Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Over the course of the past 18 months I’ve moved the majority of my domain portfolio over to Fabulous.com and I couldn’t have been happier.

I’ve written before why I think Fabulous is *the* best domain registrar catering to domainers.

This time around, I will discuss an important layer of security, available to Fabulous.com customers via an one-time fee: A security token or “fob”.

When I met Mike “Fabulous” Robertson at TRAFFIC Las Vegas in January, I could not but mention how great Fabulous.com is for domainers like me. For being an Aussie, Mike was particularly sober but regardless, he promised to send a spanking new Fabulous fob to my mailbox. I just could not wait!

A few days ago, as promised, the fob arrived in a small envelope. For almost an hour I simply examined it, planning what to do with it. Eventually, I simply ripped the envelope open and the fun began!

The envelope’s particulars showed a total weight of 11 grams or less than 1/2 an ounce. That thing was light as a feather, yet it managed to make it all the way from ‘down under’ intact. After I opened the envelope, I saw that it was packed in some bubble wrap for protection. And no, that’s not the layer of Fabulous security I was referring to!

Inside the bubble wrap was a small square plastic folder, complete with a label. My excitement peaked, as I saw the Fabulous.com logo with the blue gradient and the stars of Australia! The words “Security Key” made it clear that this was the real deal.

I opened the plastic folder, barely wider than a business card. Inside was a printed piece of paper that consisted of the front cover with the logo, the back bearing instructions and finally, the Fabulous fob in all its glory!

Here is a scan of the instructions portion. Since this was my first time to ever face a ‘security fob’ I had no idea how it’s used. The instructions miss one important detail: you have to plug the Fabulous fob into a USB port before you proceed with the steps above!

You can see how tiny the Fabulous fob is, the hole on the left allows you to put it in a keychain – although I would not recommend it – and the right side is what you plug into an available USB port in your computer. So what is the center part that looks like a ring? Hold on!

This is the magic glow of the Fabulous fob, after it was plugged into the USB port! It is now ready to be used and provide an extra, solid layer of security to your domain portfolio with Fabulous.com

After your Fabulous fob is installed, log into your Fabulous.com account as usual and go to the Admin section, then click on “Security”. A menu will be available. Select “Fabulous Security Key” and you’re ready for the registration part.

At this point, you need to ensure that you have easy access to the USB port; first click inside the form field as displayed above. Then press your finger firmly on the round, green ring of the Fabulous key.

As if by magic, the form will fill with a long set of encrypted characters in just a few seconds. That’s the time when you should lift your finger from the Fabulous fob and press the “Register Fabulous Security Key”.

The next step will confirm that everything went as planned with the registration of the security key token. Head over to this discussion if you want to know how the security fob works. Who said I’m not assisting you with your technology education!

At the bottom of the same confirmation page as above, you will see this nifty menu of options which will allow you to set up the extent of security that you’d like to implement. For example, you can enable authentication via the use of the Fabulous fob only when you want to make finance changes, or before you push a domain to a different account. Since you have this Fabulous device in your hands, you might as well check them all!

Finally, this is what you’re looking at when authentication is needed. To proceed with authorizing any action specified in the checkboxes above, the Fabulous fob must obviously be plugged in. Then, click inside the form field, tap and hold the glowing green ring of the fob until the form field fills – then hit Continue and you’re in!

I hope you found this review and tutorial about the security key, a.k.a “Fabulous fob” rather helpful. Fabulous.com is indeed a quiet giant, in the dark blue sea group of companies and it’s the domain registry of choice for anyone serious in the domain business.

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There’s a new gaming application for the iPhone called Canabalt. The great news is, that you can download it from the Apple store for just $2.99 – or play the online version for free on the web at Canabalt.com

The game features multi-level parallax scrolling action, miniature but detailed graphic sprites and intense action that only requires one finger: tap the screen to jump or tap and hold it to prolong it (gravity takes its toll).

The music is reminiscent of the Bourne Ultimatum soundtrack and adds to the atmospheric gameplay, which consists of jumping on collapsing rooftops, avoiding obstacles, robots and walls. That sounds like the kind of challenge Rick Schwartz might introduce at TRAFFIC New York 2009.

Whoah!

Things get too serious sometimes. In order to instill some fun into the serious business of domains, I’m starting the “Friday Funnies” section.

