iWeb Communities: Blog

Before reading, Please Take our iWeb January Survey. Thanks!. And now, here is the iWeb Tech News Highlights for today Jan 15th:

• Nortel has filed for bankrupcy yesterday. The telecom company which was hailed once as the most valuable technology company in the world cannot pay for its debt interests, with $107m interest payement due for today.
• Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has announced to its employees that he’s on medical leave, until June this year, with “health-related issues more complex than he thought”.
• Google announced that the Jaiku codebase has been re-engineered, and will be be open-sourced soon. The new version will be OAuth-compatible, making it a strong competitor to Laconi.ca, the pioneer on distributed, federaded open-source microblogging. Alongside with Jaiku, 5 other Google products were slashed, with complete details on VentureBeat, and new announced job cuts at the web giant
• For web designers looking for inspiration, Smashing Magazine has published Web Design Trends for 2009
• New in-session phishing attack could fool experienced users

Before reading, Please Take our iWeb January Survey. Thanks!

A new beta feature showcased at the last Google Analytics seminar is Events tracking. You can see a preview of this feature with the screenshot seen on the right side. Event tracking allows a webmaster to get numbers for website elements such as Ajax, flash files, downloads, widgets and other multimedia elements like flash videos. The tool will allow you to follow and compare the average time of viewing, the number of downloads, the applications which bring you the most revenues, the percentage of visitors who view a video completely etc. To use the feature, replace the “urchin.js” in your tracker snippet with “ga.js”, which is the latest tracking software, as released by Google.

You might also be interested in:

• Web Marketing, Tip #3: Advanced Segmentation and Custom Reports
• Web Marketing, Tip #2: Transaction Tracking
• Web Marketing, Tip #1: Tracking Web Campaigns

• Carol Bratz is the new CEO of Yahoo! Inc. She takes over the direction of the web giant, after Jerry Yang’s troubled leadership and deadly battle with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.
• Analytics toolbox, 50+ ways to track online traffic at mashable.
• A New York Supreme Court judge has authorized the state to gather taxes from Amazon. The decision also affects overstocks, and most e-commerce websites, which may have to review their fiscal and price policies, if other US states follow suit.
• Microsoft has just launched SongSmith, a competitor to Apple’s GarageBand
• Hackers finally unlock the iPhone
• Symantec says managers are pressured “to do more with less” this year, in its 2008 State of the Data Center
• Nokia’s Qt has switched to the LGPL license. It will allow software developers to use freely Qt for proprietary application development, and as such will boost the framework’s popularity

New: Take our iWeb January Survey.

Here are the Tech News Highlights for today, Jan. 13th 2009:

• An interesting interview of Marten Mickos, who heads MySQL at SUN. The interview is about the birth of MySQL, as well as the current state of the database
• Review of the new windows 7 at Ars Technica.
• tweetbacks is a new interesting plugin for a Wordpress blog, which allows the blogger to display links to his/her blog post from twitter users
• An article at the ThinkRelevance blog on how the author still prefers prototype to jQuery, with several examples and cases for the javascript libary
• A blog post showing the importance of design and presentation in a software (Windows’ example). For those who are in web design, Smashing Magazine has collected 10 innovative techniques for web application interfaces
• An interesting read for programmers: the top 25 most dangerous programming errors
• An article about the transition for VB.NET to php, for an internal business application. The author lists all libraries, technologies, frameworks and tools used for their stack.

As written yesterday, if you have a suggestion or a link for tomorrow’s edition, do leave a comment

Last week, the stars for the 2009 CES conference was without doubt netbooks. Every major computer manufacturer, be it HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, Sony, Gigabyte, or LG released new models, or updated specifications to their existing line-up. I have written about 2008 trends, and CES does prove that netbooks will be the main source of growth for laptop manufacturers this year.

If you are looking to do web development or sys-admin on the road, if you are looking for a secondary laptop, if you are highly mobile and travel very frequently, a netbook is highly suited. Here is for instance a highly probable scenario for a sys admin: you are responsible for monitoring a website and make sure it is running properly. While commuting or in a coffee shop, you are alerted that the website is malfunctioning. With a netbook that fits in one of your pocket, you can access to the website’s control panel or via SSH, and solve the problem right away, without having to race to an office.

To help you chose amongst the 40+ netbooks models which are now available, here’s an exclusive table comparing 4 different models.

Note: The Acer Aspire One, the MSI Wind, and the Asus Eee PC 900 has very similar specifications to the Dell. But since the Dell Inspiron 9 is cheaper and has more options, they were excluded. If you buy a netbook, don’t forget then to consider the Acer Aspire and the MSI.

