Why is changing DNS for a domain such hard work

It should not be such a hard task. Move a .com and .co.uk domain from free hosting at where it was register to new paid for hosting. In an effort to give the client as little down time as possible it will have taken me about 5 days and 1o phone calls and a lot of emailing and reassuring the boss and then the client.

I wanted to move two domains for my agency for a clients site to the new hosting we have on 1&1. The client registered the domains a few years ago and have had some flash on there BT free website for a while now.

So I hoped having changed 5 or so domains before that I could save the downtime and loss of email and my hassle by just changing the dns settings. New IP address for the A record and leave the dns where it was.

So phone 1&1 for the ip address or the simplest way I could change the settings. They said sure here is the IP and also I did a reverse dns and got the same ip.

At end of day 1 this was all good but the domain had not moved it was just doing a redirect to the new temporary domain at 1&1. boo...

So called 1&1 again next day and they said you can't do that as we do not garentee your ip and it might get changed but dns would not. So how is it possible? you must ask 1&1 to change the DNS server to ours. Will that effect the email? No I am told you can point an MX record back to BT for the email. Fine I thought, now try to find any information on BT site as to changing DNS servers and they give one page and it just wants to transfer the whole domain. For my hosting on DSVR (now Demon) I was able to call them with the new dns servers and they made the change for me. All fine that time the renewals stayed but the dns moved. This time BT said it was not possible. I must do a transfer on their site.

Now I find I need lots of security question that I have to go back and ask the client for. Also that you do different things to move .co.uk and .com and some pages say I need to pay and some not. Then as the domain needs to be both transferred away form one company into the nothingness of the net and then picked up by the new company each site can only tell you half the story.

One said I needed an AUTH code and the other a Transfer code, these for the .com are the same thing. and must be requested and then given to the new owner. Then you have to enter the contact address details for the domain.

But before anything can happen BT website went down and they can not manage to make changes without there web admin and then they are closed for the rest of the weekend.

So finally on Monday when we need to be live tomorrow the domains seem to be moving with one domain down and the other changing, we are in the twighlight zone of time to live and dns renewals.

Learning a new langauge to expand your horizons

I am taking a plunge into learning a new language, I need to increase my German to teach my son and talk to my girlfriends family. And with my new job trying to get my head round language learning as a whole. Cactus Language http://www.cactuslangauge.com

They do all sorts of training angles Evening Courses, TEFL courses, Learning a language on holiday. So lots to learn and figure out where and how people go to learn a language when booking online. Its good think to think of when I'll be taking a course in January.

Proving your worth online, can I trust this person

This is something that I come round to now and then, and when signing up and entering details into another website that needs a profile.

Where do you find out who a person is and if they should be trusted or worked with. This is because online trust has a big part to play in relationships and business.

Other points
No of posts
Ranking
Comments by others
Several sources saying the same thing

Shared interests and feeling are the biggest thing that pulls people together. Be that your interests or tags or conversations or simply being on the same site sharing an experience.

Building a picture of me online
These need to be recognisable to other people.

Amazon profile
Ebay profile - star rating, comments, time a member, lack of negative comments.
FaceBook profile - to those who can see it
LinkedIn profile - public or shared version. Employment history indicators, Recommendations, number of connections.
Current company - listed on the company website to prove your working there
Personal homepage
Personal Blog - this does not have to be on personal things but be your writing.
Yahoo profile
MSN profile
MySpace page

Personal for me:
BoardGameGeek profile - interested, games owned, comments made, thumbs up given, contributions made.

Will keep looking this week for more examples.

Making really soical widgets for FaceBook

Peg Davis posted this week about Widgets and social sites full of virtual swag for the social network masses on Marketing Experiments. Asking what the value of the widgets is, when popular ones are water and food fights?

This is an avenue I have been taking some time to brainstorm. I have yet to come up with something that fits the brand I work with though.

Most of the widgets I have found on facebook do nothing for social or community. And seem little way to get value from. (though I still love adding ones I like.)

Most offer the opportunity to share an image or add a flower or fish to someones page, or versions of poking (little-gamers poke with more humor) like ninja/jedi/pirate. The quizes seem to have some value and you gain information and it is interesting to learn things about friends.

They only seem to increase time on site for FaceBook, and get abandoned quickly. I have dropped the fish and flowers and other sections from my facebook account, as they require other people to actually be interested in giving me a new fish every few days.

I think there needs to be more that leverage the community and shared space. Most just enorage more messaging to talk about them. The best I have come up with is a game of "pass the parcel" (TM me when i get time) You pass the parcel to one of your friends, they have to open the next layer and there coudl be nothing, something funny, a message, an ad, a voucher and a prize or celebrity to the winner. But the key thing is it exists only on the person who has it, so people want to track it and ask that person to pass it on. Much more social, well to me its a start.

Also note here long tail and Tim O'Reily both taking about the small number of widgets with the traffic

Get real web stats for WordPress.com blogs

I have been a bit fustrated with stats on Wordpress.com, as they use Google Analytics themselves and only give you a few days limited stats. I have been thinking of writing my own stats script for image loaded on a client site to record stats. You can see the basic stats and I am sure that is enough for alot of bloggers. I want more detail of my SEO efforts and so was glad I found a package that has an image tracking option.

Clicky who claim to be web analytics 2.0 (not sure quite how 2.0 yet apart from the design) As they record actions as well as pages. They have some extra options like an API to all your data over google analytics so may check them out some more. With the Javascript version rather than the image version I am using on the wordpress site.

They have a trial option for 21 days and then a couple of paid options for upto 50,000 views so not for big sites put small personals and blogs should be good.

Test - using Yahoo search for a week

This week I am going to use Yahoo Search (mostly from in firefox, like normal) instead of Google. I'll look back at google now and then to see what difference the results are. I'll be using the .co.uk version of each.

I decided to try this for a couple of reasons. One my post last week after reading how the top 10 in each tends to be different. Also working with websites with puchase parts at the moment tend to rank and be crawled better by Yahoo. As opposed to the research style of Google for text content.

My first test today resulted in -1 yahoo +1 google, for my serach for the ServerAlias directive for Apache. 'apache server alias' on Yahoo returned a top 10 on the Alias command, which is for aliasing directories not the whole server domain name. Google got it right with the first result being a page with ServerAlias on. It was resarch query so going with type.

Term | Yahoo | Google | Type(Reseach/Shopping)
'apache server alias' -1 +1 R

The test continues.

Posting your name first in title helps Google rank

I think the change I made last week posting the name of the compnay first in the url for the homepage readlly did work for Google ranking.

I changed from
About the Restaurant << The Black Rat Restaurant, Winchester
to
The Black Rat << The Black Rat Restaurant, Winchester

And now I get a reasonable rank on google for 'the black rat' on its own, 4th on google.co.uk. I think that is quite respectiable as the site does not have any PR yet and there must be millions of pages about real rats, 6,300,000 to be exact.

So quite pleased with my results at the moment.

Offline is a good boost

The other boost the site stats the local county newspaper did one review and one interview and then posted them on two of their websites. So the traffic jumped to double the highest point for a day on friday when it hit the news stands. See if it drops off again this week or not.

Another quick tip:
Put the url in plain text in a post on your blog as Google News tracker seems to like that more that in an a tag when reporting on wordpress.com stats. Not sure if it helps more than that. But it could be why my blog ranks over the main site?