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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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.

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!).

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?

… and I’ll be on it when it takes off again.  I’m flying Emirates to Dubai (then on to Melbourne) on Monday 26 July and it just happens to be Newcastle Airport’s 75th birthday. As part of the celebrations, Emirates are flying a 777 into the airport – the longest plane to land at Newcastle, and 50% bigger than the Airbus A330 which normally flies the Newcastle-Dubai route.

This means that I will have a comfier ride to Dubai and plenty of entertainment for the kids.

Maybe they’ll upgrade me to first class as well to make it a real birthday celebration.  Here’s hoping…

Basically, there is a key combination – somewhere around the “A” on my keyboard, probably involving the control and perhaps the shift keys, and is so easy to accidentally press when not being careful, that locks up all my keyboard input.

When I say “locks up”, I mean that the keyboard becomes completely unresponsive. Nothing gets it back, except a full reboot, and if you know how long my PC takes to boot, you would realise it is not very convenient (I do manage to make a cup of tea while it boots, which is a bonus, kind of).

I have tried unplugging and plugging back in the keyboard. I have tried undocking the PC (I use a Toshiba Tecra laptop in a docking bay). I have tried logging off and on again. Yes, I have tried logging off and on again. None of this works; only a full reboot does the job.

It locks up both the external Logitech keyboard and the laptop’s built-in keyboard, so there appears to be no workaround.

So – what could this be? I have a feeling it is some kind of “feature” that is misbehaving, but cannot think what it could be. I have not even been able to find the key combination purposefully to give me any more clues. It just happens, and when it does I know my fingers were pressing some keys around the “A” end of the keyboard.

I have a feeling I will never find a solution to this. Perhaps I need a new laptop.

Step 1 was to create a list of URLs that needed screengrabs. I wrote an small PHP that printed a list of URLs (one per line) which I then saved to a text file:

http://www.siteroom.co.uk/

http://www.consil.co.uk/

The first tool I came across was WebShot. The GUI interface is simple, but there’s far more flexibility using the command line. This is the command I used to run a batch of screenshots listed in the text file I created earlier

webshotcmd.exe /in "C:\screenshots.txt"

The tool worked well and uses Internet Explorer to render the web pages (so make sure you have the latest version!). You can also add parameters to your batch list too. I wanted the width of the image to be 1280px wide, rather than defaulting to the width of the web page, and also to use custom file names.

/url "http://www.siteroom.co.uk/" /bwidth "1280" /out "C:\screenshots\siteroom.jpg"
/url "http://www.consil.co.uk/" /bwidth "1280" /out "C:\screenshots\consil.jpg"

Unfortunately the free version only renders screengrabs in black and white.

I settled on Grab them all – a Firefox addon. Although it doesn’t have advanced features like watermarking, it does boast enough options for my needs. You’ve also got the benefit of Firefox’s web page rendering engine, which means screengrabbing the page with all the good-looking CSS3 features.

Options can be tweaked by going:

Tools > Add-ons > Extensions > Grab them all ‘Options’ button

I was able to change the filename from Base64 to the URL and set the width of the window. To run the program go to:

Tools >> Grab them all

Pass it the simple list of URLs (one URL per line) and let it run its magic!