Updates

• Joomla 1.5: 1.5.7 -> 1.5.8
• Moodle: 1.9.2 -> 1.9.3
• PHPlist: 2.10.5 -> 2.10.7
• SMF: 1.1.6 -> 1.1.7
• Xoops: 2.0.18.1 -> 2.3.1

If you are utilizing any of these software packages on your website, please upgrade as soon as possible.

If you want to add it to your own blog it’s quite easy. First you need to define the style sheet in within your head tags like this:

<link type="text/css" media="print" href="http://www.example/com/css/print.css" rel="stylesheet" />

The key parts are media=”print” and then the proper href to your style sheet.

What you put in the print style sheet is really up to you. We decided to drop a number of the visual elements, the top navigation and the sidebar. They are great when you are viewing on-line but don’t really help on a printed copy. Here is a small snipped of our print style sheet:

#sidebars { display: none; }
#footerlinks { display: none; }
sociable { display: none;}

As you might guess, the display: none causes that division to not be rendered/displayed.

So if it makes sense for your blog, it’s really quite easy to add support for printing. It may take a little extra time to keep the two style sheets in syc but it’s a feature your readers may really enjoy.

cPanel’s concept of Add-On, Parked and Sub-domains are very confusing for the first time cPanel user. This article will explain each of them and when/why you would use them.

We’ll start out with the easiest concept which is a domain. Before I can explain a domain there needs to be a brief discussion about “Top Level Domains” (TLD). No one really gives TLD’s that much thought. It’s really hard to define what a TLD is, so I’ll simply provide a sample list here:

• .com
• .net
• .org
• .co.uk
• .jp

There are 100’s of different TLD’s (as well as country code TLD’s but you get the idea, right?) Domains then are pretty simple. It’s just any name that you pick (that follow domain naming rules) that are just to the left of the TLD. For the rest of our example here we’re just going to work the really simple “sample.com” domain.

So what are sub/add-on/parked domains?

We’ll start out with sub-domains first. You don’t realize it, but you use sub-domains every day. A sub-domain is simply the name just to the left of your domain name. The universally accepted sub-domain for web sites (drum roll please) is “www”. So while everyone “thinks” of their domain as www.sample.com, “www” is really a sub-domain of sample.com. Other popular sub-domains are “mail’ and “ftp”. See, that was pretty simple, wasn’t it?

At this point your’re probably asking yourself “why would I ever need a sub-domain other than www?”. There are a lot of good reasons. Some of them include “blog.domain.com”, “forum.doman.com”, “secure.domain.com” and “devel.domain.com”. Each of these sub-domains could have been created as www.domain.com/forum and www.domain.com/blog but there is one big technical difference. With www.domain.com/forum and www.domain.com/blog they both physically have to be on the same server becuase there is only one DNS record for www.domain.com. With sub-domains like blog.domain.com and forum.domain.com each sub-domain has it’s own DNS record and therefore can be on different servers. The fact that you can put the different sub-domains on different servers is not particularly useful for most cPanel web hosting clients but if you have an very large/active site you many want out put devel.domain.com on a totally different server than www.domain.com

Parked domains are pretty straight forward. When you park a domain in cPanel it simply lets one site respond to multiple names. So again, with our sample.com domain you could park sample.org and sample.net on sample.com and you would see the exact same web site for www.sample.com, www.sample.net and www.sample.org. The real confusion with parked domains is that cPanel uses a different meaning for “parked” vs. the rest of the domain world. When most people think of parked domains they think of a landing page that your domain registrar gives you to “park” your web site before you create a real one. If you simply think of cPanel’s parked domains as domain aliases I think it’s a lot less confusing.

Add-on domains in cPanel are also pretty straight forward. They literally let you “add-on” another domain to your hosting account so you can host multiple domains from a single cPanel account. So how does cPanel do this magic? Most of it has to do with the configuration of the web server and of course, you don’t have to worry about that. The only thing you really need to be concerned with is “where do I put my files?”. With cPanel your web pages will be put in your public_html directory. When you add-on domains (unless you change cPanel’s defaults) they will simply be directories under your public_html directory. Visually they look like this:

/public_html/
/public_html/domain2.com
/pubic_html/domain3.com

So what is this 1+1 and 1+10 nonsense on the Doreo web site?

OK, first off, let’s blame that on the marketing guys, ok? This is simply the best notation we could come up with to explain how many accounts you can host on a single Doreo hosting account. With our SH-A plan you can host one main domain (the one you sign up for) and then you can add one more sub-domain or add-on domain or parked domain. With the SH-B plan you can host one main domain and then up to ten more sub/add-on/parked domains. It does not matter how many of which kind as long as the totally does not exceed ten.

