

Next steps

When it comes down to it, there’s a clear message – if you want to make the best website you can, don’t rush. Work out what it’s for. Work out the best way to present the information and keep it up to date. Then choose the tools to create it and find hosting that will let you do everything you want to now, and as your site grows.

If nothing else, we hope this feature has given you some inspiration to start thinking a little more in depth about your online needs. Now you can develop your own plan of action, and only then can you start the hard work of actually setting up domain names, servers, software and building your site.

Lapsed domain names 'bought in seconds'

Clive Akass — 2007-11-22T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Thursday 22 November 2007 at 00:00:00

Don't forget your £5 renewal, warns domain registrar

Website owners have been warned to keep their registration up to date because lapsed domain names are being snapped up within 10 seconds of becoming available.

Re-registration, which has to be done every two years, can cost as little as £5 but you can pay ten times as much to get an address back - and sometimes far more. Names are regularly sold for more than £100,000, and some for as much as £1m.

Registrants are warned by email to renew, but many do inform registrars that their addresses have changed. There is a 60-day grace period after the expiry date, which the name will no longer work but can still be renewed; but then the name is up for grabs.

A report from Nominet, the not-for-profit company that controls .co.uk registration, says there is a growing secondary market in domain names with some organisations hoarding large numbers of them.

Ownership is often split across a number of companies, so figures are hard to come by, but analysis has shown that around 50 individuals or organisations each own more than 3,000 domain names - between them accounting for five per cent of the .co.uk total.

Trading in domain names is one of two ways "domain warehousers" make money. The other, often done in parallel, is to attach the name to a rudimentary site with commercial links that can earn click-through revenues. Such sites get hits either by clever search-engine optimisation of by having names close to those of legitimate sites.

Phil Kingsland, marketing director of Nominet, said most lapsed names stem from people who have either ceased trading or never really used the addresses.

And he points out that warehousers do not have a completely free rein.

"There is a grey area around using names that people or organisations believe they have a right to," he said.

Nominet has a dispute resolution system for companies who feel their brand is being 'abused' in a web address, though cases do sometimes reach the courts.

Hands on: Indices and mapping

Nigel Whitfield — 2007-10-18T00:00:00.000Z

Nigel Whitfield, Personal Computer World, Thursday 18 October 2007 at 00:00:00

How to control the way your site is indexed by search engines

Last time round, I started exploring how search engines index your site, with a look at some of the more basic aspects adding keyword and meta tags to your pages and looking at some of the tools available in Google’s webmasters area, which will let you see what queries people are using to reach your site, and where they rank.

This month, I’m following on from that with a look at two techniques that you can use to give yourself a little more control over which parts of your site are indexed.

If you have a busy site, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility to find that you have a huge number of simultaneous connections to your server from assorted search engine crawlers, potentially impacting upon the performance for other users.

While Google’s Dashboard allows you some control over the crawl rate for its own bot, even if other search engines were to provide such systems and many don’t it would be tedious to have to visit each one and tweak the settings. The obvious solution, then, would be to have a way that your site can hold information that dictates how search engines will index it, and there are two established methods.

Robots.txt

The first of those is called robots.txt. It’s a simple text file that’s intended to be put at the root level of your site, so if the site is www.nigelwhitfield.com, for example, then the URL of the robots file would be www.nigelwhitfield.com/robots.txt. If the crawler for a search engine doesn’t find such a file, then it will index your site by reading all the pages and following all the links.

If, on the other hand, the file exists and is readable by the crawler, then it will interpret it according to the Robots Exclusion Protocol, about which you can find more information at www.robotstxt.org. Essentially, though, it’s a very simple text file.

Lines that are comments begin with a # symbol, and you control the reading of your site by robots using User-agent and Disallow couplets. Together, these specify which parts of your site should not be read by the web crawlers. Here’s a simple example, to stop Google indexing a site forum, for instance:

# A simple robots.txt file

User-agent: googlebot

Disallow: /forum/

A well-behaved search engine should be liberal in interpreting its name so if something is called SuperWebCrawler-3.07 then it should still ignore your site if you refer to it as ‘superwebcrawler.’

