I’m a big fan of the domai.nr service which helps with the discovery of domain name variations creatively using ccTLDs. If you’re into wasting money on random domains, you can spend hours trying different words and phrases to see which crazy variants are still available for purchase. Ignoring the standard .com, .net and .org TLDs that are already taken, here’s what the service suggests as possible valid domains for my surname:
rus.co/e
ru.sc/oe
r.sc/e
Since .sc domains cost a whopping US$125 per year, I’d ruled those out a long time ago. But when I heard .co domains were being opened up to global registrations, I happily handed over $29.99 to Go Daddy to reserve the domain, hoping nobody else would claim it during the sunrise and landrush periods.
After over four months of waiting, I finally got confirmation yesterday that the rus.co domain was mine, joining the likes of t.co (Twitter), fb.me (Facebook) and goo.gl (Google, obviously).
My first shortened URL is rus.co/e which is currently serving a 302 temporary redirect to ruscoe.net since I’ve not yet decided how to structure my shortened URLs. For example, should I always include the trailing /e after the domain so that it looks more like my surname? Should I use a namespace for different URLs – e.g. something like rus.co/e/b/ or rus.co/eB/ for blog posts and rus.co/e/x/ or rus.co/eX/ for external links?
While I’m making my mind up about those details, I also need to decide which technology I want to use to power the URL shortener. I’ve considered services like bitly.Pro and awe.sm but think I’d prefer to have tighter control over things, so it looks like I’m going to be getting my hands dirty writing a custom solution...
When I started my first weblog back in 2002, I was using a homegrown blogging platform. It was powered by ASP and a Microsoft Access database, which I later rewrote to use the FileSystemObject to create static files after I learnt that Access didn't scale well even with just a handful of visitors.
Around three years later, I eventually decided to migrate to Blogger because it had some excellent features which I couldn't be bothered to implement myself. The killer feature for me was FTP publishing, which allowed Blogger to upload ASP files to my server so that I could continue to host the blog on my own domain whilst still being able to benefit from its other features, like archive pages, comments and an XML feed.
I was therefore disappointed – but not surprised – to see the announcement that Blogger would no longer support FTP publishing after 26 March 2010 (which was later extended to 1 May 2010). Although the team added a bunch of new features when they launched Blogger Beta in August 2006, FTP publishers couldn't migrate to Blogger Beta until a couple of months later, and even then they couldn't benefit from the full range of new features. It was pretty clear to me then that FTP support was going to be phased out one day, especially when custom domains were announced in January 2007. To be honest, I'm surprised it's not been switched off sooner!
Migrating to custom domains actually offered me the best of both worlds; the ability to host the blog on my own domain without needing to worry about hosting whilst benefiting from all the latest features. Regardless, I decided against it for no good reason other than the fact that it would require some effort on my part.
One advantage of working at Google is that I was able to reach out to the Blogger team and ask what they had planned for the FTP migration tool before it was launched. I was really impressed and relieved to hear that they'd been working hard to design and develop a tool to make the migration from an FTP blog to a custom domain as quick, easy, pain-free and seamless as possible for blog owners, site visitors and search engines alike.
The migration tool is now available on Blogger in Draft, the special version of Blogger where new features are tried out before being released to everyone, and it should be available on www.blogger.com soon. There's an excellent step-by-step screencast of the FTP Migration Tool, which I've embedded later in this post, so I won't go through what that process entails here. However, having now followed the migration process myself, I thought it would be good to mention a few extra things that I did to help make the move as smooth as possible.
Feeds
Before the announcement that FTP support was being deprecated, I had already moved my feed to FeedBurner and was redirecting any requests for the old feed using a custom ASP error page which I configured on my host. Furthermore, rather than provide FeedBurner with the location of the static XML feed on my server, I pointed it at the one hosted by Blogger since I figured that would be faster to update and more reliable.
Note: You don't need to do this, and not everyone with an FTP blog will be able to redirect requests for their old feed to their FeedBurner feed, which is why the Blogger FTP Migration Tool automatically posts to your blog explaining that the blog has moved, giving your readers the new feed address.
Tracking
Since I use Google Analytics to track visitors to my website, I wanted to make sure this would still work. Although my existing profile would have continued to track visits to the blog, the site structure would be different and could have potentially made my reports confusing, so I decided to create a new profile. All I needed to do then was update the tracking code in my blog template to include my new profile identifier.
