Lifelog

2,5 years ago, when starting my own company, we wanted to offer webhosting to our webdesign customers, that’s why we decided to buy a server, and make use of a ‘colocation’ host for a 1U server. Pretty soon, it became clear we would need another ‘development’ machine to test/debug our applications before going live…So we bought another one…

Because we now had 3U’s space, we decided to look for a larger spot, so we would have more options afterwards. I convinced my cousin’s company to come along, and we decided to rent a 1/2 rack (colocation) in Amsterdam. At that moment we were still hosting gameservers, so we regulary did server updates (new hardware etc)…Now if you know that going to Amsterdam, without traffic, takes about 3hrs (and 3 hours back) by car, you can see that this is a terrible situation, and especially when your hardware malfunctions once in a while…

So at the end of my contract, i decided to move to Belgium with my servers. The prices of colocation in the Netherlands were booming because of energy pricing (that’s what they told me), and the service wasn’t all that either….

Because my network administrator has a small colocation company in Antwerp, Belgium. I decided to give it a go. Important detail is that i don’t profile myself as a webhosting company but i offer webhosting solutions to my webdevelopment clients. This way i do not have to keep 1000+ users in account, and i can guarentee maximum uptime to my clients (i know exactly which modules, dependancies, configuration these clients need).

Now as time is going by, my company has some decent clients that require maximum uptime. Because the location in Antwerp is fully dependant of realroot (a major player on the belgian colo market) we’ve had a few problems. Being dependant of only one company is a major flaw in any case, so i started looking for alternative solutions…And i did, a Brussels based colocation company, this company offers everything i need (multiple power feeds, independant network, own RIPE account), now let’s hope we could stay here for a while…

Seems like Europe is getting a lot of critique on the management / handling / registration of .eu domain names. Wired news published an article that handles some of these problems

“It was badly handled from start to finish,” said John McCormac, who runs an Irish domain monitoring service and whose blog tracks the .eu controversy.

To make sure my company was able to get the .eu domainname, i tried to register the digitalbase.eu domain name during the sunrise 2 phase , so i used google to find a decent Belgian .eu registrar compared it to the certified registrars on the eurid site, mainly because i knew alot of fake companies were popping up…

After signing up, filling in all datails and paying the bill (about 300 euro’s), i got documents i needed to fill in and send to PriceWaterHouse coopers, and international law firm that was appoined by the .eu to handle the sunrise paperwork. I sent the filled in request 5 days after registering my domainname, on the day the sunrise2 period started. There i made a terrible mistake by not sending it by ‘registered letter’. My registrar told me i had 30 days to make sure my file would reach PWH (price waterhouse coopers), and as i sent it in 5 days after sunrise 2 phase opened, i was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any problem, right ?

After 30 days, i got a message from my registrar saying my application suspended, because the period was over, WTF?
I immidiately called them :

Me : I sent the application form 5 days after i registered my domain with you, i think it should have arrived by now ?
Registrar : I’ve had several complaints the past days, but i can’t help you, as it is PWHC desponsability, i suggest you give em a call ?
Me : Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr……ok

After this phone conversation i was starting to realise it was going to be a terrible job, getting someone to talk to at PriceWaterHouse coopers, but i gave it a try without any luck (i didn’t have a confirmation of sending the application). To make sure i had my domainname, i immidiately pre-registered my domainname with the landrush period, as i had a fast & solid registrar i was the first to register it in landrush…but i still lost my 300euro.

Now i ask myself, this lawfirm appoined by the .eu just has the complete control of what they do with your application ? During the period (after paying 300euro, for a minimal level of service), you do not get informed ONCE that your file still didn’t came through…I did send my letter immidiately, but even if it didn’t came through, for this amount of money you would expect a basic service and/or follow-up concerning your application, but i guess not…

Untill now, the letter didn’t came back, neither did i get a word from PWHC, and i am pretty sure i am not the only….

As a follow-up to my previous post (Internationalization – seo – mod_rewrite : Part I). If you followed my previous instructions, by now you should be the proud owner of a ‘google sitemaps‘ account and your webhost supports statistics that can tell you when a crawlbot visited your website (or raw logs, if you’re a sherlock holmes type).

