For more information check out the Slice Hosting page or contact Sales@xdnet.co.uk

This can be applied to ANY email hosting, ANY shared hosting account and ANY reseller account!

Promo code: xmastreat

Terms:

Any one can take advantage of this promotion, new and existing clients.

This promotion ends 31st decemeber 2008 - so sign up now!

This is only applicable to NEW purchases.

Clients are free to downgrade their account after the promotional pricing has ended in accordance with the Terms of Service 

FREE 10GB backup with unlimited bandwidth for UK VPS!

As a special treat sign up for a UK VPS and you can get 10GB off-site backup space with unlimited bandwidth, saving £6/month!

For further details or questions please contact us: Sales@xdnet.co.uk 

Merry Christmas from XDnet.co.uk!

Features include:

Support ticket rating, so you can now tell us how helpful our responses are which helps us to provide a better service, and hopefully ensure we are providing the very best support possible.

SEO Friendly URLS! we have finally got SEO friendly URLs on the Knowledgebase and other parts of the Client system, which is not only good for Search Engines, but hopefull makes it easier to know what a link is about just from the URL.  Also apologies to any users (i know there was a few!) who caught us in the middle of the upgrade or before the client area templates could be corrected, as some of the links for the knowledge base was a little messed up because of the friendly URL changes, but that has now been corrected and hopefully there should be no further issues.

Ticket Search, which will enable you to easily search through previous tickets.

Network Issues, If and when network issues occur or are planned they will be shown on the network issues page in your client area (we are currently revising our client area and for users where this does not show, it will be there soon! - we are working to get the client area to fully reflect the new features and changes).

Feedback on changes, or feedback about things you would like to see on the site is much apprieciated - leave a comment below or pop us an email to support@xdnet.co.uk.

Check Everything!

Seriously, never trust user input. They may not intend to do a SQL inject, but they could still end up doing it anyway. Any data coming from an uncontrolled source should be checked. In the below example I am going to use the if() function:

<?php
if(!is_numeric($_GET['ID'])){ // If it’s not a number
echo ‘Sorry you ID is not a number.’; die();
}
// Do the SQL here.
?>

Hash/Encrypt It

Hashing or encrypting something is essentially changing a string of data into something more manageable. In the below example, I’ll use MD5 as my hashing method. This should remove any dangerous characters which could lead to a SQL error.

<?php
$password = md5($_POST['password']); // run a MD5 on the password
// If the password was 1234, it will now be 81dc9bdb52d04dc20036dbd8313ed055

// do the SQL Query
?>

Of course there are other functions to hash or encrypt something. Take a look at the PHP manual for more of them.

Serialize
Serializing a string creates a storable representation of a value, personally this is my favorite way of putting some data into SQL because it can store arrays (So when I select the field, I get a big array of data). Here is a very quick example on how to do it.

<?php
$data = serialize($_POST['data']);
// do the SQL Query
?>

What’s new?

We have doubledour money back guarantee to 28 days!

Launched our reseller packages, which all include a free domain and as a special launch promotion sign up now using promo code 50offreseller3month to get half price reseller hosting for the first three months!

Business plan has been upgraded bandwidth from 15GB to a whopping 25GB!

Advanced plan has been upgraded disk space has been upgraded from 800MB to 1GB and bandwidth has jumped from 8GB to 10GB.

We will also be launching a perks program (details coming soon), which will reward our clients who among other things make payments on time. We will are interested to see how this goes and would like to see what kind of effect it has on our current client base.

And of course we have been tweaking the site design, and had added more information about XDnet and the products we provide, we now have detailed information about our US and UK datacenter so you can see where your websites live, we have also added new UK dedicated servers.

We have also been able to reduce all UK VPS prices as well as a few others.

Regrettably we have had to slightly increase the price of some of our US products due to the current exchange rate which means, because we work close to cost prices it was unsustainable to provide the products at the previous prices. We intend to keep XDnet as a sustainable web host ensuring stability with your hosting.

We also have a few more tricks up our sleve which we will be implementing soon, so look out and don’t forget to tell us what you think of changes and we will do our best to make our service as best as it can be fo you.

What this means:

All users can expect their account(s) which includes files, databases, email accounts and everything to be automatically backed up to another server every single day, meaning should something go wrong we can recover your account for you meaning minimal (if any) data loss.

Backups are taken daily, weekly and monthly.

Backups are generally stored for one month and will be deleted periodically to minimise costs.

This also means if for what ever reason you require a backup of your account we can provide it (for a small fee).

Any Questions or Comments please add them below, or contact support@xdnet.co.uk

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts, XDnet uses the inbuilt RSS feed which wordpress generates - http://xdnet.co.uk/blog/feed/ so you can subscribe and always stay up-to-date with the going on’s at XDnet.co.uk

The RSS feed, which is also called a “web feed,” or “channel,” contains a summary of the blog post or news and a link to the full page with the info and if avalible articles about the event/news. RSS makes it possible for you to keep up with the latest content from your favourite sites in a format which is easier than checking them manually.

How do I use it?

RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”. You can subscribe to our feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking on the RSS icon (right) or the Orange RSS icon which appears in the top tabs bar. Which ever reader you use it will check our feed, once you have subscribed, regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

Using Internet Explorer for feeds

You can use Internet Explorer 7 to read and manage your RSS feeds and keep you updated.
Click to find out how!

