Welcome To Devils Workshop!!!

My Experience With Indiatimes Domain Service [TDIS]
How websites can track and identify your browser as unique?
How to find mystery fonts with images?

My Experience With Indiatimes Domain Service [TDIS]

Posted: 20 Feb 2010 06:27 AM PST

Seeing new blogs coming up everyday the writer inside me started nagging me to start my own blog. After giving it a lot of thought I finally started my journey with blogger.com. But having a blogspot.com attached to my url didn't give that feeling of ownership. So just after a week I started looking for a custom domain. After doing a lot of research I came across a post by Rahul 8 Tips For Finding Good Domain Name. Using that as a buying guide I finally bought my first domain name from GoDaddy and started my blog KnowledgeHub. Believe me guys having your own domain name gives you an immense satisfaction and also motivates you to write regularly.

Cheap_domain_name

Last week I decided to add another blog to my network. Having helped my friends in buying and setting up their domains made me feel like a pro in the field of domain market, and thus I let my guard down. A big mistake.

After a lot of research, I finalized the domain I wanted. But just before hitting the buy button at GoDaddy, a "smart idea" struck me and I started looking for other cheap domain registrars. My (bad) luck, I came across Indiatimes. They were offering 'dot in' extension domains at half the price I was paying at GoDaddy. HALF THE PRICE !! Boy that's lot of money !! Without thinking further I logged out of GoDaddy and registered the domain with IndiaTimes. "HaHa, I'm a smart customer", I told myself. A dumb statement.

Trouble started when I opened the dashboard to change dns settings, as required by blogspot. Guess what- no dns settings there !! 1 mail and 2 calls later I realized that they do not provide the Cname and A record entries access to customers, but they'll "do the needful from their end, if I provide them the details". Why can't they give us the total dns control like GoDaddy ? . Well you can't ask for everything at such cheap price , I tried to reason with myself. And at least they are making the changes so that's fine.

But their next mail told me that nothing is fine. They required Google Unique String 'which is needed for domain verification' ! Now what's that ! A quick call to their customer support team told me that I can get the unique string by googling about it. Boss, if someone can get their unique string just by googling it, then how can it be "unique" ? But with nothing else to do, I tried that as well. Google told me what it is, but no matter what search query I used I couldn't find a way to get the unique string for the domain I bought. Baffled, I mailed them again, telling them that I was never asked for this string when I changed dns settings in GoDaddy, to which they replied that they will get back to me soon. I'm still to hear from them.

Its been five days since I bought the domain name and I'm yet to get the dns settings done . I am now considering to move my domain to GoDaddy, but after adding the transfer fees, the effective cost would come out to be more than what I would have initially paid. Looks like I wasn't such a smart customer after all.

Lessons Learnt

1) Before buying a domain do complete research about the registrar. Ask experienced people about their opinion of different registrars.

2) Check if your registrar gives you total dns control or not.

Planning to buy a domain name ?

Before you go ahead, I recommend you to read these articles on Devils Workshop:

You can buy your domain from GoDaddy. I have bought 3 domain names from them till now and have faced no issues. A suggestion though: You might want to change the renewal process from Auto to Manual, otherwise your credit card will be charged at the time of renewal without your consent. Or better still, use virtual credit card.

This Post My Experience With Indiatimes Domain Service [TDIS] is Published on Devils Workshop .

How websites can track and identify your browser as unique?

Posted: 20 Feb 2010 03:26 AM PST

When you clear browsing history, delete the cookies and clear the cache you expect your browser to be not trackable. If you think about individuals certain singular information is not all that important but a combination of them can allow you to differentiate if not identify the individuals.

If you know the Zipcode of ten people there is no way to distinguish one from the other if two or more have the same zip code. But if you know a combination of zipcode, gender and date of birth then the person would be very uniquely identifiable and hence trackable.

In terms of browsers this information is often stored by servers when you visit a website for tracking statistics. Most analytical services track individual visits, unique visitors on websites with a combination of some information which makes the individual visitor unique and hence trackable.

About Panopticlick

Ideally we think if we clear browsing data and use incognito mode for making use our stats are not tracked by a tracking service.
That is not true. Despite all this your browser and its visits can be recognised as unique and tracked by a service.
Visit Panopticlick after you have cleared all browsing data. Let it look up the uniqueness of your browser.

For instance I used my Chrome browser with all details removed and logged into Panopticlick with in incognito mode. Here it identified browser characteristics as User Agent, Browser plugin details, Time Zone, Size color and details. As I mentioned before none of these characteristics can give a unique identity about the browser. But a combination of all these create a unique identity for a website to track individual browser.

Link: Panopticlick

This Post How websites can track and identify your browser as unique? is Published on Devils Workshop .

How to find mystery fonts with images?

Posted: 20 Feb 2010 12:10 AM PST

We are in the Web 2.0 era, where there is a big focus on fonts. Especially for the fonts that we use in the logo, they are smoother, bigger and much cleaner. This has definitely increased the number of fonts used now a days. In our day to day activities, we often stumble over to the websites that have awesome designs and logos, that we desperately want to know the font used in it!

To figure out a font type isn’t easy, especially when there are ten’s of thousands of fonts available to search from. MyFonts.com has a service named WTF – WhatTheFont, to recognize the mysterious font in an image. What you have to do is simply upload the image or provide the url to the image. You will be provided with a set of closest matches available in their database.

Upload the image containing the font that you wish to recognize. The service providers suggest that the characters in the image should not be touching, have a height of about 100 pixels, have a distinct shape and as horizontal as possible. After uploading the image, they may ask you to enter the text corresponding to some of the characters in the image, which their system wasn’t able to detect accurately.

Moving on to the next step, you will be provided with a few fonts that closely match the font used in your image. If it does not provide you with the accurate font, it will surely take you very close to the font your wish to use.

I am a fan of this service, and it has never let me down. If such a thing happens to you, submit your image to WhatTheFont forum for it to be reviewed by font geeks world over!

Being a blogger and a fan of latest design aspects, I am often attracted to the designs on web. The recent case being the logo for my own website. I remember, I had to search all the fonts in my photo-shop, and still wasn’t able to decide on the font. Then I came across an image logo on a website and at once decided to end my search. Knowing that I had a back-up service, that will help me recognize the font used in the image. This post was about my experience with fonts that helped me to make use of this wonderful website WhatTheFont!

What’s your experience with the fonts? How do you tackle them, when you need to recognize one in a million. Let us know through your comments.

This Post How to find mystery fonts with images? is Published on Devils Workshop .