Each Friday, a cartoonized photo will attempt to deliver some humor without – hopefully – hurting the feelings of those it depicts.

Today’s “Friday Funny” is about social media “wars” and two well-known personalities, Frank Schilling and Rick Schwartz.

Original picture link from DNJournal.com

The waters of “mass development” were hit by a major tsunami today, when news broke of a new, FREE bulk development tool that promises to deliver instant results. Seasoned web developer, Tia Wood launched the new service at BulkDevelopment.com

In her own words:

Want to leave domain parking? Don’t want to pay for MASS domain development? Our tool is FREE, fast and easy. Mass develop hundreds of domain names at the push of a button.

Newsflash: There is no “silver bullet” when it comes to web development. What has been the blurb of recent months and weeks has escalated to ridiculous claims from certain individuals that promise to develop “hundreds and thousands of web sites” en masse – all without having any such credentials and being unable to produce samples of their alleged creativity via a portfolio.

To truly get results from a selection of domain names, one needs to implement a well-thought strategy and entrust the web & graphics design only to skilled and qualified professionals. An exception to this paradigm, appears to be Rick Latona’s AEIOU service, that provides a streamlined process of quality designs aimed at domainers, at an affordable price.

The bottom line: Tia found a very creative and imaginative way to promote her web development services, while expressing her views on the subject of so-called “mass development” and I applaud her creativity and sense of humor.

It is sad that as soon as she launched the service, some hater clown left a message at her blog assaulting her creativity.

During the past few days, Ken’s been busy adding new features to his wonderful tool, ZFBot which now includes the zone files for the .net TLD, in addition to the .com. This brought the daily crunching to a whopping 92 million domains! Currently domains with no nameservers are not included but Ken is working on this as well.

Other great additions include the following:

• WHOIS tool: By double-clicking on the domain, you get a new window with the WHOIS output. Fast and efficient.
• Jump to website: Click on the little arrow on the left and a new window will open with that domain’s URL to quickly visit.
• Archive.org Wayback Machine link: Click on the “WM” icon and a new window will open with the URL of the Archive.org link to the domain’s history.

Now that’s what I call 4 tools in one! Don’t forget the Excel export option, that’s very useful in order to save your favorite research results to a file.

Ken is working on adding even more features now that the core code has been tested for functionality and data control, including a Google PR checker.

Stay tuned! Or rather, visit ZFBot and see what it can do for your domain research.

Every once in a while, a neat web application shows up and then you scratch your head wondering – “Now, why didn’t I think of that first?” Without much debating on the issue of one’s dying braincells, I’d like to introduce ZFBot and its creator, Ken Greenwood. In this quick, impromptu interview Ken talks about his product that he offers for free at http://www.ZFBot.com

So Ken, what exactly is ZFBot.com and what does it do?

ZFBot.com is a web application that gives anyone the ability to easily and quickly find .com domain names that are actively registered. I like to refer to it as an encyclopedia of all registered .com’s. The Z is for Zone and the F is for file… so it’s the Zone File Robot. And the domain sounds like your saying “The F Bot” in German. The application also keeps track of the count of registered .com’s in total and broken down by letter combinations. Currently, there are approximately 80 million registered .com domain names.

Can you outline the process steps in not too technical terms?

Sure. I’ll try not to get too technical. At a high level, there are 3 key layers, so to speak, that make up the ZFbot.com application.

1. The data. The data file, which contains every registered .com on the internet, is retrieved from Verisign – the primary directory provider of all .com domains. The file is around 7 gigabyte in size and contains roughly 185 million records – multiple records per domain due to the fact that there can be multiple name servers associated with each domain.
2. The data crunch. The downloaded Verisign file is automatically bulk loaded daily into a MySQL database table via a script that I wrote. The script then starts “crunching” through the records on that one massive table and splits the data off in to roughly 750 tables – one for each two letter/digit combination (For example: aa, ab, ac, ad, etc… and 1a, 1b, etc). You may ask “Why would you split the data out in to several hundred tables?” The answer to that question is Performance. It was critical that the results were presented to the user of the application as quickly as possible and querying a table with 185 million records would take an unacceptable amount of time. Yes, I could have used one of several built in database techniques to assist with the performance (ie. building indexes, partitioning the table, etc) but all of them would have added significant overhead and time to rebuilding the data on a daily basis. The live status of the data crunch is displayed and scrolled directly on the ZFBot.com application.
3. The user interface/website. Although the core of the application is highly technical, I am also a stickler about aesthetics and usability… and I wanted the application to be aesthetically pleasing, relevant and very easy to use. I chose to use Adobe’s Flex as the tool to build the user interface because it satisfied those requirements (and because I do a lot of work in Flex!)