Note: Updating the tracking code in the template before the migration process would result in the FTP blog being updated to use the new tracking code too, so I did it after the blog has been fully migrated. If you're thinking about doing the same, make sure you read my note about updating templates below.
Template
I had always used a custom template with my FTP blog, so I had to update any absolute references to my CSS, JavaScript and image files. Although Blogger's missing files host could have taken care of this, I prefer to have things like this explicitly defined so it's clear how things are working at a later date.
My blog had also been using Active Server Pages (ASP) for server-side scripting, so my blog template included things like server-side includes and ASP code blocks. Since those obviously wouldn't work on Blogger, I had to make a few changes to remove any server-side scripting. This basically involved moving the content of the includes to directly inside the template and rewriting any of my server-side logic to use jQuery on the client-side instead.
Note: One small gotcha about updating your template after your blog has been moved to a custom domains is that the "Off" option for the NavBar is no longer available. If you had this switched off previously, any changes you make to your template now will add the NavBar code back into your blog. If you're using your own custom template, you may find it doesn't play nicely with your CSS. It should be possible to fix this by updating your CSS though.
Once I'd completed the things above, I was ready to use the migration tool:
Links
Since I often link to my own blog posts from within my blog posts, I need to go back through my old posts and update these links to point to my new blog address. The same applies to any links pointing to my blog from other places, like profile pages on other services or social networks. Although the redirects would direct visitors to the right place, it's always best to remove any unnecessary redirects where you have control over the links.
Tip: If you're using Google Webmaster Tools, it's quite easy to get an idea of where is linking to your blog. Just go to the dashboard for your old FTP blog domain and click the More link under the Links to your site section to see all external links and then select Internal links in the menu to see where you're linking to your blog posts from inside your website. (This will probably return hundreds of URLs, but it should give you a good idea of what you need to update.)
Conclusion
Using the migration tool was really straightforward and I'm pleased it's encouraged me to finally make the switch. I'm going to have to spend some time checking out all the new features that are available to me now I'm finally using Custom Domains.
Since I like to keep my website directory clean, I'll probably give it a few months to see how things go before I delete my old blog posts from the server. I may then create server-side 301 redirects to make sure any visitors, proxies or search engines that have been slow to pick up the changes will still manage to find my posts. If you're planning on migrating and think you're comfortable setting up server-side redirects and getting your hands dirty with Blogger's advanced setup options, you could always just skip using the migration tool and follow the Advanced Setup Checklist.
(Finally, apologies to anyone who briefly saw messages posted to my feed over the last couple of days saying this blog had moved; I was too eager to try out the migration tool and my unusual configuration caused a couple of bugs to surface in the process. These bugs have now been fixed and everything is working!)
Firstly, apologies to anyone who saw this post earlier when the title was incomplete and it didn't have any content. I am currently on a train trying to use Blogger on my iPhone. Although I didn't have any signal to save the post as a draft, it seems I did have enough signal for it to publish when my fat thumbs pressed the wrong button. Then FeedBurner picked up the post and published it to Twitter. And I've just had a Google Alert email telling me it's now indexed by Google Blog Search. It's times like this when I have to question whether the real-time web is a good idea. Anyway...
The reason I'm on a train is because I'm heading down to London in preparation for the first day of my new job at Google. Even though it's been two weeks since I finished work, I still feel like I've been rushing around trying to get everything sorted. One thing I wanted to do before starting was update my website. It's about four or five years since I last made any significant changes to the design or underlying structure of the site, so it's long overdue. And given I'm joining the Webmaster Team at Google, I figured I might get a few more visitors.
Of course, I left it until the last minute and didn't really get chance to do everything I wanted to. So what you're seeing at the moment is definitely a work-in-progress version which I expect to change lots over the next few weeks, months or years. It could really do with an Under Construction animated GIF. If you get any errors or experience any issues with any area of the site, please get in touch.
And if you do find any problems with my site, please don't worry... I can assure you that the quality of my work at Google will be much, much better than this!
Back in August I posted about Blogger Beta being released. Yesterday, they finally announced that users with FTP-publishing blogs could migrate to the new system (using a Google Account) and benefit from some of the improved features.
I’ve just migrated my blog to use Blogger Beta and have discovered a few bugs / issues with it:
Previous Posts
When using the <BloggerPreviousItems> tag in your Blogger template to display previous posts on your individual item pages, this used to display a list of all the posts you made prior to the post that was on the current page. This meant that you could easily use this list of links to go back through your blog archive. This is no longer the case. Instead, it simply shows your 10 most recent posts. If you never re-publish your blog, this wouldn’t be such an issue, but they really shouldn’t have changed this functionality.
Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08) The Blogger Team sez: We’re aware of the Previous Posts issue. I don’t have an ETA for when this will be fixed, though.
Encoding HTML entities
They are no longer encoding the ampersands in the links created by the <$BlogItemCreate$> template tag. For example, this:
Which means any XHTML validation will obviously fail. And they’re still converting line breaks in comments as <BR/> instead of <br /> despite the settings page saying that “single hard-returns entered in the Post Editor will be replaced with single <br /> tags in your blog. [...] This also applies to the comment-posting form.”
Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08) The Blogger Team sez: We did not know about the URL encoding; I’ll add that to our internal bugs tracking system. (We generally don’t report tiny stuff on the Known Issues blog.
Posting comments
Clicking the link to post a comment on a Blogger Beta blog now takes you to a page served over HTTPS instead of HTTP. This page contains both secure and nonsecure items, which means that Internet Explorer users get an annoying popup. (Who cares about those losers though, right?)
Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08) The Blogger Team sez: I’m not familiar with the IE problem on posting comments. (I mean, I didn’t get a popup the last time I tried this.) Can you send the URL of an example page that gave you this alert? [Which I’ve done...]
There are probably loads of other issues that I haven’t even noticed yet but hopefully all the extra features and improvements will overshadow those though. I just hope that the Blogger team don’t let the development of any new features overshadow the need to fix any bugs...
Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08) As you may have seen in my comments, Blogger Beta also seems to generate the blog feed differently. Instead of including the most recently created posts in the feed, it now includes the most recently updated posts. If you’re one of the people who subscribes to my feed and received a load of old posts in your feed reader yesterday, please accept my apologies; I was just taking advantage of one of the new Blogger Beta features and adding labels to all my old posts. (I’ve asked the Blogger Team whether that’s behaviour by design or a bug.)
Whilst at the airport before going on holiday recently, I noticed WHSmith had That Peter Kay Book by Johnny Dee on display. Being a Peter Kay fan, I picked up the book and had a quick flick through. To my amazement, I immediately spotted that the list of Internet Sources towards the back of the book included the following:
“That’s my website,” I shouted to Suzy (despite her being stood right next to me). The author must have found my Max & Paddy’s Road To Nowhere Location Guide website whilst researching material for the book. Anyway, I called my mum and got her to order a copy from Play.com (just because it was £4 cheaper than WHSmith) so that I could read it when I got back.
I remember seeing Peter Kay on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross saying how he didn’t like the idea of someone else writing his biography, which is why he’s written his own (due to be released on 5 October 2006). I seem to remember him implying that all these people do is dig for dirt on a celebrity and publish it, making money off the back of their fame.
Having read Johnny Dee’s book, it’s obvious that he admires practically everything Peter Kay’s ever done. Of course, there are things in the book that Peter Kay won’t have included in his autobiography, but not because he wouldn’t necessarily want them to be published – more because he wouldn’t even know some of those things about himself! Contained in this book are some honest opinions from Peter’s school friends, teachers, other comedians, co-workers and various other people he’s come into contact with over the years, many of whom would never have divulged this information directly to him.
I thought I knew quite a lot about Peter Kay, especially coming from Bolton and reading many of the stories and articles that the Bolton Evening News printed about him, but reading this book made me realise that I knew practically nothing about him at all. Starting with his childhood, then the numerous part-time jobs he had before becoming a stand-up comedian, and eventually his slow rise to fame as a star of TV and film, Johnny Dee’s experience as a journalist has allowed him to speak to many of the key people in Peter Kay’s life – including Peter Kay himself – with each one providing amusing tales and anecdotes about his journey so far.
So where does my guide to locations used in Max and Paddy fit in? After reading the entire book, I’m pretty sure that content from my website was only used for a couple of items in the “The Little Book o Mis-Kay-Lany” at the back of the book:
TRACKLISTING TO JERRY ST CLAIR’S SOLO ALBUM YOUNG AT HEART – this was possibly obtained from this photo of the fake album (as featured in Series 2, Episode 2 of Phoenix Nights) that I found whilst visiting the motorhome used in the series
I thoroughly recommend this book to all fans of Peter Kay. Even when his autobiography is released next month, I’m sure it will be worth reading both of these books.
