CIRA's Nomination Committee is seeking interested individuals from across Canada to apply to fill three open positions for the Nomination Committee Slate of CIRA's Board of Directors Election. Professional Canadians with Board experience and/or an interest in technology and the Internet are encouraged to apply. Expertise in one of the following areas would be an asset: accounting, law, marketing and communications or technology.
If you know of anyone you think would make a great addition to the CIRA Board, please consider nominating them for the upcoming elections. Applications will be accepted by CIRA from May 12 to June 10, 2011 at https://elections.cira.ca/2011/en/nom_com_nominees.html.
If you want to help spread the word about the CIRA Board of Directors nominations and elections, CIRA provides a PDF information sheet to help explain the process and why the CIRA Board of Directors is an important part of the management and stewardship of the .CA domain extension.
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It’s been a week or so since we introduced the Domain Manager tab in the OpenSRS Control Panel. We hope you’ve had a chance to dive in a play around and let us know what you think. We’ve already received some encouraging and constructive feedback – keep it coming!
We’re pretty excited about the Control Panel and what it can do, but a lot of the really neat stuff is behind the scenes. We know there’s a bunch of you who are keen on hearing about some of the neat kit that powers things like the search and filtering features. So we’re offering a webinar to bring some of that information to you.
Webinar: Control Panel In-Depth
With: Paul Tichonczuk, Senior Web Application Developer and James Koole, Communications Lead When: Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM and 2:00 PM EDT [GMT/UTC -4] Register now
The webinar will be hosted by yours truly and Paul Tichonczuk who is a Senior Web Application Developer here at OpenSRS. Paul T. is going to talk about some of this new tech and geek out a bit on how things fit together to provide the fast, intuitive interface that you now have in the Control Panel. I’ll take you through some of the neat things you can do with Control Panel – like filtering your domains lists, and how to setup DNS templates. Think of it as a bit of a power-users demo.
Do plan to check it out if you want to get some pro-tips and learn about some neat developer stuff. We promise to keep it understandable whether you are a developer or not!
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I just posted the latest in our Meet our Resellers series of articles about the various people and companies that work with OpenSRS.
This latest article takes a look at Webstarts.com, which provides a powerful, yet simple to use site builder and hosting solution for small business. The Tampa, Florida based company has been an OpenSRS Reseller since 2009.
With the preview launch of our Control Panel, if you’re an Internet Explorer 6 user, it’s probably time we had a chat. And if you don’t want to talk to us, then please do us a favour and seek professional help before it’s too late. Because we care about you a lot, and it’s tough watching you put yourself through this.
The Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 web browser was unleashed released to the world more than ten years ago.
As we were designing the OpenSRS Control Panel, we made a decision, after ten long years, to drop support of Internet Explorer 6. Despite the very small reseller base this would affect, we still struggled with the idea that we were finally leaving some of them behind if they continue to use Microsoft’s infamous version of this browser.
Before we get too far into it, let’s put things in perspective with a quick overview of visitors to the opensrs.com website:
In the last 30 days, the OpenSRS website welcomed 40,887 visitors. Of these visitors, 20.91% were using the Internet Explorer web browser. Of those visits, 3.23% were using infamous version 6.
Using these numbers, it means that we’re no longer going to support 0.68% of visitors to our website (276 people) if they report a browser-related problem.
No customer-focused company wants to ignore concerns of its users, but at some point, this day of tough love had to come. On the plus side, there’s no downside to upgrading.
In fact, here are just some of the pros associated with taking the time to upgrade:
It’s free and doesn’t cost anything to upgrade.
There are multiple browsers available to choose from.
Better security and protection
Faster web browsing, Faster browser startup
Your computer will not crash as often
Support for the latest web standards
Depending on your connection speed to your ISP, you could be enjoying a shiny new web browser in less than five minutes!
Moving the world off Internet Explorer 6
If you still don’t believe us, look at the efforts Microsoft, the developer of the browser. Even they don’t want you to use it! They’ve been putting lots of effort into migrating IE6 users to a safer, faster, more secure browser:
The Internet can be a dangerous place. It’s important to protect yourself by using the latest version of your web browser. Anything less would be outright crazy. If you’re one of those people frustrated by choices and would rather be told what to do, then go download Mozilla Firefox and install it right now (and remember to keep it upgraded!)
