Domain names

Recently I had to resurrect some of my high traffic sites after they were down for a few weeks due to hosting trouble. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they still had some traffic coming to them and I started earning immediately. This made me realise how valuable the domain name of a successful website is:

PKNIC is the registry responsible for the .pk country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for Pakistan. .pk domains are very popular in Pakistan and with good reason. There are lots of premium word .pk domains still available and companies that purchase .pk domains enjoy the natural targeted traffic that these domains bring.

I had a few unused domain names so I decided to put them to use as URL shortening websites.

In case your unfamiliar with the concept, a URL shortening website takes your long website addresses or URLs and shortens them into short and search engine friendly URLs. A URL shortening site saves you from having to use long URLs that can break in your emails, forum posts and IM messages.

So here are my newly formed URL shortening sites. Use anyone of them to shrink your URLs:

TC7 URL shortening

TE9 URL shortening

SI9 URL shortening

BS2 URL shortening

FI9.org URL Shortening service

Every site has the same web 2.0 design but in different colours. So if you like blue visit bs2.org or if you prefer red then go to te9.org .

I use my own script for all these sites. The programming logic is simple. The site accepts a long URL and INSERTs it into a database. A short URL is made by appending the primary key of the newly inserted row to the short url site's domain. When a user visits a short URL the primary key is received by the script as a query string and it simply looks up the relevant URL in the database and redirects the user. Throw in a bit of mod_rewrite goodness to get rid of the query string and you have yourself a URL shortening site.

I'll be adding more sites soon as I have a number of unused domains!

Often when switching hosts or signing up at new host you'll have to set your domain's name servers to your new website host's name servers. This step is necessary because it allows your new host's servers to receive and serve requests for your website from your visitor's browsers. However the Domain Name System (DNS) is such that it takes time for this new mapping between your domain name and your host's servers to propagate across the Internet. Depending on your new host's DNS servers and your Internet Service Provider it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days before you will be able to access your website via the domain name. If, in the meantime, you want to upload files to your website and test it you will need to edit your Windows HOSTS file to manually map your domain name to your web host's IP address.

The first step is finding out the IP address of your new host's servers. A lot of enlightened hosts include this information in the email they send you when you sign up with them. In that case you can skip to the next step. But if your host does not provide with this info then you will have to do an ns lookup:

• Go to http://www.kloth.net/services/nslookup.php
• Type in your domain name, your web host's DNS name server and make sure that the query field says ip address.
• Click on lookup and you should see your site's new ip address.

Next open up your windows HOSTS file using your favourite text editor such as notepad. You can open this file by copy pasting %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS into your editor's open file window. In most cases you can also try C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS . Keep in mind that the file has no extension.

Open up the file and on a new line type in your host's ip address followed by a space and your domain name. For ex:

208.113.192.208  websitetheme.com

You may also prefer to add the www version:

208.113.192.208 www.websitetheme.com

Save the file and try to access your site by typing in your domain name in your favourite browser. It should work now! To enable ftp access add another line with the ftp subdomain:

208.113.192.208 ftp.websitetheme.com

Using this technique you should be able to access your site while DNS is being propagated.

Recently I have been buying a lot of domain names for resale and I have had to provide contact information that is publicly accessible in the whois database. This database is widely used by spammers to harvest email addresses. But I figured out a way to make my email address public whilst limiting the number of spammers that harvest it. The key is to create an email address with the words "nospam" in it.

The idea behind this is simple. Lots of users disguise their real email addresses by adding nospam to it. Then they instruct their friends to remove nospam before using their email address. In fact this technique is so common that spam software has adapted to it and it automatically removes "nospam" from any email address that contains it. So by creating an email address that does contain "nospam" in it you are fooling spammers into using the wrong address. For example my domains carry the email address domain-nospam@abdussamad.com . Spam bots harvest it as domain-@abdussamad.com which is non-existent. Of course I do remind humans that the email address is to be used without modification by making that clear in a note in the address field. How well has this technique worked? In more than a month since making this email address public I have recieved only two spam messages. In my book thats not too bad.