(For a more detailed review of That Peter Kay Book – or The Story of How Peter Kay Became Bolton’s Biggest Export – see Chortle.co.uk.)
For any of my readers that have never even heard of Peter Kay – you’ve either been living under a rock or don’t live in the UK – you can catch some of his work on Google Video, although it’s mainly just his John Smith’s adverts and short TV appearances.
Back in November 2002, we went to Blackpool for the day and visited Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks. Some of the waxwork models were so poor that I couldn’t resist taking photos of the best (and worst) examples to put on my website. I soon created the Waxwork Quiz which has now had almost 500 people attempting to complete it – but only 6 people have managed to guess 12/12 correctly!
Just over two years later, in November 2004, I was contacted by the producer of ITV’s Today with Des and Mel.
I work on Des & Mel – I came across your website which I enjoyed. I thought the pictures of the wax works were very funny and would love to show them on the show. Did you take the pictures? Would it be OK to use them!!!!!! I think Des would love them. Please let me know
Of course, I obliged, but only on the condition that I got a name check, a link to my website from theirs and a signed photo of Des and Mel. The photos appeared on the show on Friday, 26 November 2004, but it was a total disaster. Not only did they call me “Tony Roscoe” but when they tried to get the studio audience to guess who the waxworks were of, someone in the audience managed to guess every single one correctly! (I can only assume that they’d either visited my website before or had been to Louis Tussaud’s themselves!) To add insult to injury, they then said that I’d emailed the photos in to them! Honestly – as if I’d be so sad as to email photos into a daytime TV programme. Their producer had practically begged me to use them!!! A few weeks later, I finally received my “signed” photo. I say “signed” in the loosest possible sense since it was a digital print of a photo that had been signed. What absolute rubbish!
Anyway, I’d just about managed to get over that episode in my life and then all the bad memories came flooding back to me today when I was contacted by a researcher for a new Channel 4 “comedy panel show” who also wanted to use my photos! Again, I’ve obliged, but this time they can’t give credits for any pictures (apparently). But after last time’s efforts, that’s probably for the best.
The show is called “Best of the Worst” (or something like that) and should air towards the end of June 2006, so keep you eyes peeled in case my photos make it to the final edit!
I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions, mainly because I’m totally incapable of keeping them. Previous years have seen me try to stop biting my nails (several times) and give up kebabs (which is actually impossible). This year, however, I’m going to try and do a couple of things: chew my food more thoroughly and post to my blog more frequently. Only time will tell whether I’ll keep to either of them, but since it’s the third day of the year already, it must be time I posted something to my blog. (Especially since the extra food chewing hasn’t been going too well over the last couple of days...)
Anyway, it seems fitting that my first post of 2006 should review what happened to me in 2005 – i.e. all the things I probably should have posted about at the time but couldn’t usually be bothered.
Warning: anyone with a low boredom threshold should probably stop reading now as I’ve just read the post before publishing it and I have definitely rambled on a bit too much...
January 2005
I’ve been researching my Ruscoe family tree for around five years, but over the last year or so I’ve started to take it more seriously and decided to visit Shropshire Archives in January 2005 to help fill in some blanks. Whilst we were in the area, I took the opportunity to have a look at where my ancestors would have lived back in the 1800s. If you’ve got the Ruscoe surname in your family tree, you might want to look at my photos from the trip, my Ruscoe Family Genealogy website and the Ruscoe Family Genealogy Google Group.
February 2005
I received a letter from a popular men’s magazine threatening legal action against me unless I removed photos of two TV celebrities. The images showed how the celebrities looked before and after they were photoshopped for the magazine. I received them by email and made them into Flash movies so that you could hover over each to see the differences. Needless to say, the magazine’s legal team didn’t like this, so I kindly agreed to remove them. I now get hundreds of disappointed visitors looking for the photos on my website each month.
We managed to get some tickets to go and see The Games being filmed in Sheffield for Channel 4 and watched a few celebrities compete in Olympic style sporting events. The line up included Craig Charles (comedian/actor/presenter), Princess Tamara Czartoryski-Borbon (model), Danny Foster (former member of Hear’Say), Kirsty Gallacher (presenter), Mel Giedroyc (comedienne), Chesney Hawkes (singer), Lisa Maffia (singer), Jonathon Morris (actor), Philip Olivier (actor), Kevin Simm (member of Liberty X) and Anna Walker (presenter). There’s not much else to say about this really. Chris posted an equally brief description at the time.