Update
Perhaps the continued use of Microsoft IE6 can be attributed to the idea that not many people know what a browser is?
After writing this post, a friend directed me to this YouTube video, shot in Times Square, New York, by Google in 2009.
It’s a bit dated today in 2011, but it makes a good point that lots of average Janes and Joes simply don’t know what a web browser is. At the time of filming, only 8% of people knew that a browser was an application used to view webpages, with the majority of those surveyed believing the browser was the search engine itself.
The image used in this post was licensed from iStockPhoto.
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It's a pretty big day at OpenSRS – we're ready to take the wraps off our Control Panel and let Resellers give it a try starting today. You'll probably agree that it's been a bit of a long time in coming, but we're pretty sure that once you see it and try it out, you'll agree that it was well worth the wait.
The Control Panel is far more than just a new skin for the current Reseller Web Interface (RWI). It's a beautiful and modern web interface paired with a powerful new backend, both of which utilize the latest in web technologies. The result is a fast, intuitive place for you to quickly and easily manage your OpenSRS Services in ways that weren't possible until now.
For example, using the Domain Manager in the Control Panel, you’ll be able to nearly instantly see a full list of domains in your account, including the status of each of those domains – like whether it’s set to auto-renew, when it expires, and if Contact Privacy is enabled. You’ll also be able to apply extensive filters to the list and see things like all the .com domains in your Reseller account that are expiring in the next 30 days – all in a matter of seconds.
And thanks to some of the great new technology that has been implemented, you can do all of this stuff whether you are managing three, 300 or even 300,000 domains.
It's a Preview, not a beta
Keep in mind that the Control Panel is a work-in-progress. We're very confident that you'll find it stable and feature-complete enough to use as the primary way you interact with OpenSRS. That said, there are still some features and elements still to come. As a result, you will need to head back to the RWI to do certain tasks – things like funding your account, or using bulk tools.
More to Come…Soon!
We're iterating quickly these days thanks to our agile development method and you can expect to see new features being added to the Control Panel fairly regularly until we've filled the gaps and brought over everything that exists in the RWI (and more). The addition of the Domain Manager tab to the Control Panel brings us one step closer to our goal of having a single, unified control panel that allows Resellers to manage domains, trust, email and publishing in one place.
We'll be going into more detail about the thinking and also the technology behind the Control Panel in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Before Microsoft had the good sense to build Internet support into its Windows operating system, there was Peter Tattam and his software, Trumpet Winsock.
Personally, I don’t think of myself as being old enough to talk about how tough we had it during the “old days”, but man, the Internet sure was a different place 17 years ago.
At the risk of offending the technical veterans with some elementary details, Winsock (a mashup of the words Windows + socket) equipped the Microsoft Windows operating system with the ability to ‘speak’ the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Back in the “olden” days of 1995, Windows computers were often not even connected to the local office network, never mind the globally-connected Internet.
The Trumpet Winsock software was distributed under a shareware, “try before you buy” license, which means you could use it on a trial basis, but after the period expired, you were legally required to pay for it. The problem was that people rarely paid for the software after the trial period ended.
Trumpet Winsock was hugely popular in the days of Windows 3.1, mostly due to the inclusion of the software in many popular computer magazines and distribution by Internet Service Providers. The wide distribution channel these magazines offered should have been a good thing for Tattam Software; Internet users signed up by the hundreds, and then thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. But ultimately, although they used the software, many Internet users didn’t care or didn’t bother to register (and pay) for it.
In the end, Peter and his company received very little financial compensation for what many would agree was software that enabled a connection to a global network that has positively impacted the lives of millions.
At Tucows / OpenSRS, at our very core, we believe the Internet is the greatest agent for positive change the world has ever seen. Trumpet Winsock accelerated Internet adoption during a time when Microsoft failed to offer Internet connectivity in the OS. So, earlier this week, we wanted to thank Mr. Tattam by recognizing his efforts with Trumpet Winsock by way of a small corporate donation.
If you’re a former Trumpet Winsock user, we’d love it if you would also take a moment to thank Mr. Tattam for his hard work and dedication in building one of the most popular on-ramps to the greatest resource the world has ever seen. Donations are accepted via Paypal at the thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com website.
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