Thursday, January 18, 2018

A web crawler for new gTLDs

ICANN IT has released a UA (Universal Acceptance) Web Crawler that’s been published on GitHub. The website explains that it is "a tool to find the UAC compliance factor of any website". In more simple words: a tool to help you ensure that your domain names and email addresses can be used by all Internet-enabled applications, devices and systems.


What does the crawler do?
I first thought that ICANN had created its own browser but found out that it had nothing to do with this so since I am not geek enough (sorry Don) to try the tool myself, I pasted this from the official website so you can feel free to give it a try yourself:
The UAC Crawler will enable companies and website owners to find out the complexity involved in making their web assets Universal Acceptance Compliant. The idea behind the UAC Crawler portal is that it will give a complexity score which will help nontechnical user base to get started with the UAC journey. The UAC Crawler will crawl the website and generate a list of all internal links - Each use of a link might need to be checked that it can handle UA. It will then generate a score based on how compliant the website links are. The score will be out of 10 and will be based on the following factors:
  • Domain Unicode URL Compliance - Checks if all links are UA compliant. It checks for the HTML encoding of the page to verify if it is UTF compliant;
  • Unicode Email Address Compliance - Checks if all email addresses are UA Compliant;
  • Inactive URL Compliance - The tool also checks for inactive or dead links.
Check the full presentation here.

Blogger users will just love that

I was recently informed that Blogger, the free blogger platform from Google, is about to announce that SSL certificates ("https" secured addresses) will soon be activated for personal domain names.
In more simple words:

  • The SSL certificate will become allowed for personal domains and allow visitors to view your blog over an encrypted connection by visiting "https://";
  • It is free.
I am testing this on gtld.club and guillon.blog (this blog). It seems to work.

For information, Google also offers the SSL certificate on the new version of Google Sites, available in its G Suite.

What more do you need to run a company?

.BRAND new gTLD Reports are updated once a month: CLICK HERE !