	Asus Eee PC 1002HA	Dell Inspiron Mini 9	OQO Model 2+	Sony Vaio P
Model
CPU	Intel Atom Diamondville 1.6Ghz	Intel Atom Diamondville 1.6Ghz	Intel Atom Silverthorne 1.86Ghz	Intel Atom Silverthorne 1.33Ghz
Graphics (Screen Size + Resolution)	10.2″ 1024×600	8.9″ 1024×600	5″ 1024×768 OLED, Toucscreen	8″ 1600 x 768px
RAM and HD	1Gb	512Mb	2Gb, 120Gb HD shock-mounted	2Gb, 60Gb HD
Software	Windows XP	Linux or Windows XP	Windows Vista Business or XP	Windows Vista
Battery	30 Wh	31Wh	“3.5 hours”	15 Wh
Connectivity (Wireless, Expansions, 3G)	Ethernet 10/100, Headset Mic+Line, Multiformat Card reader, USB2.0, 802.11g	Ethernet 10/100, Headset Mic+Line, Multiformat Card reader, USB2.0, 802.11g, 802.11n, BT2.0, with 3G, with TV Tuner	HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, Docking connector, 802.11g, 3G (EVDO – HSPA)	USB2.0, Headset Mic+Line, Docking Connector, 802.11g, 802.11n, BT2.1, 3G, GPS
Dimensions (Size w/h/d inches and Weight)	0.4 x 7.1 x 1.12.6 lb	9.1 x 6.9 x 1.22.3 lb	5.6 x 3.3 x 1 1.0 lb	9.6 x 4.7 x 0.8           1.4 lb
Price	$499	$349	$1600 depending on mobile plans	$899

Here are  conclusions:

• Netbooks for Web Development, Sys-Admin: Asus Eee PC 1002HA, because of the screen and price
• Netbooks for Mobile Blogging, email, calendars: Dell Inspiron Mini 9, because of its price
• Netbooks for hackers who want to expand or “fine-tune”: Dell Inspiron Mini, because of its connectivity, price and Linux
• Netbooks for mobile businessmen: OQO Model 2+, for the 3G feature, Windows Vista, size
• Netbooks for school, or as a second laptop: the Asus Eee PC or the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, for their price and size

Please read about our community project. Join the iWeb community on Twitter, Friendfeed, or one Facebook, or by email.

Beginning from today, the iWeb blog is going to publish a regular feature entitled “iWeb Tech News Highlights“, with links and short snippets of web development, web design, system administration, open source software and web marketing news, relevant to iWeb customers. The goal is to provide readers the essential tech news for the day, amidst all the blog posts, news articles, forum posts and social media content published on the web. For today, here are the Tech News Highlights:

• “Maxim Indelicato”, a CTO architect, has published a reference post about distributed systems and achieve high scalability, with links about php, mysql, sharding, reliability, web operations, etc.
• An article at the New York Times about niche web sites and blogs now under the AOL banner. The article reveals that AOL’s “magazines” strategy, targeting niche audiences, is working very well, something to think about if you have a blog or publishing content,
• Google announced that Chrome for Linux and Mac are targeted to be released in the first half of 2009. They also announced a highly-wanted feature: extensions, akin to Firefox’s,
• The beta version of the next Windows, known as Windows 7, has been available for public download last Friday. However, Microsoft’s servers were not robust to handle the traffic, and the deadline has been extended to Jan 24th
• the iPod Touch is now the #2 mobile device with a 4.7% share. The iPod Touch’s usage exploded last Christmas, according to the AdMob network
• Facebooks vs local homegrown versions, an interesting article at BusinessWeek, on how entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley can win a local market, even when competing with giants like Myspace of Facebook
• There was a fuss this weekend about the “pollution costs” of web servers and queries. The Google blog discusses the details.

Do leave a comment below if I’ve missed something

Please read about our community project. Join the iWeb community on Twitter, Friendfeed, or one Facebook, or by email.

If you are looking into switching to a web host with better services, products and prices, the process of transferring your websites can be either seamless or a tragedy. If you just copy and paste files, you will risk losing emails, traffic, databases, and may face the wrath of your audience.

Here is then  a complete guide on how to switch, with the objective of having zero downtime, and have at the same maximum availability of the website:

1. Stop any Search Engine Campaign, PPC advertising, content promotion campaigns, or publication of new content on your website
2. Do a backup of your static files (html, jpg, php, javascript, css, etc.), your wordpress or drupal plugins and templates, either by FTP or by the use of a source control repository such as svn or git. Get a copy of the files on a separate disk, either on a local dedicated hard drive or on a DVD
3. Do a backup of your emails
4. Choose your web hosting product: shared web hosting, dedicated servers, or advanced solutions. 
5. Setup your web server and the OS (such as optimization, security, updating to latest version via available mirrors)
6. Install your web server, programming languages, gems and libraries required for your setup
7. Create the domain on your new web server
8. Transfer the static files saved from step2
9. Export the database to a SQL text file from your old host, import it into the database of your new web server
10. Test the website, with the new temporary URL provided by iWeb. In the case of a dedicated server, you could also use directly a IP address provided to you. 
11. If there is any problems, or if you think it requires fine-tuning and optimization, go back through the different steps, from step 5
12. Choose a day for your switch. One tip: use your website analytics software to choose a date, by looking for a day and hour with low traffic. Typically, the night from saturday to sunday is a good choice.
13. Send a newsletter to your customers, partners and website visitors, announcing them that there’s a planned maintenance on a given period, with your contact information
14. Now, you need to setup the database. This step can be difficult to implement, and you might need the help of an experienced system administrator. There are 2 ways to do it: the easy way is to export the latest version of your database and then import it. If there is sensible and critical data, you need to setup a S-Tunnel or secure synchronization link between the 2 databases so that new changes are reflected into the new one. 
15. Change DNS Settings from your domain name registrar. Point the new server to the domain name, by inputting IP adresses for your DNS primary servers (NS1 & NS2)
16. Upload a static maintenance page on your old web server. Note: you can choose to go through this previous to step 15, depending on your setup.
17. The propagation of the new DNS settings can take from 15 minutes to 24 hours. It means a few users will see right away the website from your new web server, but most people will take up to 1 day to see the new changes. For this transfer, you need then to ask your old web hosting provider to suspend your account and stop payement, 72 hours after the DNS switch. 
18.  Last (optional) update to do: change your emails settings in your email software (Microsoft Outlook, Mail.app, Thunderbird)