Because you are reading this howto, i can conclude you have a website running on a domain or atleast a subdomain. For multi-language systems i prefer using the subdomain to set the language of the user. So if you were using www.mydomain.tld/index.php?lang=en before, you will now be using en.mydomain.tld. For a website with multiple languages that would become :

• www.mydomain.tld : would point to the default language, or will relocate the user based on browser/os/nslookup (whatever you prefer)
• en.mydomain.tld : would point to the website in english
• fr.mydomain.tld : would point to the website in french
• X.mydomain.tld : would point to the website in …

If you are using a subdomain this could be done with en.subdomain.mydomain.tld etc….
This way of working has some advantages :

• users will be able to bookmark directly in their language.
• Search engine optimalisation can be targetted on subdomains seperately
• crawlbots will easily know which language they are crawling (also due to tag)

Step 1 : Set up your nameserver records

Make sure the A records all point to the same adress, i prefer setting a records for all different languages as i do not want to point *.domain.tld to the website (for various reasons). As this is not a dns administration guide, try to find more information in the docs of your dns daemon, but before doing that check if undefined subdomains do not already point to the same ip as your main domain, this could be the case and then no configuration is needed…

You can check this by doing :

 ping mydomain.tld

Compare the result ip adress with a ping to a subdomain :

 ping en.mydomain.tld

If both ip match, you will most probably have the right nameserver configuration already, you can go straight to step 2.

Step 2 : Make sure the webserver catches the subdomain

As i am using apache only at this moment, i will only explain you briefly how to do this in apache, for all other webservers check the documentation. Try to look for the virtualhost directive of your domain in the webserver configuration, by default this will be in /etc/httpd/conf, searching for httpd.conf, apache.conf or apache2.conf will tell you where it’s located…If you split up your virtualhost directives in different files, you are most probably clever enough to find your virtualhost directive, if you didn’t check the bottom of your configation file, there should be something like this :

  ServerName yourdomain
  DocumentRoot "/path/to/your/webroot"
  DirectoryIndex index.php
  
   AllowOverride All
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from All
  

Add a serveralias, so apache knows to catch the subdomains, there are 2 ways of doing this, you can add a ServerAlias for all different languages, or you could add a * alias, so from now on apache will catch all unknown subdomains for this domain.

Option 1 : Catch only the subdomains i want

  ServerName yourdomain
  ServerAlias language1.yourdomain
  ServerAlias language2.yourdomain
  DocumentRoot "/path/to/your/webroot"
  DirectoryIndex index.php
  
   AllowOverride All
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from All
  

Option 2 : Catch all subdomains

  ServerName yourdomain
  ServerAlias *.yourdomain
  DocumentRoot "/path/to/your/webroot"
  DirectoryIndex index.php
  
   AllowOverride All
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from All
  

Save your virtualhost config file, or main webserver configuration file and restart your webserver

 apachectrl -k restart

More information on setting Apache virtualhosts serveralias’es.

You should now be able to see the same website you had before, using the lang.mydomain.tld subdomains, if this is not the case, check your include paths etc….I have to stop this howto for now, we will go the the coding itself in Part III

I am running a pretty big company website that uses multiple languages so users can browse the website in their language. Lately i have been working on the Search Engine Optimalisation, and i noticed google (and some other crawl bots) do not correctly crawl the other languages, this had something todo with various reasons :

• language selection was saved in session or by $_GET argument
• meta language tag was not always set
• there was no clear line how the language was selected, user couldn’t see by url which language he selected

I did a few lookups on the internet, some various SEO forums, and i’ve collected this information and, with the help of Apache mod_rewrite, turned the website into a fancy, easy-to-use, multilanguage environment, and this is how i did it. I will explain you in 3 different parts, which i will try to finish in the upcoming 3 days….

To start off i am using .xml files to hold all the different language strings, nowadays you can find some php frameworks that fully support i18n, but back in the days i was making international websites, they were not that commonly available. If you would go for a framework i would choose Mojavi, Prado or Symfony, i am not going to elaborate on that, as this post is not about frameworks, but howto put different languages on your website, and making sure google (and other search engines), crawl em like they should….

Start off by making sure you have a google sitemaps account and have a way to gather website statistics, very good would be a package where you can list the crawl bots seperately (i prefer awstats)

Sitemaps what/where went wrong when crawling your site. The Google Sitemaps program has two major components:

• Google Sitemaps Console: Provides statistics and error information about your site, as well as tools for managing your site.
• Google Sitemaps files: Enable you to tell us what pages are present on your site.

I’ll leave you the time to make sure you have both of the above items + it’s a really nice excuse to stop writing and do something else…Part II soon…