RoboBlog

Google PageRank history for your domains

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:48:16 +0100

If you like to know the Google PageRank value for your domain, you’ll definitely love the new Google PageRank history page.

This page aggregates your domain PR changes through time and uses HTML5 + SVG charts to render the results.

You can access the PageRank history page by clicking on the PageRank information in the domain list or clicking the Information tab in your domain navigation menu.

Check out the Google PageRank history support page.

Announcing $7 Premium plan

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:23:00 +0100

Since we announced paid plans, two days ago, we received several feedback mostly from our long-term beta users. Some of them complained that the Premium plan was too expensive.

We carefully reviewed all the emails and comments we received and we agree.

For this reason, as of today we reduced our Premium plan to 7$ per month. But there’s more. We decided to thank our valuable beta users offering them the same plan at the special price of 5$ per month for the first year.

Originally, we planned to release RoboDomain with at least a couple of very important features. Unfortunately, the integration of the billing system far exceeded our initial time allocation and we couldn’t delay the launch. Of course, these features haven’t been suppressed and we’re actively working to release most of the in the next upcoming weeks.

All beta users that already subscribed to the $7 Premium plan have been automatically associated with the $5 plan. If you have already switched to the Premium plan, you don’t need to worry because we haven’t charged your credit card yet. At the first billing cycle your card will be charged for the new amount.

If you are a Beta user, please remember that you need to switch to a standard plan by January 31st to continue using RoboDomain and all its features, including expiring notifications and WHOIS information.

To change your plan, visit the account page.

Moving out of beta

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:45:00 +0100

We are pleased to announce that today (January 13th) RoboDomain we are moving out of beta, into monthly plans!

Since opening the doors of our beta product, we have received a lot of great feedback about RoboDomain. After an extensive test-driving and development phase, we’re happy to announce that RoboDomain is moving out of beta.

Choosing the best combination of plans has been very difficult and, in the end, we decided to keep things simple: one single Premium plan with unlimited domains and transactions for just $15/month.

We also offer a Free plan limited to 10 domains. You will find all details on our pricing page.

In order to continue using RoboDomain you should select your plan before January 31, 2012 from the Account > Plans & Billing page.

A special thanks to those of you who participated in our survey last month. We received terrific and honest feedback, and have incorporated your proposals into our roadmap.

As promised, if you completed our survey, you’ll get one month free on the Premium plan.

We hope you’ll continue to use RoboDomain. We have exciting new features planned for 2012 and we can’t wait to make them available to you!

If you have any queries on our service, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Goodbye Flash charts

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:12:00 +0100

There are a few places in RoboDomain where we display interactive charts.

For example, there’s the costs-per-year chart that displays yearly expenses to maintain a specific domain (please note you need to add transactions to get this very cool chart!).

Just a few years ago, Flash was the de-facto standard for creating interactive charts on the web. But now we have open specifications such as HTML5, canvas and SVG.

Starting from today, we are replacing all Flash-enabled charts with cross-browser HTML5 + SVG charts.

It means you no longer needs to have the Flash player installed on your browser to view our charts. And now our charts work on iPad and iPhone too!

Isn’t that wonderful?

Google PageRank information for your domains

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:02:00 +0100

We now collect and display Google PageRank information for every domain in your account.

There are several PageRank checker tools available on the web, but we believe that having this value integrated into your domain can be really helpful when you need to valuate your domain.

PageRank is currently displayed in every domain listing, including domain list and expiring domain list.

Learn more about RoboDomain Google PageRank feature.

The PageRank information is automatically refreshed periodically. It’s very unlikely that we display outdated information. In case the PageRank information for your domain is not correct, please let us know.

There are cases where the PageRank information is not available. This is mainly because a domain is not registered, invalid or too young.

Simplified domain thumb view

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:23:55 +0100

You may have noticed we made a few changes to the thumbnail view of the domain listing. We weren’t satisfied with the previous version: many empty spaces and data was concentrated in a single point.

We decided to make it more similar to the list view, but keeping the domain thumbnail so that you can immediately identify your domain by its content.

This layout version also leaves space to other features… ops, I’ve already said too much.

Email verification required

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:53:00 +0100

We recently introduced the new expiring domain notifications and we have more exciting new features planned for the upcoming months. However, some of these features requires our users to provide a valid email address.

We have never validated email address changes in the past. Because of this, a noticeable number of emails is delivered to unavailable recipients or got simply lost.

The bad news, is that you won’t notice all the wonderful goodies we’re going to deploy in the upcoming weeks.

For this reason, we kindly ask our users to validate existing email address. Last week we delivered a verification email with the subject Confirm your email address.

If you received it and you already verified the email, you don’t need to do anything else.

But if you haven’t verified your account yet or you didn’t receive the verification email, please log into RoboDomain, go to your account page and make sure there’s no pending verification.

If there is, change the email address to a valid email. A new confirmation email will be delivered.

Please note that unconfirmed accounts will be disabled and finally removed by the end of the year.

If you are having trouble, open a ticket or email us at support@robodomain.com.

Expiring Domain HTML notifications

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:46:00 +0200

Last month we rewrote the expiring domain notification system. The response to this feature was simply amazing and we decided to make it even better by introducing a new notification HTML design.

The basic features are the same of the existing version.

We introduced some courtesy links to the application (1), we compute and display the distance of time to the expiration date (2) and we also provide some links to subscribe the expiring domain list using alternative sources (3) such as a Calendar application or your feed reader.

If you are a plain-text fan don’t worry, the “old” plain-text template is still there. We now deliver a multi-part email and your client will display the more appropriate version according to your view settings.

More details are available in the Expiring Domain Notifications page.

Domain Transaction Changes

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:15:00 +0200

We introduced a small update for transactions.

