Now that some of the domains are coming up for renewal, NameCheap wants to charge me for renewing the privacy as well. Sneaks!

To quote from their list of “features“:

WhoisGuard Privacy Protection

• For a limited time, we are providing WhoisGuard Protection with every new domain registration or transfer.
• This option puts our contact information in Whois, and helps to keep your contact information private.

I think they tried to leave themselves a loophole: WhoisGuard is provided on registrations and transfers… but they don’t say that it’s included with renewals.  I would argue that they imply WhoisGuard is included for the life of the domain at NameCheap.

Any input from the court of public opinion, since I don’t have the cash to get a ruling from the court of the land?

I am currently in the process of transferring all my domain names from GoDaddy to Namecheap.

Why?

1. GoDaddy’s price has gone up
2. Namecheap is cheaper, and has private registration for no extra charge. GoDaddy charges for each private domain name registration, unless you register a certain number of domain names all at once. But when it comes around to renewal time, you’re stuck paying for it on each domain ($1.99 each, at the moment).

A note to others looking for GoDaddy alternatives: avoid iPower like the plague. COMPLETE nightmare. iPower does not have a centralized login so you can see all your domains with them listed in one account. I had to call in order to get a list of the domains I had registered with them. If you transfer a domain away, you have to let them know manually by email or phone, or it will still be in their system and will be renewed (and your card charged) if the expiration date comes around. If you do email and tell them not to renew the domain name, their response includes the explanation that they have put a dummy credit card number in the billing field so it will not renew, and tell you to ignore any “failed” billing messages regarding that domain. ???!!

Another one to avoid is 1and1. Clunky and customer-unfriendly.

Anyway, there shouldn’t be any interruption of this website during the transition. I have been pleased so far, so hopefully, Namecheap will be my new gold standard of registrars, just like Dreamhost is my choice of web host.

In a search engine, this “snap” thing is wonderful — you get a little preview of the site without the time and frustration of clicking and going back, etc.

But it really annoys me when I don’t expect it and it suddenly appears in my face. And when it interferes with using a site by covering up navigation links or (usually) by blocking what I was reading. Yeah, it goes away when you mouse off, but what about those pages with a lot of links? Hard to miss hitting one and setting the preview thing off again.

I realize that it’s possible to turn it off. There is an “options” link in the corner of the snap window — click that and you have the option of turning off the tool for this site or for all sites.

But I wish I had a choice about it appearing on my blog. Hmm. Might be enough to make me move this thing to my Dreamhost account.

Well, I did promise an update, so I’ll post a brief one based on the code I posted yesterday. Remember, I was having trouble understanding how to use cURL instead of the PHP include function, so that’s all that this covers. To learn about using cURL in other ways, head over to Paul Hudson’s wiki.

(Note: I realized that I could shorten it by one line (the timeout variable) so I did for this example.) 

Here’s the cURL code altogether:
<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.host.com/remotefile.html');
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
 if (isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']))
  $url .= "&".$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$file_contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $file_contents;
?>

Now let’s break it apart.

You open with a standard PHP tag:
<?php

Then you set some variables.

This is the basic way to start a cURL query:
$ch = curl_init();

Next, set the options that the query will use.

This one identifies the remote file (the URL) you want to access:
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.host.com/remotefile.html');

This one tells cURL not to immediately print the file that it’s querying, but to keep the results until we call for them later:
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

And this one tells cURL how long it can take (in seconds) to connect to the remote file. I chose 5 seconds (if it can’t connect in 5 seconds, it will stop trying and the rest of my page will still load):
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);

Here’s where an if-else statement with extra variables can go (this is standard PHP):
if (isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']))
$url .= "&".$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];

Set a variable (in this case, file_contents) that you can call in the future to execute the cURL query based on the items you identified above:
$file_contents = curl_exec($ch);

By using a variable you can call later, the results can be displayed in the place and format of your choice. 

End the cURL session (this ends the process so that server memory is freed up):
curl_close($ch);

This PHP code calls the variable we set above to execute the cURL query, and displays the results:
echo $file_contents;

End your PHP like normal:
?>

As mentioned above, by calling a variable to execute the cURL query, you can manipulate and format the results. For example, use $echo to add text before or after the results from the cURL query, wrap it in a table, change font colors and so on and so on. For details on how to format echo strings, visit the official PHP web site.