Website Spark Enhanced
Jul/100
WebsiteSpark membership has expanded to include membership in the Microsoft Partner Network—and web professionals are now able to get listed on Microsoft Pinpoint. If you sign up you can showcase your applications and services, create new opportunities to generate sales leads and drive revenue, and view customer search criteria and traffic analyses of your profiles.
Joomla News
Jul/101
Joomla Hosting
Here’s a few extensions for Joomla CMS that we’ve found very useful so we thought’d we’d share them with you.
- jLoginAlert Emails you when someone tries to login to your site.
- Mobile Joomla Reformats your site to fit mobiles
- JoomArt Extensions Manager Centralised management and updating of extensions
- Docman document/download manager with user login, notifications and a big supporting community.
- VirtueMart free ecommerce extension that can also be used as a catalogue.
- ReDJ allows you to create short urls on your site that redirect to actual pages. See www.2020media.com/contact for an example.
Coming soon for Joomla fans is going to be the release of Joomla 1.6. This is actually quite a major update, the current 1.5 release has been going for around 3 years and the release of 1.6 will open up Joomla far more to integrate with other services. This is an approach the Drupal has used very successfully so its a case of Joomla catching up with how the web is developing now.
Brusells ICANN Meeting
Jun/100
Promotional items from potential new gTLD applicants
2020Media’s Management team attended the recent ICANN (policy making body for gTLD domains and IP numbers) meeting in Brussels, Belgium. The week long conference is part of ICANN 3 annual worldwide meetings to engage with all internet stakeholders, from representatives of government to non-commercial internet using private individuals.
The main topics for discussion were the release of new gTLD (global top level domain names), and the .xxx domain. The last was rather a moot point as ICANN revealed on the last public discussion that they had taken a decision in principle to approve the application, subject to various caveats. After an independent review which found ICANN’s previous decisions was flawed, the board really had few options left.
New domains like .shop, .canon, .london provoked much more discussion, this time about the various guidelines and rules that ICANN has come up with. ICANN is seeking comment on it’s latest release of the applicant guidebook.
Of note to the technically minded was further steps along the road to secure DNS (DNSSEC) with more top level domain signings. The root zone itself is due to go live in July.
10 Years of Tomcat
Jun/101
Apache Tomcat is the world’s most widely used web application server, with over one million downloads per month. Tomcat originated as a Sun Microsystems project, with the goal of providing an example implementation of Sun’s newly created Java Servlet and JSP specifications. Sun developed Tomcat internally through Tomcat 2.x. In 1999, the project was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, where it was developed under the Jakarta project.
Since becoming a separate project in 2005, Tomcat has been developed through version 6.x. The next version of the project, Tomcat 7, is expected sometime in late summer of 2010, corresponding with the release of Servlet 3, which Tomcat 7 will implement.
2020Media has supported servlet hosting for 11 years now. It was the first to offer shared Tomcat hosting in the UK – before Tomcat, it offered J-Run.
Web Professional Offer updated
May/100
WebsiteSpark
2020Media.com already partners with Microsoft to offer web development software at no upfront cost. Now WebsiteSpark membership has been expanded to include a membership in the Microsoft Partner Network. With Microsoft Partner Network membership you get a community of fellow members, evaluation software, expert support, incentives, newsworthy articles and announcements about products and initiatives, lead generation, sales demonstrations, and training.
WebsiteSpark provides software licenses that you can use for three years at no cost. WebsiteSpark also provides a path to get exposure and participate in the developer community (through the Partner Program, BizSpark Camps, etc.).
Datacentre
May/100
This week, the owners of the datacentre where 2020Media colocates it servers officially opened their third building on the Docklands site. In a colourful ceremony involving Japanese saké barrels and glitz and glamour, we were reminded how Telehouse pioneered datacentres in the UK, and how they have maintained their status as the key networking hub of the UK. This is important to 2020Media, as we aim to provide the very fastest connection speeds for our servers and broadband customers.
The evening was rounded off with a speech by Mike Harris about technology pioneers who came out of the blue to disrupt the incumbent processes of the day (Twitter is the most recent). It was also great to hear Tim Berners-Lee described as the inventor of the internet yet again.
Internet Policy – you decide
May/100
How you can become involved and help ICANN to shape the future of the Internet
ICANN, the governing body of the internet is holding two web meetings on 20th May 2010 that are aimed at you. The sessions will be held on Thursday 20 May at 12.00 GMT and 19.00 GMT, and will use a webinar format – all you’ll need is a web browser and internet connection to listen or participate.
If you are wondering whether a role in Internet policy development could benefit your or your organization’s long-term goals, it’s well worth joining.
In order to participate, we suggest you read the announcement here: WEBINAR: Policy Development at ICANN and sign up to join in.
Blackberry Firewall List
Apr/100
It may help to be aware that Blackberry/RIM publish a list of the IP addresses that they use for connections to internet server providers.
The list can be found here.
2020Media’s email services are fully supported on Blackberry mobile devices and we encourage anyone using one to configure their 2020Media email for use remotely.
The best way is to use IMAP for connection as it is the fastest.
Flood and Fire in Paddington affects Broadband
Apr/100
Burne House (courtesy of Google streetview)
A central London network node belonging to BT disastrously flooded and caught fire yesterday.
The incident at Burne House in north Paddington affected landlines, broadband and mobile services across the west of London. Over 400 local exchanges are connected from this site, so connectivity was also affected across the south east and further afield.
“The flood water has been removed from the exchange building overnight and power supply has begun to be restored,” BT said this morning.
“We are now beginning to restore communications services to customers and this work will continue throughout the day.”
The impact of the great torrent/inferno was even felt on the continent. There have been reports that roaming for Vodafone, O2 and 3 customers in Austria is currently down, with operators pointing the finger at Paddington.
Read more at TheRegister
Excluding directories in AJP ProxyPass
Feb/100
Configuring Apache with Tomcat
You might have ProxyPass configured to pass all requests to Tomcat. However its better to serve some content directly from Apache for speed – images for instance. If you arrange your site into a well planned folder structure you can exclude certain folders in proxy_ajp.conf.
You might have this:
ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8080/
Just add this line BEFORE the catch-all above:
ProxyPass /images ! ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8080/
The file is parsed in order, so the exclude must come first.
Watch out for more Tomcat tips and tricks in the future. Information on our market leading Tomcat hosting can be found here
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