More webmasters basics - this time about how to get someones telephone number, address, and other personal details about them from their domain.

It is actually very easy, and is also a bit of a worry to domain name owners. Anyone can find out their personal data. It shouldn’t be, but it is used for spam and other illegal/immoral uses.

How to do a whois lookup

This is what it is all about - whois (”who is”). If you are on a linux machine, just type “/whois domain.com” in the console. Otherwise the easiest way is to use a website that provides a whois lookup service.

I personally always use whois.sc (now domaintools.com). You can just simply type in whois.sc/thedomainyouwanttolookup.com (this still works even though domaintools now owns it) and you get the whois record.

What if nothing is showing up?

Well, there is this thing called whois protection. It is free on some TLDs (such as .co.uk), but not on most. You can pay a company (usually your registrar) to basically put their contact information inplace of yours. This is often called whois protection. Emails sent to the email listed normally gets forwarded to your email address. If someone uses whois protection, there isn’t much you can do really…

This is the first in a small series of posts about some very basics to webmastering. This one covers programs that allow you to connect to your host via FTP and upload your files.

FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol” and is very popular for transfering files between computers. There are many FTP programs - some 100% free, some have free trials, some cost a bomb. But you don’t need to spend money to get a good FTP program. We will only cover FTP programs for windows (Win 2000, XP, Vista), as chances are if you use linux, you won’t be needing these basic guides…

• Smart FTP - this is what I personally use. Download smart FTP here. It has a very easy to use interface and is very easy to connect to more than one server at once. Uses an explorer like interface, with drag/drop ability.
• FTP Commander - This is another great program (that I used before using Smart FTP for all my ftp needs). Has some great functions like resuming broken downloads etc. http://www.internet-soft.com/software-download.htm
• Ace FTP - I used this for a while, it very easy to use, and also has drag/drop ability! Get it at http://freeware.aceftp.com/.

PS - Merry christmas :).

(My personal excuse for doing this, on Xmas Day - there is nothing on tv ;) )

Update - I’ve had a few comments about this. I guess we all think the best FTP program is the one we use every day! So check out the comments for their views, and leave your own if you think there are better ones! I haven’t used any of those mentioned in the comments, so I won’t cover them here.

I haven’t posted for a few days so thought I should. Might make a more constructive post later. But for now it is just a post ranting about RegisterFly. (non SEO related, quite off topic)
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Howdy

If you want to do a cron job, but don’t want that email giving you the result, such as for example when doing a wget command, do this:

wget –quiet –output-document output_filename http://www.urltoget.com/

It will still email you with errors, so if you want it to never email you, add this:

>/dev/null 2>&1

to the end of it.