Anything about Everything

Update : Link to the DN Registration Forms

Today’s post is a slight diversion from the usual website reviews, I thought maybe today I should be a bit more informative rather than critical. So having had to register a .co.bw domain name in the past, I thought it might be useful to some people who may want a .bw domain name.

.bw is the top level domain (TLD) for internet domain names in Botswana and the Botswana Telecommunications Corporation(BTC) are the authority over the .bw domain space. So this means that, if you want to register a domain name that ends with .bw you’ve got to get in touch with BTC, fill in some forms and wait for them to do their “magic”.

Unfortunately, you cannot check for the availability of your .bw domain name online, BTC does not have that facility just yet, so you have to do some paperwork to get your .bw registered.

The domain registration form provided by BTC is quite easy to fill in I must say, the good thing is that it has some pretty nicely written and straight forward instructions annexed to the form.

The following information is required to fill the form

1. The domain name you want to register [obvious, isn't it?], unfortunately, at the moment there’s no way of automatically checking whether the domain name is available for registration or not.
2. Domain Nameservers  and their IP addresses, you need at least the primary and the secondary nameservers which you can easily get from your prospective webhosting companies like Bluehost, Godaddy, Fastdomain, 1and1, Dotster, Fasthosts etc.
3. Money talks and it makes the world go round; the cost of a commercial or personal .bw domain name at the time of writing this article was BWP 500.00 for 2 years (roughly USD 35.00/year) which is rather expensive I have to say. Given that you can quite easily get a more popular .com domain name for as low as USD 8/year.
4. Apparently, the registration of a .org.bw domain name is free, I learnt this from one of my colleagues who was registering the domain name for the Botswana Scripture Union website- subotswana.org.bw (which “Dot-T Enterprise Systems & Solutions) ” are developing kindly developing free as well )

The domain registration forms are not available for download from the BTC website however,  but I do have a copy of the form, will just confirm with the guys at BTC whether I won’t be on the red if I redistribute it. I’ll put the link to the form here in due course if I get the all clear from BTC.

Other places where you can apparently register a .co.bw domain name

BNamed

Marcaria - for a whooping $280.00 (that’s way too expensive)

Firs it was “rumours of Google Browser” then it was the Google Chrome Comic teaser and now it’s finally here; I’m actually writing this post from this stinking new browser which Google chose to call Chrome.

Released on the 2nd September 2008 under an Open Source licence, Chrome Browser albeit a Beta version is available for download at the browser’s home page. Among many other minimalist and non-intrusive feature set, the browser boasts of the following :

Crash Control

Google claim that every tab runs independently, so if one tab was to crash, it wont take the whole browsing session down. I’ll have to find a webpage that can crash my session and see if Chrome browser lives to the hype.

Advanced Tabbing

One feature I’ve always found to be lacking in Firefox was the ability to detach tabs; and boy! does Google’s Chrome make this easy; detaching a tab from a window is simply a matter of clicking on the tab and dragging it off. You can easily drag it back in or re-arrange the tabs by “juggling” them around. Easy peasy !

Tabs at the top of the screen rather than the traditional “Under the address bar” position

Chrome web browser has a microsoft’ish IE7/8 feel to it, especially the manner in which they have hidden away the Settings and Options menu. Obviously this gives you more browser window, work area.

Google Chrome Browser screenshot whilst dragging a tab off the window.

Incognito Mode

The ability to go incognito i.e. browsing the web without leaving any trace of your web activities, e.g. sites you visited, cookies, web or search history is not cached on your system. The Incognito mode works on the same principle as Internet Explorer 8′s Inprivate famously dubbed “Porn Mode” for obvious reasons.

Seems like the Google monopolistic philanthropy is going to continue for some time, only “God and Google” know what Google is doing behind closed doors, I guess next, we’re going to hear that Google has released a new Operating System .

Download Google Chrome Browser from the Browser’s Home Page.

I read a very interesting exchange between two guys on the Hostgator forums yesterday. Below is an excerpt from the guy that calls himself “whatrevolution.”

The discussion was about website traffic analysis utilities like Awstats, Google Analytics and the forum poster was merely asking about which stats program they can use to filter out his own traffic just to increase the reliability of the stats of visitors to their website.

As it usually happens in forums, the discussion turned into the Google Dynasty and Dominance of the World Wide Web. So this is what whatrevolutions said about Google [Analytics] free service[s]:

Certainly, there are always alterior motives which justify a “free” service. Consider the differences between “rationale“, and “rationalization“.

Google is useful as a publicly accessible database, but not as a benevolent public service fueled by marketing revenue. You’ll laugh, because your skepticism has been conditioned out of you, and replaced by selfish greed for what you want right this instant. That you don’t question unjustified earnings reports and stock prices speaks volumes toward what you’re capable of not questioning.

It’s too good to be true.

Google is useful by design. This is incrementalist herding toward unquestioned total information awareness, which has been a completely successful operation. As useful as it is, and I use it too, in a much more limited fashion; Google is a bane upon self-sufficience in information technology.

Spend less time consuming, and more time building; and just because you “got the job done”, does not mean you did it right. “Google gets the job done. To each their own.”, case in point. Operant Conditioning.