Is there a market for such a tool – how would one use it?

Well, aside from building web applications like ZFBot.com, I’ve been buying/selling/developing domain names since the mid 1990’s. And in opinion, in order for a domainer to be as successful as he or she can possibly be in regards to selling domain names, they need to exhaust every research avenue available to them to learn about the domain names within their portfolio. Yes, there are major website forums (ie dnforum.com) that a domainer can visit to post their domain for sale. But those sales are to resellers for the most part… not end users. And anyone in the domain name business knows that end users pay a lot more for a domain that they want and that means a higher profit for the domainer. And the avenue that the ZFBot.com application provides to the domainer is the ability to very easily and quickly find potential customers for their domains.

Let me explain – before I buy a domain name (typically in an auction), I do plenty of research on that domain. And one critical step in that research process is to find out if there are any individuals or companies (preferably big companies) using a domain similar to the one that I’m about to try to acquire. If I find out that there are – I’m willing to pay more for that domain because there is a good chance that the company or individual, if contacted properly, is willing to pay (sometimes handsomely) for the domain. I’ll give you a specific example… A few months ago I saw that a domain was going to drop – I’ll protect the privacy of the company and let’s say it was companyname.com. Well, a quick Google search revealed that there was a company in the UK operating their business under the domain name companynameinternational.com. I ended up picking the domain companyname.com up in auction for around $300 bucks, contacted the company in the UK in a professional and courteous manner asking them if they were interested in the domain and if so, to make me a reasonable offer. I received an email two days later and we negotiated a price of $3000 USD for the domain. Not bad – a profit of $2700 in 3 days.

Here’s where the beauty of the ZFBot.com application comes in – you don’t need to manually figure out what to search for on Google… the ZFBot.com application will show you ALL of the .com domains that are currently registered that match the domain you may currently own or are thinking of acquiring. After I first built the application and tested it out, I was enlightened by the number of actively registered .com’s that matched domains within my portfolio. These are all potential customers of mine and can be contacted by retrieving the WHOIS info or accessing the actual website – both of which be done directly from the ZFBot.com application. ZFBot.com search results can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet so that you can do your contact leg work at a later time and not have to worry about forgetting what domains you had found.

I’m currently working on further functionality to the ZFBot.com application that will give users the ability to see expiration dates on all domains and a list of domains that are going to drop or go to auction within the next few days.

What is your opinion about current technology available to domainers?

I believe that pretty much all the technology and information that a domainer needs (or individuals in any other business for that matter) already exists on the internet. The solutions are just scattered all over the place, are sometimes antiquated and in general take a lot of time to find and sift through. Heck – I seriously don’t know what I would do without the awesome power of Google. You can find the answer to any question you might have – however technical or obscure the question/answer may be… with a few minutes of research on Google.

I remember the days where an individual would have to go to the library or to a class at a university to learn how to do something. An intelligent, eager and creative individual need not always take that old school approach any longer. The main reasons I built the ZFBot.com application were curiosity, a sense of challenge and a need of my own to trim down on domain research time. Plus it’s a fun to use application.

I’ve also built a few applications for domainers to both manage and showcase their domains – those can be found at Domainerport.com and Domainerport.com/showcase respectively.

Ken, thank you very much for all this detailed and very interesting information!
Is there any personal info or a short bio you’d like to share?

Ken Greenwood, One World Media
Website/Web Application Design and Development since the mid 1990’s
Facebook profile – LinkedIn profile

DNGator.com will be featured on tonight’s Domain Masters radio program, broadcast LIVE from Webmasterradio.fm tonight at 7:00pm Eastern.

Theo Develegas, general manager of Acroplex LLC will be discussing the DNGator “Domain News Aggregator” project, offering analysis on the current domain market conditions and other interesting items – LIVE on the web.

Don’t forget to tune in!