It’s taken longer than we hoped, but finally Siteroom is live! Oh yeah, I better explain what Siteroom is …

Siteroom was originally conceived as a way to offer high quality websites at reasonable prices, for small businesses and startups. In the last 18 months there has been a revolution in the way in which WordPress (a popular web platform) is used to create websites. Developers can create powerful sites in a fraction of the time, using web templates. There are thousands available, but the quality varies widely. We’ve cherry-picked the best, and entered into agreements with the template authors, so we can show you their designs in Siteroom. Unlike other website developers, we decided to make the process transparent – and our clients can pick their designs, and decide if they want any custom features and add-ons. And unlike other website template sites – you don’ty have to spend days and weeks trying to put your site together – we build it for you. But that’s just the start …

When we got our heads together we realised that SMEs often need more than just websites to grow and promote themselves online. Some of our clients would be ready to go live with their new website, then a delay would occur because they didn’t have the text (web copy) ready. Others needed branding or marketing advice. So, we decided to also offer the key supporting services that small businesses needed to make their websites work, and, more importantly their business grow, online. Take that a step further and Siteroom is a one-stop-shop for small businesses; marketing, branding, copywriting, design, websites, SEO and free business advice, all ‘under one roof’. A key difference with Siteroom is that we try to remove the hassles – and let our clients get on with their core business, not tasks such as website development or copywriting!

We have lots of exciting plans, new additions and ideas in the pipeline. We’ve also got happy customers already. But enough blather from me; take a look at Siteroom, version 1 and let us know what you think – we value your feedback!

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No computer or internet access for our fortnight in the north, but back in Melbourne now for the last few days of our holiday.  We’ve gone from 36 degrees back down to 14 in Melbourne, but the sun has been shining so that helps.

Yellow Water, Kakadu

It’s been 16 years since I first went to Kakadu in the Northern Territory.  Last time I was there it was late October, the end of the dry season and the ‘build up’ to the wet, so – as might be expected – the park was very dry.

This year, the wet didn’t finish until the end of May, which is very late, so consequently there was a lot of water around this time, which made it look really beautiful – all very green and the wetlands were plentiful.

One highlight was watching the sunset from Ubirr Rock – looking out across Arnhem Land – the view goes on for miles.

Crocodile on Yellow Water, Kakadu

The other highlight was the crocs – saw plenty of those (some a little too close for comfort). We took a cruise on Yellow Water and saw some really ugly bruisers.  Yuck. Nathan was the only one on the boat who thought we weren’t close enough to the big salty.

The week before we went out to the Great Barrier Reef for a spot of snorkelling and a trip on the glass bottomed boat – the boys were particularly keen to see the coral and all the fish.  We got to swim with a turtle as well as a stingray, but did think the coral looked in a lot poorer state compared with 1994 when we last visited that section.

General election, Labor (sic) loses its majority, the result is a hung parliament, everyone scrabbling around trying to woo the independents, the first Green Party candidate is elected to the lower house – no one is currently governing the country.  Sounds familiar?  Yep, same thing has happened here.  It’s looking like the right wing (‘Liberal’) coalition will be the ones able to make the numbers up, but as yet nothing confirmed.  Australia holds its elections on a Saturday as it is a legal requirement to vote.  We arrived back in Melbourne on election day, so went along to the polling station.  There were two voting slips – one for the lower house (House of Representatives) and one for the upper house (Senate).  They have PR here, and you have to number all your preferences – your vote is invalid if you only number say your first two choices, and fail to put numbers in the other boxes.  However, for the constituency we were in, for the upper house seat, there were 61 candidates.  Hmm, voting can take some time!  Still, that was an improvement on the last election, when there were 84 candidates!

Yep, plenty of koalas – and also lots of beautiful birds visited us in our treehouse at Wye River – a gorgeous view of the sea through the gum trees – and the lorikeets, parrots, rosellas, kookaburras and cockatoos keeping us company on our deck.  We also saw kangaroos, wallabies and emus on our drive through through the Grampians – i bet they were finding it cold, it got down to 5 degrees.

We’re leaving the southern Australian winter for 2 weeks, heading north to Cairns, checking out the Barrier Reef.  Yesterday we visited 5 wineries in the Barrossa Valley, so we’ll have to declare our purchases when we land back in the UK.  I had tasted so many different wines through the afternoon, that I turned down wine with my evening meal – one of the wines I tasted (at Wolf Blass) sells for $169 a bottle, which is just over 100 pounds (there’s no pound sign on this Aussie laptop!).

Plesk-based hosting can often suffer from a resilience problem: failure of the DNS for sites it hosts if the server goes down for any reason.

Ideally a zone should have a number of domain name servers located in different places. A zone is basically a domain and all its sub-domains. The zone record tells other servers where to find everything for that domain – where the websites are, the main servers etc.

Plesk run on a server or virtual server (VPS) generally provides two name servers. They will be configured automatically when websites are set up on the server, and are very convenient to use. Plesk also allows some customisation of the domain records so that, for example, a sub-domain can point to another server, or the mail server points to your office server.

The problem comes when the server running Plesk is down or inaccessible. A mail server trying to send an email to your domain will suddenly find there is no record anywhere of that domain – it has basically dissappeared.

The way around this is to use external name servers. By setting up the external name servers as a slave servers, they can be made to automatically keep themselves updated from your master name servers on your hosting machine.

For our domain, I used www.zoneedit.com to set up a slave for one of our zones. The slave was pointed at our hosting server (using its IP address) and that was it for that end – the zoneedit slave just fetches updates when it is appropriate and updates its own records, putting them onto two geographically-separated name servers of its own.

Back to the domain registration settings, I then needed to add the zoneedit name servers to the domain, giving me four in total (the two on our Plesk hosting and the two on zoneedit). There is no priority assigned to any of these name servers, so a server looking for our website or mail server could go to any of these sources. It is therefore very important to ensure they are all synchronised identically.

One last step was to tell Plesk to allow these name servers to fetch a copy of the zone records. This is not so obvious but is in Plesk under the option:

Server -> DNS Settings -> Common ACL

In here I added the IP addresses of the two zoneedit name servers assigned to my zone, and then the updates simply went ahead.

You can test this works using nslookup command from another server. Create a new sub-domain, then check it can be seen on your Plesk server:

nslookup new.sub-domain.example.com ns.plask-server.example.net

Then try the same command but pointed at the external name server. You will find the external name server cannot see the sub-domain immediately. Try again in an hour – and it should be there. If not, check your setting and TTL etc.

Hopefully that will give you more resilience; even if your website is down, other severs that your zone points to are still locatable.

One thing that I am still looking for a solution to, is domain aliases. A domain alias for a domain set up in Plesk will not get transferred to the slave name server. Even if the alias is a sub-domain of the main domain, it does not get transferred. So the hosting server will correctly return the IP address for example.com for the alias myalias.example.com, but the slave name servers will not. This is not just a problem for when your hosting server goes down, because there is no priority on the name servers – all and any could be used at any time for a server to locate your alias domain, and depending on which name server it hits, it is pot luck as to whether it finds it or not. I’m looking for a solution to this, so any hints appreciated.

I’m also looking for a decent and cheap slave name server service. zoneedit is good and reliable, and easy to use, but could get costly when we have scores of domains to sync up. Any suggestions?