There are various pages around that list the common and some not-so-common search engine bot names, so you can exclude them specifically, but in most cases, you’ll probably want to control access by all search engines, unless you’re nursing a grudge, and you can do that simply with

User-agent: *

And what if you do want to be picky about who looks where? Well, the file should be read from top to bottom, and a bot will use the first matching couplet, so if you only want Google to index your forums, and not anyone else, you could say something like this:

# Let Google index my forums, but not anyone else

User-agent: googlebot

Disallow:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /forum/

Google’s bot will see the first entry, and realise that it’s allowed to look everywhere, while others won’t match and will look at the next entry.

Another key point to realise is that the text in the Disallow line will also be partially matched, so saying /forum/ will disallow any file that matches, which would include the whole contents of the forum subdirectory on your site.

But if you said ‘/forum’ then it would also disallow files with names like /forumhelp.html or /forum.php. And though I said ‘couplet’ earlier, you can also have more than one Disallow line, for example:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /secrets/

Disallow: /personal/

The RobotsTxt site has a database that lists many crawler bot names and the hostnames from which they usually crawl your site.

If you simply want to know which ones are visiting your site the most, then look through your server logs and see who’s been requesting the robots.txt file if you don’t have one, depending on the server config, the requests may be in a separate error log. The User-agent information if you log it will tell you the name that the bots are using.

Can’t upload?

In case you can’t upload to your real root folder (see box), you can use a meta tag to control indexing too. The name of the tag is ‘ROBOTS’ and it can have a value of NOINDEX if you don’t want a page indexed, or NOFOLLOW if you don’t want links from the page followed, or both. So, a line like this in the header of your first page will do much the same as a robots.txt that excludes all search engines:

For those who are scratching their heads, one reason for doing this, of course, is if you’re working on a new site and you’d rather it doesn’t appear in search results until it’s finished.

Sitemaps

The Robots protocol is fairly old, and only serves one purpose; it tells search engines to go away. While that can be handy for some parts of your site, it’s not exactly a flexible approach. Far better is to have some control over what you want indexed, and when. You may have pages on your site that change quite frequently, for example, with news or product updates, while other pages are more static or simply don’t need indexing so much.

What if, for example, you’d like changes to the new products area to be picked up really often, but you don’t want bots crawling all over your forum every day, which will generate extra database traffic and a much heavier load on the system?

The answer to this lies in the sitemaps protocol, which you’ll find detailed at www.sitemaps.org. Like lots of things on the internet these days, it’s an XML-based schema, so it’s a little more detailed than a robots.txt file, but not excessively so. You can pop a sitemap.xml file in the root folder of your site just as you would with a robots.txt file and you can also submit one to Google and some other search engines. You can also specify the location of a sitemap in your robots.txt, like this:

Sitemap: http://www.nigelwhitfield.com/sitemap.xml

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves let’s look at a basic sitemap file first.

http://www.nigelwhitfield.com/v2/index.php

monthly

Within the ‘urlset’ you can specify up to 50,000 separate URLs, which should be enough for most, and the only compulsory element for each one is the ‘loc’, which specifies the actual web address. You need to URL encode it, so if there’s an ampersand, for a page parameter, you should use the form &.

In the example above, we used an optional ‘changefreq’ element, which tells a search engine how often a page is likely to be changed. This isn’t considered an absolute command, but it serves to guide a search engine when it decides which pages on your site to index. You can specify always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never.

Two other optional elements are ‘lastmod’ which says when a particular page was last changed, in the format 2007-11-18 for the 18th of November this year, and ‘priority’.

The priority is a number from 0.0 to 1.0, with a default of 0.5. You can use this to say which of the pages within your site are most important again, it’s informational, so won’t necessarily be followed by all search engines, but the idea is that if a search engine has to choose which parts are indexed, it will look at those you mark as most important. So, in our example, you could give your new product pages a high priority, say 0.8 and your forums a lower one of 0.2.

Sitemap files also only refer to pages below their location on your site, so you can have more than one, but a file in the /products/ folder on your site can only give information about pages in that area if you specify other pages, they’ll be ignored.

You can build a sitemap file yourself, but there are also tools out there that will do it for you one such is a free plug-in for Dreamweaver, from www.dmxzone.com, which you can see in the screenshots. Some fiddling may be required for example, the navigation for one of my sites is in a file ‘navleft.php,’ included in other pages, so I had to point to that as the home page for the tool to find all the links, and also edit priorities manually.