Hopefully this clears up the mystery a bit about sub/add-on and parked domains (and why you’d use them). If things are still not quite clear please feel free to contact Doreo sales (by phone, chat or email) and we’ll do our best to explain it.

We feel very honored to have the Doreo Hosting web site design featured in the book “The Web Designers Idea Book”. The book was written by Patrick McNeal who runs the very popular Design Meltdown web site (Doreo Hosting is featured on the web site also in the Hosting section). Doreo is on page 38 of the book.

What is Xobni?

Xobni is a free plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, so if your not an Outlook user, it’s time to move on (sorry). More importantly here is what Xobni does:

• Search you email (really fast)
• Get analysis about your emails
• Get contact information
• Quickly find attachments
• It’s FREE!

Everyday I get dozens and dozens of emails that I have to save from vendors, clients etc. I do my best to both automatically and manually file these into Outlook folders but sometimes even that is not enough. I “know” I filed that email but I still could not find it. Outlooks built in search (at least in Outlook 2003) is OK, but it’s really slow. With Xobni I can simply start to type a few letters of what I’m searching for and “poof” search result start to come up. You can also easily search for anything. It could be a persons last name, a part number, etc.

Once you have completed your search the real magic of Xobni starts. Xobni will return the search results in five sections. The first part of the search results is the analysis. It will show you a histogram of when you receive emails from this contact. While this may just seem “cute” at first knowing when you receive email from someone may help you know when the best time to reply to them (and they will read it). Next to the histogram Xobni will display the contacts picture from their Linkedin profile (if they have one). I deal with a lot of people only by email or phone so it’s kind of nice to have a “face” to go with the voice/name.

The second section in the search results are contact information. Xobni will automatically parse the signatures of incoming emails and extract telephone numbers and other contact information. I’ve totally stopped updating my “contacts” information in Outlook and I totally rely on the information from Xobin. If I need to call someone and I dont’ know their telephone number I just use the search feature to quickly retrieve it.

“Network” is the third section of search results. I have absolutely no idea how it comes up with this list but the results are sometimes pretty amazing. The network contains a list of contact that you have in common with this contact. I’m assuming this is extracted from CC’s on the emails but the results are still pretty amazing.

The last two sections of search results are the real bread and butter of Xobni. The contain conversations and files exchanged. The conversations contains email threads that you’ve had with this contact sorted by date. This lets me easily find a particular email (or thread of emails) from this contact. Once you’ve found the email or thread that you are looking for you can click on it and you’ll get a summary of all the messages in the thread. From there you can open the mail, reply to it or forward it.

Files exchanged is similar to the conversations except it shows you all the attachments that you have exchanged with this contact. I use this feature when I know someone sent me an attachment but I can’t remember when. Once you have searched for the contact you can easily scroll through the list of attachments and find it.

Xobni is not going to solve all of your problems. It does not organize or file your mail. It doesn’t make your coffee or clean windows. What it does (and I think it does it very well) is help you find what your looking for in the (admin it) huge stash of email that your collecting every day.

• Easy top navigation to the major categories.
• Overall up time and spam statistics in the sidebar.
• More white space / larger fonts so it’s easier to read.
• Better support for printing.
• Gravatar support in comments.

We’d love to hear what you think of the new layout.

Updates

• Drupal: 6.4 -> 6.6
• Gallery: 2.2.6 -> 2.3
• SMF: 1.1.5 -> 1.1.6
• TikiWiki: 2.1 -> 2.2
• WordPress: 2.6.2 -> 2.6.3

If you are utilizing any of these software packages on your website, please upgrade as soon as possible.

• Total Messages: 2,531,410
• Allowed Messages: 256,272 (10.12%)
• Blocked Messages: 2,275,138 (89.86%)

A quick breakdown of why messages were blocked:

• RBL 1,954,700 (77.22%)
• Spam 238,425 (9.42%)
• RFC 60,957 (2.41%)
• RP DNS 15,658 (0.62%)
• RP Sanity 2,709 (0.11%)
• Virus 2,372 (0.09%)
• Redlist 317 (0.01%)

October was another very good month for Uptime at Doreo Hosting. We archived 100% uptime for all servers. Year to date we’re at 99.992% for the year.

• epsilon - 100.0%
• mars - 100.0%
• mail31 - 100.0%
• minbar - 100.0%
• vorlon - 100.0%
• web32 - 100.0%
• web43 - 100.0%
• whitestar - 100.0%

Updates

• Help Center Live: 2.1.4 -> 2.1.7
• LimeSurvey: 1.53+ -> 1.7
• Noahs Classifieds: 1.3 [Patched-1] -> V8 (2.4.1)
• Open-Realty: 2.5.2 -> 2.5.3
• TikiWiki: 2.0 -> 2.1

If you are utilizing any of these software packages on your website, please upgrade as soon as possible.