April 2006 Newsletter

This newsletter focuses on a variety of interesting topics. We have a new service called Private Domain Registration that allows you to protect your contact details when you register a domain name. You’ve probably heard of RSS feeds, but for some, it’s still a mystery as to what they are, so we’ve got a great introductory guide to RSS feeds that builds on last month’s article on creating a blog. And lastly, two great articles on web logs and site traffic statistics to help you better understand activity on your web site.

Topics:

Keep Your Private Information Private – Try Private Domain Registration
Did you know that when you register a domain name, your contact information (name, email address, phone, mailing address) is publicly available on the Internet? The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet’s governing body of domain names, requires that every domain owner’s contact information be listed in an online database, which is available on WHOIS searches at domain provider (registrar) sites.

Spammers and telemarketers use this contact information to send unsolicited email or junk mail to domain owners. But now there’s help for you – Concentric is now offering Private Domain Registration as an optional add-on to your domain name registration for only $8.95/year–that’s only $.75 per month. How does it work? For your personal email address, phone number, and mailing address, the domain registrar uses generic information that actually hides your real personal information. When someone tries to contact you via any of those means, the communication is screened by the domain registrar to make sure you only receive legitimate communications instead of junk or spam mail, or unsolicited telemarketing calls.

The handling for each legitimate inbound communication varies by medium:

  • Email – For email messages determined not to be spam, the sender is sent a reply email with instructions to complete a web form page. If the page is completed correctly, that information is copied to an email message and sent to you (this will help reduce spam because spammers will not go to the trouble of completing that form correctly!)
  • US Postal mail – Only mail sent “certified” or “signed for” will be accepted. This mail will be opened, scanned and emailed to the registrant. The registrant may then request that the original paper mail be sent COD to their mailing address on record with the registrar.
  • Phone – The caller will hear a phone message directing them to a Web form that will be used to submit a message if the form is completed correctly.

Here is an illustration of how Private Domain Registration hides your personal contact information (Names and addresses are fictitious for example only):

WHOIS listing now What would be displayed with
Private Domain Registration
Organization name John Q. Public John Q. Public
Organization address 55 First Street P.O. Box 1234
Organization address San Jose Emeryville
Organization address 95113 94662
Organization address CA CA
Organization address US US
Admin Name John Q. Public John Q. Public
Admin address 55 First Street P.O. Box 1234
Admin address San Jose Emeryville
Admin address 95113 94662
Admin address CA CA
Admin address US US
Admin email john.public@concentric.com address@myprivateregistration .com
Admin phone 408-817-2800 510-595-0000

Note that this feature is not available for domains with the .us top level domain, but is available on all .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info domains that you have registered through Concentric. Please review the Private Domain Registration FAQs (requires login) for instructions on enabling this feature.

Usage hint: If you register a new domain name (either as a domain alias to your account or in a separate Concentric account), we strongly recommend enabling the Private Domain Registration option at the same time you register the domain name. (There is an option for it on the domain registration page.) That way, your personal information will not be displayed in WHOIS listings from the start for your new domain name.

So protect your privacy, yet still have the assurance that you will receive important correspondence or contacts regarding your domain name – sign up for Private Domain Registration today!

Blog RSS Feeds: An Introductory Guide

If you read last month’s article on creating a blog, you should have a pretty good understanding on how to get your blog started (if you didn’t read the article, you can find it here: http://www.concentric.com/blog/?page_id=9#article2).

Whether you’re an individual, simply wishing to get your personal thoughts out to the world, or you’re the CEO of a big corporation, spreading the word about your next product launch, the big question is how to make your blog available to the most amount of people.

And while there are multiple ways to get your business noticed on the Internet (email marketing, banner campaigns, pay-per-click advertisements, podcasting), RSS marketing is one of the easier, yet more powerful technologies available to online marketers today. In fact, because of the stigmas attached to direct email campaigns, blog RSS marketing is quickly becoming the preferred method for disseminating legitimate information out to individual market segments.

And the best part…it’s free!

But first things first. As discussed in the previous article, you first want to get your blog listed in many of the blog aggregators, such as Bloglines or Technorati. This first step will, at the very least, get your blog on the Internet radar, enabling people to find your blog either through a query on your company name or via your company’s product or services category (e.g. your company makes widgets, so if anyone searches for “widget blogs,” your company’s blog will be listed in the results). This will also give you a chance to see what places will list your RSS feed.