After logging into your RoboDomain account, you will notice a new transaction style in the dashboard.

We applied the same style over the entire application, making it more consistent. For example, here’s the domain transaction list.

We also updated the transaction list introducing new information. Now you can see the order amount and the payment method for each transaction beyond the transaction type, date and hosting company.

Obviously you need to enter order and payment details when recording a new transaction in order to get them in the list.

This is also a good way to have a quick overview of your domain costs.

Better Expiring Domain Notifications

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 09:42:00 +0200

RoboDomain has been sending out expiring domain notifications since its very early stage. This is a very powerful feature and one the most appreciated by our users.

We designed the notification system to deliver an email for each expiring domain matching one of the following pre-defined ranges: 1 day, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, and 2 months.

This approach worked very well in the past when the number of domains per user was reasonably low, but we now have users managing 500 or 1000 domains and receiving tons of notification emails in your inbox is not that helpful.

So, we’ve redesigned the expiring domain email notification to acts as an email digest. Your emails should now look something more like this:

This is how it works:

As soon as you have at least one domain expiring in the next 2 months we start sending you a weekly expiring domain notification
The email contains a list of all expiring domains, grouped by periods
Because we don’t want to spam you, you will receive at most one email per week

We’re continuing to improve the expiring domain notification experience on RoboDomain, so look for even more awesomeness going forward.

Downtime - September 7th

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 09:22:05 +0200

We’re experiencing a very long downtime caused by a SAN issue that is affecting our VPS provider. We’re waiting for our provider to fix the issue on its side.

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.

Celebrities block their .XXX domain names

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 16:13:00 +0200

Celebrities block their .XXX domain names:

Many celebrities contacted the ICM Registry to block their .XXX domain names.

Celebrities like Justin Bieber decided to have his domain name permanently banned from the .XXX list. By doing this, celebrities want to make sure no cybersquatter will be able to register domain names like JustinBieber.xxx or BritneySpears.xxx.

.APP gTLD Project Launches & Is Pre-Selling Domains To Fund The Application Fee

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 15:53:04 +0200

.APP gTLD Project Launches & Is Pre-Selling Domains To Fund The Application Fee:

A new group of App developers have stepped up and announced plans to apply for the .APP new gTLD and is going about raising the money for the application in a very unusual manner.

WHOIS Definition Update

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:05:00 +0200

We just deployed a new release including several updates to the WHOIS definition database. Several new TLDs have been added to the list and we also increased the list of supported IDN domains.

The full list is available at the domain WHOIS support help page.

GoDaddy SSL Certificates and Nginx

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 10:16:00 +0100

Last week we installed and configured SSL support on our RoboDomain server. We purchased the certificate using GoDaddy. When you download the certificate from GoDaddy, the package contains your regular .crt but also a gd_bundle.crt file.

That confused me a bit. I was expecting just a single certificate file.

When you download your certificate, GoDaddy prompts you a select with several different options and instructions. The instructions tell you how to install the certificate on several different environments, but unfortunately Nginx is not included in the list.

I read the documentation about Apache and I noticed Nginx HttpSslModule has no SSLCertificateChainFile equivalent. Actually, it turns out you just need to append the content of gd_bundle.crt to the end of your certificate.

$ cp example.com.crt example.com.bundle.crt
$ cat gd_bundle.crt >> example.com.bundle.crt

Then, configure Nginx as explained in the HttpSslModule documentation.

ssl                  on;
ssl_certificate     /patch/to/ssl/example.com.bundle.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /patch/to/ssl/example.com.key;

Going SSL

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:06:00 +0100

In the past several users asked us to be able to access login and account pages via SSL-protected pages.

Today we’re switching the entire site from HTTP to HTTPS.

We originally planned to make this feature available to paid plans only, but we eventually decided to deploy SSL to all users, including free and beta accounts. We’re also flagging all cookies as secure to make sure they are sent only over SSL requests.

Let us know if you experience any issue.

New Blog Design

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:11:00 +0100

We are happy to announce the new RoboBlog design in this first new year post.

After the successful launch of our official website in September 2010, a lot of users asked us to update the blog and they were right.

So, what’s new with it? Let’s see.

Taxonomy and navigation menu

We introduced a new taxonomy changing the old tags with new ones:

Announcement: communications, status updates and other announcements
Development: features, design and major updates of RoboDomain
Business: about RoboDomain and domain world

You can navigate them using the new sidebar menu.

Smooth and clean design

Design solutions we are using for this theme are based on the official RoboDomain website: same color palette, visual elements and typography.

We also support new techonologies like CSS3 and we use them where possible: rounded corners, shadows, web fonts and transition effects. If you use a browser up-to-date you will get a better experience.

…and last but not least, the RoboBlog logo

Here’s our mascotte in the new RoboBlog shape!

WHOIS Definition Update

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:38:00 +0100

A couple of minutes ago we rolled out an update to the WHOIS definition list. The update introduces the support for more than 15 new TLD, including .br.com, .cn.com and all the CentralNic extensions.

Thanks for all your feedback.

New Account Settings Section

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 17:16:00 +0100

Yesterday we rolled out an other major update. After the Import Domains page cleanup and the user-friendly Error Pages, this time we are offering you a redesigned Account Settings section.

The new section is now divided into several tabs. The first one contains your user account settings. You can update your profile information, change your password and regenerate the authentication token.

If you haven’t updated your profile yet, take the time to fill your name and provide a few information about you.

The domain settings page offers some preferences to customize your domain list. In this phase we integrated a few popular requests, such as the ability to change the default number of records per page.

User-Friendly Error Pages

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 13:58:00 +0100

We just deployed a customized version of the standard error pages, such as the 404 and 500.

So, the next time you’ll try to reach a page that doesn’t exist, you will see our friendly robot instead of a scary blank page with a red message.