Cheap hosting problems

Reader Steve Holmes is having problems with Google’s webmaster tools, because the hosting he uses is actually a redirection, where a domain host provides an index file that effectively redirects to web space elsewhere.

The domain host allows you to specify keyword and description tags, but not any other meta information, making it impossible to add the information Google requires to prove a domain is your own. The alternative method, uploading a file, doesn’t work, because the domain host in this case UK2 wants to treat it as a separate site.

This sort of hosting will always present problems; you can’t upload a robots.txt file, either, for the same reasons. The real solution is to check before you choose your web hosting. You need to be able to upload any file to your web space, and have it appear with the correct domain name. Often that may mean arranging to point a domain name at your web space and asking for the server to accept that as a valid name too. Simple redirection via an index file may be quick and cheap, but as Steve found out, it’s frustrating when you want to do more advanced things.

UK 'running out of web addresses'

Clive Akass — 2007-05-16T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 16 May 2007 at 00:00:00

We've gone through the dictionary says UK2 head

Registration of new web addresses has dropped off because of a shortage of names, according to the head of one of Britain's biggest resellers of domain names.

"People setting up a new business are as likely to buy up and old name that is not being used as register a new one. It is very hard to find one that is not already in use," said Ditlev Bredahl, Danish chief executive of UK2.net.

"I'd guess that 80 percent of the words in the dictionary have already been used. That's why people are coming up with names like Skype and Joost."

Bredahl reckoned that at peak in the year 2000 UK2 sold 38 percent of the .co.uk names in Britain, acting as a sales channel for the domain registrar Nominet. "We could offer the cheapest prices because UK2 had automated the whole process."

A combination of fewer new registrations and stiffer competition forced UK2 to rethink its business. In what Bredahl described as major turnaround it invested in servers, with a infrastructure and staff to support them, and began to host ecommerce and other web servers.

By 2005 domain registration accounted for just 46 percent of its business; now the proportion is closer to 30 percent, though the number of registrations has risen.

UK2 offers "turnkey" ecommerce hosting including stock management and payment facilities using Paypal or Google Checkout from £9.95 a month. "We've have got it to the point where virtually all you need to do is upload your product details," he claimed.

A lot of new sites are started by people who are running a business over eBay and want to try setting up on their own.

PayPal rings up new payment system

Martin Lynch — 2007-03-28T00:00:00.000Z

Martin Lynch, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 28 March 2007 at 00:00:00

etailers can host it on their own site - and take major credit and debit cards

PayPal UK has announced the availability of a new payment system for online retailers that promises to give them more control.

Website Payments Pro has been in use by US customers since the middle of 2005 and has been generally well-received. For the first time, etailers will be able to host the payment process on their own sites instead of customers being automatically redirected to a PayPal site.

It should also give businesses much quicker access to funds than the older system, where payments often took time to be cleared through the PayPal system.

There are three elements to the new system: Express Checkout, Direct Payment API and Virtual Terminal. Express Checkout allows customers to get from the shopping cart to their PayPal account and pay in just three clicks.

The Direct Payment API feature lets businesses accept credit or debit card payments on their site, just like other, rival online payment solutions. In addition, businesses will be able to brand those pages with their own marketing or information.

Lastly, Virtual Terminal is a new feature that will let businesses accept orders ‘offline’ via phone, fax and mail and enter the card details through an online interface to PayPal.

“Website Payments Pro was developed as a direct result of listening to our business customers who wanted the benefits of PayPal, combined with those of a merchant account and gateway,” explained Carl-Olav Scheible, general manager of merchant services at PayPal.

“With Website Payments Pro, our merchants can now offer direct credit card processing and PayPal Express Checkout, giving their customers both in the UK and beyond a full range of payment choices.”

Website Payments Pro costs £20 per month and a per-transaction rate of 1.4 to 3.4 per cent, plus 20p. There are no set-up charges or cancellation fees. PayPal is waiving the monthly fee until July 2007.

Pipex suspends executive in 'spying' case

Clive Akass — 2007-03-26T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Monday 26 March 2007 at 00:00:00

Embarrassment as company puts itself (and possibly Wimax) up for auction

Broadband provider Pipex has suspended an executive in a row over alleged industrial espionage. The company faced legal action by Rackspace, a US-owned web-hosting company.