The same strategy holds true if you’re an individual blogger wanting to get your latest personal movie reviews on the Internet for everyone to read. If your blog is about something specific, you’ll want people to find you as easily as if you were a big company.

Once your blog is listed with the blog search engines, you’ll want to capture and promote the RSS feed of your postings. An RSS feed (short for Real Simple Syndication) is the ability to “push” your latest blog entries out to those interested in your latest posts without those people having to come directly to your blog. If you’re unfamiliar with the ever-widening world of RSS, you may be surprised to hear that you probably use RSS more frequently than you realize. Sites such as My Yahoo (http://my.yahoo.com) and Google News (http://news.google.com) are mainstream examples of RSS feeds, aggregating news and information in an easy-to-read format. Each story you read on these sites is an RSS feed from somewhere else. Therefore, once you make your own RSS feed available to the world, you—and everyone else—can add your RSS feed to any RSS aggregator page. And just as those mainstream news stories update automatically, so will your own blog entries.

“Okay, I get it now. So how do I do it?”

Good news. If you’re using WordPress with your hosting account, your RSS feed is automatically built for you. Once your blog is up and running, WordPress has a built-in RSS feed already created. If you look at the navigation portion of your blog, you’ll see there is a built-in category called “RSS Feeds.” Click on the link that says “posts.” You’ll see a page that seems like a bunch of code mixed in with your postings. This is your RSS feed in RSS aggregator language (called XML). Fortunately, you don’t need to understand a single word of this mumbo jumbo. The only thing you need is the URL of this page. This URL is your own personal RSS feed. (It will look something like this: http://www.concentric.com/blog/?feed=rss2)

If you are not using WordPress yet, it can be easily turned on by logging in to the XO Gateway (http://admin.cnchost.com) and click on MENU MAP -> WEB TOOLS -> APPLICATIONS -> WORDPRESS INSTALL.

Once you have this URL in hand, you can put an RSS graphic on your website, linking to this URL. You can also put a simple text link, but it’s pretty much a universal icon these days to see that orange RSS button. Once your link is available on your site, those interested can now add your “real-time” blog feed to their own aggregator.

As a quick aside, you may be interested in adding your own RSS feed—and other feeds—to My Yahoo. Here’s a quick rundown on how to do that.

1—Click on the “Add Content” link in My Yahoo
2—Click on the “Add RSS by URL” link, just to the right of the “Find Content” search box.
3—Past your RSS URL into the box and click “Add”

That’s it! Your RSS feed is now part of your My Yahoo page.

Next time, we’ll tackle specific ways you can market your company via blog and RSS feeds.

– Scott Milrad, Concentric Internet Marketing Manager

Web Logs and Log Rolling: Managing Web Logs for Fun and Profit

What are web logs? What is log rolling? Why do I care? If your website gets traffic and you would like to see where that traffic is coming from and where it is going, then your web logs are what you need. These log files are used by several tools to give you traffic reporting. If you have web logging enabled on your account then you might want to roll those logs since web logs take up disk space. Without proper management, those log files can add up. Enabling log rolling to manage your log files will give you space for other things on your site without having to purchase additional resources. Here’s a little bit about how it works:

What are web logs?

If you have web logging enabled, every hit to your website is being logged. Every time someone goes to your site, entries are added to the web logs for everything from regular hits, secure hits, image hits, server-side include file hits, errors, and referring sites. Here is an example of a regular web hit:
—
127.0.0.1 - - [16/Mar/2006:06:42:17 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 1543
“http://unixsource.org/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/417.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/417.9.2″
—
These logs can add up quickly. The more hits you get and the more complex your site is, the more log entries you have, and thusly, the more disk space your logs use. And remember, a “hit” isn’t just a visit to your website, a hit means a hit on your page itself AND a hit for every image on that page as well.

Here’s a good way to break it down: if you had a simple web page with, say, text and two graphics, a single visit to that page would yield approximately 1KB of a log file. Obviously, a typical website has more than two images on a page, and multiple pages that comprise the site. But based on that sample two-image page alone, 1000 visits would accumulate 1MB of log files. And since the log files can exist on your server forever, you can see that over time, this file can add up to a large portion of your disk allotment.

But if I delete my log files, won’t I delete my AWStats statistics?

No! After 24 hours, AWStats has already pulled in the necessary data from your logs and never looks at them again. So ultimately, you’re keeping these files unnecessarily. (One note: if you’re still using Analog for your stats, you do need to keep your logs or you may lose some information. If this is the case then you should seriously consider using AWStats instead).

Where are the logs located and how can I view them?