April 2005
We went to see Richard Herring at the Lescar. I’m not really a fan of his but I thought he was very, very funny. Chris Hill covered it at the time, so there’s no need for me to say any more.
May 2005
During the first Bank Holiday weekend, I built myself a brick barbecue in our back garden. It’s something I’d had planned ever since we moved into our house and, even though we only got to use it three or four times, it was worth the five trips to Wickes, sore arms, aching shoulders and the sunburnt neck!
I also finally updated my website (again) to use XHTML & CSS, moved my three-year-old weblog to use Blogger and was kindly given a Flickr Pro account, which I really should be making more use of. (Maybe that should be another new year’s resolution...)
June 2005
I travelled more in this month that I’d travelled in my entire life. First of all, we went camping in Malham, North Yorkshire for Andy’s birthday (like we did the previous year). Then we went on holiday to Florence for a week, also visiting Pisa whilst we were in the area. About a week later I then made a business trip to Montréal, Canada. (You can read a bit more about these escapades in my Around the World in 25 Days post.)
A surprising number of rather largespiders made an appearance in this month. I’ve not seen many of them since then, so I can only presume that they’ve been beamed back up to the Planet of the Rather Large House Spiders by their mothership.
Google released their Gmail button for Google Toolbar, which enabled me to figure out how to add custom search buttons to the toolbar. They then released Google Blog Search which would later result in my website traffic increasing considerably as people found my blog posts much more quickly than they would through the normal Google search.
October 2005
October was an exciting month (for a geek). First of all, I wrote a script to check for Google Subdomains and found a few that people hadn’t seen before. One of these was purchase.google.com which might have inspired the folks over at WebmasterBrain.com to dig a bit deeper, resulting in them discovering the Google Purchases (AKA Google Wallet / Google Payments) sign-up pages. Incidentally, almost three months on and this new service from Google still hasn’t been released yet.
I decided to run the script again after reading a comment by Wouter Schut and discovered the Google Base subdomain. What happened in the days following my post about this discovery was remarkable. Within 24 hours, Google-watchers all over the world were discussing a new service that they didn’t even fully understand. As screenshots started to appear on the Internet, people were speculating what the new service would be capable of, which caused eBay’s stock to reportedly drop by as much five percent at points during the day! The Guardian and The New York Times – amongst many others – referenced my website and I was even interviewed by Business Week magazine! Incidentally, the title I chose for my post – All your base are belong to Google – was used all over the Internet, with some people even posting it to their blogs without even knowing why they were doing it!
November 2005
I finally went to see The League of Gentlemen live in Llandudno (as I’d mentioned earlier in the year) and the show was absolutely excellent, completely exceeding my expectations. It was well written, well performed and well worth the wait. My only real gripe was that it wasn’t long enough; the two 45-minute acts just went far too quickly! For any League fans didn’t get to see it, I’d definitely recommend buying it as soon as the show is released on DVD.
I also held my school reunion and bought myself a PSP. I actually posted an update around that time, so you can read more about all that if you like.
December 2005
T’was the week before Christmas and my sister gave birth to a baby girl, making me Uncle Tony and ending the year perfectly.
The End.
If you’ve read all the way to here, you deserve a medal! Please accept my most sincere apologies. When I started writing this post, I only intended it to be a brief look back at 2005 but then I got blogorrhea and I couldn’t just hit the delete button after spending so much time on it...
My personal website has seen a number of changes since 1998. Back then it had no content, was "best viewed with Netscape 3.0" and was hosted on an obscure URL given to me by my university department. It’s been hosted on the ruscoe.net domain for the past three years, and yesterday saw the launch of the fifth incarnation.
Why bother?
It’s been over a year since I last made any major changes to my site and I got bored of looking at the same site design everyday. I also wanted to get away from the old-fashioned method of using tables for layout and instead move towards XHTML and better use of CSS.
New Blog
I’ve had an online blog since 2002. (The previous entries from 2000 and 2001 were pulled from my web browser’s bookmarks so I could have an archive when I first put it online!)
I wrote my own first weblog system in ASP with an Access database backend, but I rewrote the whole thing using the FileSystemObject after Access caused me a few problems with server performance. This really didn’t give me much flexibility and since producing an Atom/RSS feed was going to require quite a bit of extra development, I’ve finally made the switch to Blogger.
There’s still some fiddling and tweaking to be done, but please let me know if you have any comments.
