esn studio

News has it that in the very near future, organisations will be able to purchase personalised top-level domain names such as .bank, .wine, .school, .microsoft, etc.

Currently all web addresses fall under one of a set number of top-level domain names. There are 240 .country or .territory domains, and some 20 generic ones, from .com, .net and .org to .gov, .edu or .aero.

Under the new system, the web’s 1.3 billion users would be able from early 2009 to buy an unlimited number of generic addresses based on common words, brands, company names, cities and proper names, according to ICANN.

To avoid chaos, Damilaville said the ICANN also adopted a motion designed to “limit the abusive registration of new domain names”.

None of the new names is likely to dethrone “.com” as the world’s leader, and critics fear new suffixes will merely force companies and organisations to spend more money registering names such as “microsoft.paris” simply so others can’t.

With the stock of available web addresses under the current IPv4 protocol set to run out by 2011, ICANN has been under pressure to find a solution for burgeoning demand.

The online trading site eBay is one of the many companies that wants to have its own domain name.

Broad product groups such as .bank or .car are also likely contenders.

Source: Rule changes to spark domain name goldrush

Although there are many benefits of the new system, and organisations will be rushing to secure broad categories and products such as .fashion, .car, .technology, I think it is a little ridiculous for normal internet users to spend $US100,000 just to obtain a personalised top-level domain name.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, icann, top-level domain names

DELETE FROM `tablename` WHERE `created` < DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 5 DAY);

DELETE FROM `tablename` WHERE `created` < DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 1 MONTH);

One of the reasons why many people do not change their default security key for their wireless network router is because they do not know how to encrypt them into 64/128/152/256-bits HEX format. But with these WPA/WEP key generators, you can sleep better at night knowing that your wireless network is no longer using the default key A1B2C3D4E5.

• WPA encryption Key Generator
• Generate a secure password
• WEP key generator (64, 128, 152, 256 bits)
• WEP key from passphrase generator
• Wireless LAN Key generator

Technorati Tags: wireless, security, router, wep, key generator, wap

It looks like google takes into account the location of your web server/host when ranking its search results. As most people know, in google search you can specify if you would like to search for pages from a specific country.

Let’s see what impact the location of the web server (the IP address of the web server) has on google search ranking.

My web host is physically located in UK, and therefore, when I searched for “wordpress themes” using google UK search, this site came up as #1. However, for google Australia search, my site is no where to be found in the first 10 result pages. As for google USA search (or default google search), my site appears in page 4.

So this is something to take into consideration when you are trying to achieve #1 position in google search.

Update: Google allows you to set a particular geographic location for your website which influences country-specific search results using its Webmaster Tools.
Thanks Alex for the heads-up. :)

Technorati Tags: seo, google, search, ranking, wordpress themes

Finally, google has written an official blog post about its new favicon. Apparently, what you are seeing is not the final version - google’s design team is still working towards a more unified set of icons for the brand.

Favicon iterations

Technorati Tags: design, google, favicon