Your web logs live in /logs/web in your file space. You can access them via FTP or in the Concentric Center under LOGS->WEB LOGS. You can also pull up detailed reports
of your traffic by going to the Concentric Center and clicking on REPORTS->TRAFFIC REPORT to see your traffic graphed in a chart or table, or REPORTS->LOG ANALYSIS to see detailed reports that you can customize.

What do you mean by “log rolling”?

Log rolling is just a term for managing your logs. It’s also the tool that manages the actual web logs. Depending on your settings, the tool will write to new logs on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. It can also delete older log files, freeing up space for other things.

So how do I turn web logging and log rolling on?

Some of you may have one or both of these enabled already. To enable web logging and log rolling go to the Concentric Center and click on LOGS -> WEB LOGS -> LOGGING CONTROLS.

– John Watson, Concentric Software Engineer

Ecommerce Solutions – Something for Everyone

Building an ecommerce-enabled web site has gotten a lot easier in the past few years and we offer a variety of solutions to meet your ecommerce needs.

  • PayPal® - If you are just getting started selling a few items online, want to sell a subscription service, or simply need to take donations from your site, PayPal is made to order.
  • Microsoft® bCentral™ Commerce Manager - If you want a more robust shopping cart and order management system, then bCentral Commerce Manager is easy-to-use and automates what can be time-consuming setup tasks.
  • osCommerce™ - An open source tool with great shopping cart and inventory management features. Its out-of-the-box installation allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain your online stores with minimum effort and with absolutely no costs or license fees involved. All standard hosting accounts include a quick wizard to install osCommerce in your account so you can be up and running in minutes.
PaypalTM Commerce Manager osCommerceTM
Design for user level Novice to advanced Intermediate Intermediate to power user
Compatible with site publishing options Web Builder and most other web site creation programs. Web Builder and most other web site creation programs. All
Product catalog, including search No Yes Yes
Storefront customization Insert buttons or shopping cart into your site. Your site is your storefront. Yes with FrontPage plug-in Yes
Shopping cart and checkout Yes Yes Yes
Payment processing Yes Additional charge Additional charge
Back office order management No Yes Yes
Inventory management No Yes Yes

Web Builder and PayPal - An easy solution!

Getting products and services online with a nice web site has gotten a lot easier with Web Builder. If you haven’t tried Web Builder you can launch it from the Concentric Center at Web Builder | Enable Web Builder. The wizard will help you choose a layout and design to get you started.

Adding ecommerce to your Web Builder site could not be simpler. As you are building a page, simply click on the PayPal icon and walk through the PayPal button wizard.

By using the Paypal wizard from the Web Builder, you’re able to install PayPal links into your site as you go — build product pages, donation links, add-to-cart, and checkout links, all without touching the HTML code.

If you are not using Web Builder, but want to use PayPal, you can access the PayPal Button Factory at http://www.paypalmerchantservices.com/xo. Through the Button Factory you can quickly generate html buttons to integrate with your site.

PayPal accepts most credit card types without having to sign up and pay for expensive merchant accounts. Your email address serves as your PayPal account name and setting up the account is easy at PayPal.com. The PayPal wizard supports the following PayPal payment options:

  • Buy Now - sell an individual item or distributed item such as an article or software.
  • Add to Cart - add items to a PayPal shopping cart.
  • View Cart/Check Out - view or checkout a PayPal shopping cart.
  • Donate - collect donations.
  • Subscription - set up recurring monthly payments against a credit card. Great for membership fees.

Tips and Tricks – Site Traffic Statistics

After building your website, it’s important to know who’s visiting it, how they’re getting to your site, and what they’re doing once they get there. Recently, we upgraded our statistics offering and turned on a powerful log analysis tool that creates easy to understand and highly detailed summaries of your web site traffic. It is an open source reporting tool called “AWStats,” which is short for Advanced Web Statistics.

AWStats produces a report based on the data contained in the server logs that are created for your account. This data is analyzed, processed, then presented in an easy to read report for your use.

AWStats produces a daily online report, and you can choose to receive a monthly email report that is sent at the end of every calendar month. With these reports you can fine-tune your website to better serve your current visitors and also attract new visitors.

To use AWStats, first you must make sure that Web Site Logging is enabled for your account. You can do this using the Logging Controls page under the Logs tab in the Concentric Center’s menu. Then you can enable AWStats processing on its configuration page under the Log Analysis menu of the Reports tab. For further explanation, see the AWStats FAQs.

– Jim McQuillan, Concentric Senior Software Engineer