The suspended executive, 40-year-old Dominic Monkhouse, was managing director of Rackspace until last July when he left to head Pipex 's web-hosting division Web Fusion.

The Sunday Times reported yesterday that Rackspace has sacked a woman who was alleged to have had a relationship with Monkhouse and to have passed information to him.

Rackspace's legal action against Pipex has now been settled, according to both companies. The terms were not revealed.

Pipex said in a statement: "Dominic Monkhouse is in discussions with his former employer… At this time Pipex is not party to the discussions and has no involvement in the issue."

A Pipex spokeswoman said today that the company's involvement in the case had been "tenuous".

But it comes at a delicate time, because Pipex has put itself up for sale in an auction that could shape the future of Wimax wide-area wireless links in the UK. Pipex Wireless, a joint venture with Intel, owns scarce spectrum that can be used for Wimax.

One reported bidder is Virgin Media, the rebranded cable giant NTL Telewest, which could use Wimax to extend its UK broadband coverage.

But a purchase of Pipex would also give Virgin Media a foothold in the lucrative corporate market and it is not certain as this stage whether Pipex Wireless will be included in the deal.

Why websites go down

Clive Akass — 2007-02-26T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Monday 26 February 2007 at 00:00:00

Cheap-skating companies make no allowances for hardware failures, say experts

Companies are not putting enough resources into maintaining resilient websites, according to experts at a NetEvents forum.

Steve Broadhead, of Broadband Testing, said he found alarming levels of downtime at the websites of major companies and organisations in Britain and the US. “We were genuinely shocked by the results.”

Local authority sites were the worst, with one having 176 hours of downtime during the test period, but there were “significant” failures even at ecommerce sites.

“Sometimes, when a site went down at 3am, say, it was likely that the company was doing some maintenance. But there was nothing on the site to warn people or apologise,” Broadhead told the forum at Evian, France.

He added: “The vast majority of companies were not aware of the downtime at all.”

He asked why it was that the 21^stcentury internet could not achieve the “five nines” – the 99.999 percent reliability of the plain old telephone network.

John Earley, of MyWebAlert, which offers to monitor a website’s availability for free, conducted the testing in conjunction with Broadhead’s company. He told the forum: “Testing was done over one or two months, but if it had been over a year I am sure that all companies would have shown downtime.”

He expected to see companies put in sufficient resources to fix problems when their site goes down, he said, but that didn’t happen.

Earley added: “I think the technical community – the IT managers, the webmasters, etc – don’t give a monkey’s about the website quite frankly.”

Phil Crocker, European marketing manager for clustered storage specialist Isilon Systems, said there was still a lot of ignorance about the need for load-balancing servers. He pointed out: “Hardware fails... you have to do something to mitigate that fact.”

Paul di Leo, chief-executive of Zeus, which develops traffic management software, said web sites go down because companies don’t put any redundancy into the system to provide a fallback if anything goes wrong.

“There’s no resilience. They buy the cheapest stuff they can get… They’ll do anything but spend money on their web site.”

High-street retailers spent a fortune ensuring that their premises met the needs of their business. “But when it come to their web site… You can’t get in. They can’t transact business. They lose you credit-card details,” di Leo said.

Reports on the website testing done by Broadband Testing are available here.

Remember: backup is not archive

Guy Kewney — 2007-02-07T00:00:00.000Z

Guy Kewney, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 7 February 2007 at 00:00:00

When it’s time to free up some space on your hard drive, remember the key word is archive, not backup

Imagine you’re sitting at your PC and suddenly realise that you’re running out of disk space.

You’ll need to delete some files, but don’t want to lose them forever. What should you do? Most people would say, “Back up your files!”

You think so, too? Well think again. Recently, one of my colleagues – who should have known better, I might add – did just that. He used a website that allows 2GB of free online backup, and for an astonishingly small fee will allow you to back up your entire hard disk onto its servers.

My colleague decided that this was the way to go. “You don’t want to use local CDs,” he explained, “because they’ll get destroyed in the fire if your main PC gets burned up!.”

So he went onto the internet and prepared to back up his hard disk. But two nasty surprises awaited him as he pressed ‘Go’ and sat back.

The first was the discovery that this was going to be one of those Scott of the Antarctic moments. “I may be some time,” said Captain Oates, as he walked out of the tent to his death. My friend should have done the arithmetic.

