Keep track of your new .CO domains
In about two hours from now, .CO Internet S.A.S. is going to open the registration of the .CO top-level domain. Starting from today, individuals, businesses and organizations are able to register a .CO domain name through one of the accredited registrars.
.CO domain name was officially announced in February and, since then, this extension has attracted lot of interest, mainly for its similarity with the international .COM top-level domain. Many well-known companies are using the .CO domain to expand their product or services. For instance, Twitter.com already acquired the T.CO domain name which will probably became its official URL shortener.
Here at RoboDomain we want to join the party and today we’re announcing the full support for .CO domains.
About today outage
We’re currently in the middle of a very long downtime. So far, the server has been unavailable for 930 minutes, which is an unbelievable amount of time, I know. Let me explain what happened.
RoboDomain is currently a free service, but we’re trying to do our best to be as reliable as possible. Unfortunately, this time we failed.
Yesterday we received an email from VPS.net, the current RoboDomain server provider, telling us they were going to move our VPS to a new location, sometime in the next 11 days. In order to prevent unexpected downtime — they said — they also strongly encouraged all VPS owner to start the migration their own. Quoting from their email:
Each move should take a matter of minutes (but you could be queued waiting to do the move), and will require no configuration changes on your end at all.
Unfortunately, this didn’t happen to be true for RoboDomain VPS. The VPS was shut down at 8.30 pm CET and, is still offline. Apparently, the server has been migrated but we can’t access it via SSH and the web console is returning a weird boot error.
Deploy June 16, 2010
Here at RoboDomain we embrace many aspects of agile software development. One of these is the Release Early, Release Often technique.
We usually deploy around 10 new releases every month, but most of them contains small fixes or changes that might go unnoticed.
Inspired by the Harmony’s blog, here’s a brief summary of today’s release.
- Added full whois support for
.ee,.kz,.la,.ec,.uz, and.uytop level domains. RoboDomain should now be able to fetch the correct expiration/creation date when creating a domain. - Fixed broken image path when creating a new Hosting Company.
Changes to the .hu ccTLD Whois response
Last week the Nic.hu, the Hungarian domain authority, silently released an update to their Whois server interface which affected all the .hu domain queries.
All the domain information has been wiped out from new Whois response, including details about domain creation and expiration. This is how the server responds to a google.hu query as of June 1, 2010:
% Whois server 2.02a serving the hu ccTLD domain: google.hu További adatokért ld.: http://www.domain.hu/domain/domainsearch/ For further data see: http://www.domain.hu/domain/English/domainsearch/
Compared to the previous version, this is a massive cut.
Now you can invite everyone to RoboDomain
To celebrate our first-commit anniversary, we are now opening the invitation-beta phase for all our RoboDomain users. Existing users can now invite friends using the invitation form available in their dashboard.
Invited users can immediately open a new account.
If you don’t have any friend and you really want a RoboDomain account, don’t bang your head against the wall, leave your email here. We deliver new invitations almost every day.
Enjoy, and see you on RoboDomain!
SHA f1e22866146242dc7e014748ba11db1bd11435d7
2 years ago, the first commit. Today is the second RoboDomain first-commit anniversary, the first since RoboDomain is publicly available.
This isn’t the real RoboDomain birthday, thought. RoboDomain was officially launched on December 15, 2009. Two years ago, I decided it was the time to stop using spreadsheets to manage my domains and start developing something more efficient.
Refresh your domain Whois information page with a click
A couple of weeks ago we announced the availability of the Whois information page for every domain in your account. Users’ response on that feature has been amazing and we decided to add one more feature: now you can refresh the content of the Whois response at any time by pressing the refresh button.
Autocomplete domain dates with Whois record information
You asked, we did. We are very thrilled to announce you that the most requested feature is now available to every RoboDomain user.
Whenever you create or import new domains, you can now choose to have RoboDomain update the domain dates for you reading the values from the Whois record.
The feature works for all the domains where creation date and/or expiration date are publicly displayed in a Whois query. Unfortunately, not all the domain authorities include this information in their Whois responses, but the list of supported extensions contains some popular TLD such as .com, .net, .de, .org, .it and many others.
As usual, you can always update your domain dates in your domain overview.
In RoboDomain, domain dates are completely detached from Whois record dates.
This is because there are some special circumstances where your domain purchase and/or expiration date doesn’t match the registry record. For instance, when you first register the domain with one maintainer then you move it to an other one, the new maintainer might decide to start billing the domain from the transfer date instead of the real domain expiration.
Remember that RoboDomain expiration notifications are always based on the domain expiration date you set (or we auto-completed for you), not the Whois date.
New Account Dashboard
In our effort to improve RoboDomain design and usability, after domain and transaction sections there was one more area which required some changes: the RoboDomain dashboard.
The dashboard is the first page you see when you login. It should provide you an immediate status of your account, including of course your domains and transactions. While the existing dashboard provided all these details, we agree that it wasn’t that clear especially when you start to have an high number of information stored on your account.
Improved email notifications
Last week I was sharing with a friend of mine a few ideas about how to improve RoboDomain expiring domain notifications. In the middle of the conversation I realized there was a small change I could immediately implement to make the email notifications more meaningful: include the number of days before the expiration immediately in the email subject.
In fact, when you receive a lot of email the subject is the first immediate feedback: an incomplete, ineffective subject can devalue the entire email.
Now, notification subject changes depending on how near the expiration date is.
If you don’t like emails, you can watch your expiration dates in Microsoft Outlook or iCal.