• Make sure you can concentrate, try to get rid of distracting things such a MSN, email and RSS while you work. Interestingly enough, I recently monitored the ratio of work applications to other applications, my results were about 1:5 which was shocking!
• This varies from person to person, but music and podcasts can be a distraction. Avoid anything which could need extra attention (such as news programs or music which has lots of lyrics).
• Avoid taking regular coffee and toilet breaks. It can be difficult to keep your trail of thought if you keep needing to go off and do something.
• Make sure you have had enough to eat and drink before you work. Like scientists always say “If you miss breakfast, it’s hard to concentrate”. If you really want to go crazy, have some small nibbles near by to keep you full up.
• Know what your doing! If you are unsure of what you need to do, you could end up just making a pile of crap. So when you start, make notes of what you need to do, so you know what you have done and what is still to be done.

I hope this helps ^_^

It took a little longer than expected to sort out licensing and getting it installed, and we are just sorting out some of the settings and files, to try and get all users previous installations fully setup on the new server.

This may take a couple of days but hopefully your current installations will be all safe and sound by the weekend.

What is Fantastico?

Fantastico put simply is a script library, a huge selection of great scripts which you can easily install with a click of your mouse and have a blog, forum or almost any type of script running in a couple of minutes.

Read more about Fantastico.

XDnet is also working away at some new products and more getting more information on XDnet, and plans to put more emphasise on other products we do, and will be providing. So if you have anything you would like to see, be it a blog post on a specific topic, a knowledge base article which would really help or a product you would like to see XDnet selling please feel free to leave a comment, send us an email or open a ticket and we will see if we can satisfy your needs. But don’t worry, none of the changes will negatively effect current clients - we are also planning some package upgrades and a perks scheme for clients so look out!

Embedding your stream into a web page, or creating an online player is a very good idea. During this example i will be using one of our clients, Swindon 105.5’s online player as an example.

So firstly, its always good to give your users choice as to the player, and there for the plug-in they use to listen to your stream. It is important to remember that just because you prefer using Windows Media Player for example that everyone will have that plug-in installed for their chosen browser, there are many players so give them a choice, on Swindon 105.5’s online player when you first open the player you are given the choice of Windows Media Player or Quick-Time this option is then saved in a cookie. Which then makes further user experience much better, as repeat users (which for online radio and broadcasting in general is important) can just click and listen to your station, how they want to.

Now we get to the actual player, but of course with the web we can be much more interactive with the user, and you as a webmaster, and/or a radio station can provide information about what they are listening to, who’s on air and whats next.

As you can see on the right this is the player window, and this webmaster as kept things simple, as they should be. However some radio stations have their players clogged up with all sorts of rubbish and unrelated information where as this is clean, and to the point.

We have an easy switch player link in the corner to change your player preference, there-fore giving the user more choice.

Also we have information about the current program on air, “The Big Weekender”, we can see the show title and the presenters, which helps listeners to know who and what they listen to and form a stronger bond with the presenters and your station.

Quick Plug: You have taken a little look at Swindon 105.5’s online player so take a look at their site and have a listen!

The code:

So far i have briefly looking at what a good player might include, so design aside we will look at the code you need to embed a player into your web-page for them to listen.

So lets take a look:

<object id=”MediaPlayer” height=”45″ classid=”CLSID:22D6f312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95″ standby=”Loading…” type=”application/x-oleobject” codebase=”http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab#Version=6,4,7,1112“>
<param name=”filename” value=”listen.m3u”>
<param name=”showcontrols” value=”true”>
<param name=”autostart” value=”true”>
<embed type=”application/x-mplayer2″ src=”listen.m3u” name=”MediaPlayer” height=”45″ width=”300″ showcontrols=”1″ showdisplay=”0″ showstatusbar=”0″></embed></object>

 The above code will embed a Windows Media Player into your webpage, so lets break this down and little and look at the parts which make it up and control how it behaves.

Breaking it down.

So you may have noticed that much of the code seems to do the same job, we have the <object> tag and then we have the <embed> tag within that which seems to duplicate some of the variables. This is because FireFox and Internet Explorer can have problems understanding the code, Internet Explorer likes having the <object> tag where as FireFox (and other browsers) are happy with <embed> for this reason we include both.

codebase:

Codebase which is a attribute in object provides a URL where the exe or plugin can be downloaded, so if a user does not have Windows Media Player installed this can help them find and install the required plugin.

This is not a required attribute and can be left out if desired.

filename:

This is the location of the file (or stream) you wish to play. You can use the direct source of your stream, which will be something like myradio.com:8000, however many users may wish to use playlist files instead, we will explain more about these and how you can use and build these later.

autostart:

This dictates if the stream/file should automatically play on loading or if the user should click play first.

Generally sounds should not be automatically played on websites as it can be offensive and annouying to users, however because in this context we know the user wants to listen to your stream (after all they have opened your player) it would be advised to set auto start to true.

showcontrols:

This option controls if the controls, the buttons like volume, play, stop etc should be shown to the user.

However note that in most modern browser this (along with many other attriubutes) may be ignored and not take effect.

As i mentioned because of browser differences it is important to try and make the code understandable to all browsers.

Attributes should be included in different ways, within <param> tags:

<param name=”autostart” value=”true” />

And also within the <embed> tag itself:

<embed type=”application/x-mplayer2″ src=”listen.m3u” autostart=”1″></embed>

Quick-Time:

The code for a quick-time player is almost identical to Windows Media Player with small differences most of the parameters/attributes are the same, however obviously there is a difference codebase:

CODEBASE=”http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab“

You should now be equip with the basic code you need to get your stream on you website or online player, we can go into further detail, but that’s another article.

And of course, we are always happy to help with programming and code writing for our customers, just get in contact for more information.

Please leave comments or questions below.