I’ve always had some “reservations” about Google’s dominance, totalitarian tendencies and monopolistic attitude when it comes to all things web related. Think GMail, Adsense, Adwords, Google Checkout, Google Reader, Webmaster Tools and so forth and so on. All these are efficient tools and service that Google provides and mostly “FREE” but I’m well aware that Google is not running a charity, they’re building an empire. Most of these tools if not all of them are there to advance Google’s Business ambitions. They do however, have a philanthropic side effect in that everyone’s online presence and experience is enhanced.

In many ways, the Google practices have connotations of Microsoft except Google seems to be adopting a different approach, it’s a case of “From Philanthropy to Monopoly” unlike Bill Gates’ Monopoly to Philanthropy.

Most of the time, what Google does with the data gathered through using these tools and services is anybody guess. We all use Google everyday, some more than others, some their very online presence centered around Google services and tools. Talk of having your all your eggs in one basket.

They are good tools/services[no doubt] and mostly very efficient and they do get the job done as whatrevolutions says but remember, Google can expunge you from their system without explanation and without mercy and they are not obliged to show any or give you any explanation. So it helps to spread your online activities especially if they are your livelihood.

Check the following stories out, to see what I mean :

The Day Google Erased me from the Internet.

Got Kicked out of Google Adsense

Happy Googling but make sure you don’t suffer from Discomgoogolation .

Earlier today, I was helping my girlfriend register a domain name, miss-networks.com ; a blog for her for her CCNP certification course; At first we wanted her to register the name with Go Daddy.com for the obvious reason that they seemed cheaper.

We also tried 1 and 1 UK Ltd for the same reason as Go daddy’s (link on the right) but their .com prices were a little bit too high for her budget, around £8.99 compared to the £5.95 which she ended up paying from dotex hosts. The biggest turn off with Godaddy was the prolonged checking out process, with every step of the process suggesting “additional domains and services” which we were not interested in.

I know, back in the days of Amway, my upline always emphasised that I have to say, Keep It So Simple but hey, Keep it Simple and Stupid; I mean the check out process of course. Trying to be intricate and overly intelligent is just another way to say to tell your potential customers to go find the services somewhere else.

The morale of my story from experience with Godaddy is; If you are running an online business,

1. Make the checkout process as short as possible and
2. Keep It So Simple so that even the granny at home can go through it without having to call “Bob the Whizkid” for help.

It was really annoying so much that in the end, we ended up registering the domain name from dotexhosts webhosting solutions because the prices we had to pay for the .com domain name was pretty much the same anyway.

In today’s review I want to somewhat adopt a review style a little bit different from the previous website reviews., rather than the usual meandering style of analysing the, Layout and Design, Navigation, Markup etc, I’ll just go straight for the kill and just focus on the good, the bad and the ugly of the website under review.

So let’s get straight into it then

Overview

Unlike few of the websites that I have reviewed so far, The Voice web site has many good features about it, the web designers did take advantage of the Joomla CMS’s features and extensions like Jom Comment, SH404SEF for Search Engine Friendly URLs. The website seems to run on Joomla 1.1x which is little bit dated at  this point in time, my advice, “try Joomla 1.5” it has some rather nice features and a little bit more secure and the amount of extensions is unlimited.

Pros (The Good)

1. Regular update schedule, the updates in the website are like clock work, the online edition of the newspaper is updated weekly, very much in sync with the paper edition unlike the sporadic updates that characterizes the Mmegi website.
2. Fascinating news stories and the reporting is light-hearted, making it easy and enjoyable to read the online newspaper.
3. The comment facility is a rocker, the first online newspaper in Botswana to allow commenting on the news stories. Other newspapers, should copy that and get their readership engaged on some healthy debate.

Cons (The not so Good)

1. The Contact Us page can be better, as it is at the moment, it uses the bare functionality of the Joomla Contact component.
2. The profile page could be better, I registered thinking that by registering I would be getting “extra” facilities, like profile customization, Private Messaging etc but actually, registering is not worth it, you neither lose nor gain any extra functionality from the website by doing so. You can always try Joomla’s Community Builder to enhance the user profiles.
3. In the contact us page, The Voice guys claim to respond to queries within 24 hours but I have since written to them through their contact page, it’s been more than 72 hours now without a response.
4. Some pages are just way too long, especially those with multiple stories bundled together onto a single page. Paginating the long pages into multiple pages including the comments, would greatly enhance the browsing experience.

Verdict and Recommendations

It looks like the guys at ebotss know their stuff. However, as we all know, every good thing can always become better and anything else that is better can always be perfected. For this website

• Implement an Archived Listing of previous stories and news articles, at the moment the news portal is like a black hole, if the story disappears, it’s gone; no how to find and retrieve it.
• Break news articles in each news category into separate pages i.e. instead of having all Business News chunked into a url like http://www.thevoicebw.com/index.php/Business/Business.html it wil be much better if each story under business category had its own story. This is because, every week each category will have different stories, so if I link to http://www.thevoicebw.com/index.php/Business/Business.html this week, the following week that particular link will be pretty much irrelevant because the story would have been replaced with new stories.
• Have comments enabled on a per story basis rather than per category basis, where you have to scroll all the way through news stories in the, say, Business category before you can comment on one particular story you were interested in.
• Fix the Live Search at the top of the page. I tried using it but all I got were PHP errors as shown in the screenshot.
  
• Do away with the limit of the number of characters that can be typed in the Live Search Box as well, when testing this, I could only type in 20 characters.

Otherwise, the website is a breath of fresh air in many respects, it in many cases resemble the UK’s The Sun website but without the annoying advertising and embedded flash.

Till next time, but do feel free to leave a comment below.