intermittent chatter

So far I have written about how to “manually” switch hosting providers i.e. how to backup and restore the files. Following is the list of previous posts:

• Shift website hosting - part 1 (static site)
• Shift website hosting - part 2 (leftover emails)
• Shift website hosting - part 3(1) (dynamic sites, CMS)
• Shift website hosting - part 3 (2) (dynamic sites, Forums and Blogs)
• Shift website hosting - part 3(3) (dynamic sites, all types) - least downtime

There is another easier way to do this through cPanel.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the 5th post in the series for shifting websites from one server to another. The earlier posts in this series were as follows:

1. Shift website hosting - part 1 (static site)
2. Shift website hosting - part 2 (leftover emails)
3. Shift website hosting - part 3 (1) (dynamic sites, CMS)
4. Shift website hosting - part 3 (2) (dynamic sites, Forums and Blogs)

In my last post I mentioned that series of manually transferring the sites was complete. But then I thought about this new way of transferring dynamic sites (with a database) with minimum downtime. Irrespetive of DNS propogation or DNS cache with ISPs, this method can transfer your dynamic sites almost instantly. Downtime will only last the amount of time you take in transferring the database from old hosting provider to new hosting provider. In my opinion, this is the most efficient way of transferring dynamic sites. Here are the steps.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the 4th post in the series for shifting websites from one server to another. The earlier posts in this series were as follows:

1. Shift website hosting - part 1 (static site)
2. Shift website hosting - part 2 (leftover emails)
3. Shift website hosting - part 3 (1) (dynamic sites, CMS)

In this part, I ennumerate the steps for transferring a forum and a WordPress blog from one hosting provider to another. In earlier posts, I have written the steps in details. However in this post, unless necessary, I have not mentioned the details because they remain almost same.

Read the rest of this entry »

In part 1 of this series I narrated how to shift static sites (i.e. sites without a database) to a new server. In part 2, I wrote about how to get left-over emails after the hosting is shifted. This is the 3rd article in the series which is about shifting dynamic sites (with a database) from one server to another. For the sake of convenience, I have divided this 3rd article in sub-parts and therefore call this one as part 3(1).

There are various types of dynamic sites with databases. The database content is changed by the administrator/owner of the site or the the visitors or both. These are the 4 categories of sites with databases:

Read the rest of this entry »

In part 1, I wrote about shifting static sites from one server to another. This is a small addendum to that post and other posts that I will write about shifting sites. This one is about how to retrieve left-over emails. I kept this separately because the same steps apply whether the site is static or dynamic. It also doesn’t matter how you backup/restore your site. Steps to retrieve emails will remain the same.

Here are the steps in brief. Please note that these steps are to be used after DNS propogation is over and not before that. This is for retrieving mails from “old” hosting account. In my opinion, at least for a week, you need to have access to both the hosting accounts - old and new.

Read the rest of this entry »

Slowly people are realising the importance of paid hosting or at least professional and quality hosting. In website hosting, there is a golden rule - if something is too good to be true, then probably its not true! Many people use free/cheap hosting services to save money. But soon realise that quality of services (uptime, speed, support, etc.) is not upto the mark.

But then comes the dilema of shifting from one server to another and a whole lot of doubts set in, especially for those who have never changed servers!

• How to do it?
• What to do?
• What not to do?
• When to change DNS of domain names?
• What if I lose some important mail in the process?
• and so on …

Here I have enumerated steps of transferring a “STATIC” site. It may look a little confusing if you haven’t done it before, but the steps are pretty straight-forward once you understand the logic behind them. Here are the steps in short:

Read the rest of this entry »

CSS 2.1 Specification, W3C Working Draft was released on 11 April 2006.

CSS2 was released on 12th May 1998 and after almost 8 years, browsers (mainly IE) don’t comply with the standards. Even IE7 won’t comply with CSS2. Here’s an interesting reading from one blog - The Real Reason Microsoft Won’t Support CSS2 in IE7. I wonder when will browsers comply with CSS 2.1.

Here’s something from the draft specifications.

CSS 2.1 builds on CSS2 [CSS2] which builds on CSS1 [CSS1]. It supports media-specific style sheets so that authors may tailor the presentation of their documents to visual browsers, aural devices, printers, braille devices, handheld devices, etc. It also supports content positioning, table layout, features for internationalization and some properties related to user interface.

CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML’s “style” attribute and a new calculation of the ‘clip’ property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. But most of all CSS 2.1 represents a “snapshot” of CSS usage: it consists of all CSS features that are implemented interoperably at the date of publication of the Recommendation.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. About a year ago all that I knew was HTML. I knew that something like CSS exists. But never paid much attention to it and never realised how wonderful it is!! There are so many things that can be done with CSS and that too so easily! My initial impression was that CSS can at best reduce the size of my code by replacing all the attributes in the < font > tag or may be helpful if I need to change the colour scheme of the site. But realised later that its much more than that!! CSS can do things which plain HTML simply cannot!!

Here’s a description of CSS from Eric Meyer, one of the well know experts on CSS:

Cascading Style Sheets is a standard way to separate a document’s structure from its presentation. This sounds very abstract, but the benefits are quite surprising and profound. In theory, CSS makes one’s life easier by creating a centralized description of Web document appearance. Any Web designer will likely come up against a situation where he or she really should use them, and many will no doubt use CSS to do things they never could do before.

People, including me, have been using tables for desired layout of pages. It was so easy and so convenient! But it had its own drawbacks. Tables are not search engine friendly and bloat the sizes of the page! But CSS is far more powerful and capable of doing lots of things in a lot better way. The CSS Zen Garden is a great site that showcases the power of CSS. On that site the HTML code remains the same, but simply by changing the underlying CSS file, the entire looks are changed drastically!

In my opinion, CSS is a must learn thing for those who are even a little serious about designing web-pages. Whether a person designes pages as a profession or as a hobby, he simply can’t ignore CSS! W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) also recommends it. Here is W3C’s CSS section and here is its CSS Code Validator. CSS is too good to be missed and the first place to start learning it is W3Schools! See you there!

I had registered a couple of .in domains with Indiatimes. After having a pathetic experience for something as small as changing DNS, I renewed and transferred my domains to mailNspace domains.

Although I have shifted, I received a renewal mail which said renewal charges applicable are 399!! I became curious. I thought charges were 795. I clicked on the link given in the mail and then on one more link and got to a page which said charges were 795. Below are the screen shots.

IMO, Indiatimes goofed up on 2 counts. First, they sent me a renewal mail. Don’t they get rid of old records? Second, their mail showed a wrong rate! Don’t they have someone who checks and thouroughly proof-reads the drafts of outoging mails to customers? If they don’t improve, they will surely have more and more customers like me that shift elsewhere.