Ask Felgall

Those domains that end with a two character code are country specific while those that have a top level domain of between three and six characters are international. When you are targetting your pages just to people in a specific country then it makes sense to use the top level domain for that country. Depending on which country it is you may then find that there may or may not be a second level domain structure established within that country. Most of the larger countries have a second level structure like this (the most obvious exception being .us sunce the majority of Americans seem to prefer targetting an international market rather than a local one).

The .au top level domain belongs to Australia and there are only a small number of second level domains for use for targetting your site at Australians. This article lists those that exist and also identifies the criteria that you need to meet to obtain a domain within each of the SLDs.

.au Domains

This particular golden oldie is particularly relevant today as today marks the end of daylight savings time in Western Australia for this year. I had to pay particular attention to the end of DST this year because the Eastern states where I live have decided to extend DST by an extra week and so I had to spend time locating all of the affected scripts on my site to update them. DST will now end next Sunday instead.

This really early JavaScript that I wrote is one that needs to be able to know when it is and isn’t DST at your location because this JavaScript converts the time from your visitor’s computer (assuming that they have their time and timezone set correctly) to display the time where you the author of the page is located.

Author Time

It suddenly occurred to me a few days ago that it had been quite a while since I had last reviewed the prices that I have on the various scripts, memberships etc on the site.

In the case of all the scripts I have for sale I have prices showing in both US and Australian dollars. While the Member’s Area silver and gold membership prices are only listed in US dollars, I have to convert all the money I receive to Australian dollars when I transfer it to the bank.

Since I had last updated the prices there has been a significant change in the Australian to US dollar exchange rate. The obvious thing to do first was to adjust all of the US dollar prices on the scripts to reflect the current equivalent to the listed Australian dollar prices. Note that while this means an increase in price for those buying from outside Australia, it simply means that I will get the same money as I was getting 12 months ago instead of a lower amount.

The next place to update the prices is the Silver and Gold memberships in the Member’s Area. I haven’t actually done that yet. Instead I have decided to hold off on that price correction for a few weeks so that you effectively have a couple of weeks in which to purchase those memberships at an effectively discounted price. I will not be holding off for too long though so if you want to save some money on getting access to a whole load of useful scripts templates and ebooks then now is the time. The price increases on the scripts mean that a couple of the scripts that are included in the Gold membership are now selling separately for about the same price as the Gold membership.

I will be teaching computer classes at the local Community College again next year. For anyone who lives in Sydney, Australia who might be interested in attending one of my classes, the list has now been updated to include those classes that I will be running at the Macarthur College in term one next year.

In the Classroom