Today’s typical £500 PC will rarely have less than 80GB of disk storage, and it might even have 250GB or more. No doubt when my friend bought his machine he thought he’d never fill up a disk that big.

But after spending several months on allofmp3.com and downloading from his 8-megapixel camera, and saving clips from YouTube.com, and using his PC as a personal digital video recorder, he was on the brink.

Your ADSL line runs at about 512Kbits/sec upload speed – if you’re lucky. It’s more likely to be half that, or even less, if you’re on a budget service. Yes, you can download at 8Mbits/sec, maybe even 10Mbits/sec, but backup over the internet is uploading, not downloading.

Here’s the arithmetic. An upload speed of 256Kbits/sec means 32Kbytes/sec (1 byte = 8 bits, of course). That’s a megabyte (1,024Kbytes) every 32 seconds. How many megabytes in a gigabyte? Yes – you’re looking at (for a hard drive maker’s gigabyte of 1,000MB) 32,000 seconds per GB. So for 80GB, that’s 2,560,000 seconds. And 250GB is 8,000,000 seconds.

In minutes, the number is 133,333, which won’t allow you to watch the progress bar while the data is backed up and still get down for supper. In fact, the 2,222 hour-long transfer will see you starve: it’s actually 92.5 days.

My friend soon realised this and speedily cancelled the transfer. He went through the menu, selecting ‘Urgent’ and ‘Important’ files to back up. He selected only 5GB. Still, two days? “That can’t be right!” he said. “I downloaded 5GB of Windows Vista in just an afternoon! Oh… right… that was downloading.”

Two days later, it still wasn’t done. Some of his fellow internet users had been uploading things, too; file sharing, Bit Torrent – that sort of thing. Contention on the line. But all things come to those who wait – and by the following weekend, it was done.

With a sigh of relief, he deleted the files, freeing up some space. He also deleted a few other files, less important ones that didn’t need to be backed up, and got about his business. A month later, he realised he needed one of those deleted files after all and went to the internet backup site. He searched and searched for the files, but they were gone.

A very little investigation produced the following response from the internet backup operator: “Yes, that’s the way we work. We keep backups of files on your disk. If you delete them, then you have a week to change your mind, and then we delete them too.”

My colleague was absolutely furious. Fortunately, he’d had the sense enough to take the precaution of writing a DVD with the contents of those files, and so managed to avert a complete tragedy. But when he rang me to say: “You’ll get a good story out of this, Guy!” I had to disappoint him.

“Robert,” I said, sadly, “you’re making a very simple mistake. You don’t want a backup service. You want an archive service!” You will remember the difference, won’t you?

ISPs to pay less for BT lines

Clive Akass — 2006-11-13T00:00:00.000Z

Clive Akass, Personal Computer World, Monday 13 November 2006 at 00:00:00

Cuts could mean lower bills for end users as BT ramps up 21st Century Network

BT Wholesale is to cut the prices independent service-providers pay for broadband lines in a move that seems certain to reduce the cost of access for end users.

The move will help independent service providers (ISPs) who package and resell BT Wholesale services to compete with companies that have installed their own equipment in exchanges under the Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) scheme.

BT agreed with regulator Ofcom not to change its wholesale prices until 1.5million LLU lines have been installed, to give the new system a chance to grow. This threshold is expected to be passed in May.

The company announced today that it will then cut cost of a line for ISPs, by nine per cent from £8.40 to £7.63 a month under the BT IPstream deal used by most ISPs. Increased rebates at busy exchanges, where per-customer costs are lower, will push the savings up to 12.5 per cent.

Connection charges will also be cut, from £40 to £34.86 ex-Vat. But service providers will face a new £33.75 (ex-Vat) charge for cutting off a line unless they subscribe to the so-called MAC process, which is intended to make it easier for customers to switch providers.

BT hopes the charge will encourage ISPs to use the MAC system. A spokeswoman said service-providers have only just heard about the price cuts and that it is too early to predict the effect on end-user bills.

BT also announced that it is to start trialling its next-generation ADSL2+ service, called Wholesale Broadband Connect, next summer. The service, which uses BT's all-IP 21st Century Network (21CN), will offer speeds of up to 24Mbits/sec.