Voilà! Of course, if you have multiple websites, you have to go through this process for each website. I hope this guide will be useful for you, to get quickly a website online with iWeb

Please read about our community project. Join the iWeb community on Twitter, Friendfeed, or one Facebook, or by email.

Looking at growing websites like digg or new start-ups like Friendfeed, it struck me how active those communities can be, with their users apparently plugged in 24 hours a day, and submitting a never-ending flow of information, and users challenging each other to bring new witty comments or content. Trend-setters have dubbed these websites as the future of the Internet, so I have taken the opportunity to analyze why these services are growing and generating interest from their users.

We can see at the same time legacy media empires like the Tribune or the New York Times having trouble converting their business models to the Internet. They are converting their content to a web format, but they have trouble getting enough revenues comparable to their print business.

Here’s a comparison of different media, their format, and their uniqueness:

As you can see, each kind of medium has its pros and cons. The strength of print (newspapers and books), and television are known, it’s just now that we are completely aware of the advantages of the Internet. Summed up from the table, the Internet has very high interactivity, real-time delivery of information, small tidbits of information, very high collaboration potential, and low barriers of entry. One aspect of the Internet that is still being dealt with is the design of sustainable business models.

In practice, Wordpress, friendfeed, youtube, facebook, RSS feeds are direct implementations of the characteristics described in the previous paragraph. This is what the internet is for, and ultimately, we will see more of these services in the future. If you are running a website, you should have a close look at those, and try to get advantage of the Internet’s uniqueness.

In the same way that web site designers must spend time to design sites which take advantage of the Internet’s uniqueness and its strengths, web entrepreneurs should also take the time to design new business models, native to the web, which take advantage of the the Internet’s strenths.

This is 2009’s first day, and as such, I wish a great successful 2009 year for all readers and all customers of iWeb, on behalf of the iWeb team. As written previously, the previous year has been exceptional for the web, with its share of crisis, but most importantly with key innovations, revolutions & growth. For iWeb, this year is simple: provide you with the best web hosting services in the industry, with trusted, solid and better products and services.

This is also an ideal day to sit back and think what you and your company would like to achieve this year, a due exercise to start afresh with new objectives and new motivation.

Here are a few ideas to tinker with, if you are a web developer or programmer:

• look at traffic figures, and plan appropriate capacity for servers
• see if it would be easy to improve performance of the website, by working on the most immediate & easily fixable issues,
• install monitoring services,
• take the opportunity to update software you are using, or uninstall unused software. You might have missed a critical update, and starting fresh could boost performance of your server, with the same existing resources.
• do a security check-up of your server
• learn one or two new technologies from this list: javascript (see capuccino), objective-C, java (android), ruby (Rails 3), python (Google App Engine) etc.
• technology changes fast. So be sure to subscribe to the iWeb blog to get updates on new web technologies or any other new software relevant to the web hosting industry.

If you are a business owner or a consultant, here are other ideas:

• see how using web applications like the Zoho suit can save you money, instead of using desktop applications.  You can also use new online services for recruting, accounting, sales, marketing to capitalize on untapped resources
• see how web services like ning.com, Facebook group, pages and applications, twitter, or by having a company blog can provide you with guerilla marketing and promotion
• get metrics about your web presence. use web analytics (such as percute) to nail your most valuable customers, and focus on them to drive sales and revenue. You can also think about PPC advertising to reach more of those valuable customers.
• be up-to-date with latest web marketing news by subscribing to the iWeb blog

If you are into web entrepreneurship, if you are launching new web destinations and new web startups, here are a few ideas for 2009:

• Get real now and find paying customers. Focus on providing services to customers that will save them money, make them more productive, or get them immediate returns. Do not hesitate to differentiate and nail a niche where you will excel, instead of wasting resources into trying to capture entire markets.
• Track metrics, such as monthly revenues per member, cost of acquisition, viral loop coefficient, etc
• be lean, capitalize on rapid development and user-centric development
• keep an eye on growing markets: mobile (iPhone & Android), social platforms (facebook , twitter & associates), Asia (china and south-east asia), etc.
• Be up-to-date with latest tech news by subscribing to the iWeb blog (of course)

If you have any other ideas or resolutions for 2009, don’t hesitate to share with other readers in the comments area.

(Image Credits: Melbourne New Year’s Eve Fireworks)