Web hosting users may have heard the term “canonical plugins” if they have been paying attention to what the WordPress team has been up to over recent months. There have been numerous references to it, especially at WordCamps, but what does it mean

Well, essentially, they would be plugins which are developed by multiple people rather than just one and would deal with the “most popular functionality requests with superlative execution”, explained Jane Wells, writing on the WordPress blog.

“There would be a very strong relationship between core and these plugins,” she pointed out. This would guarantee “the plugin code would be secure and the best possible example of coding standards”. It would also ensure “new versions of WordPress would be tested against these plugins prior to release to ensure compatibility”, she commented.

A screen in the plugins section of the WordPress admin would be home to the canonical plugins “as a kind of Editor’s Choice or Verified guarantee”, Ms Wells said.

For a system like this to operate properly, every canonical plugin’s development community will most likely require similar infrastructure to WordPress with things such as Trac and mailing lists.

Ms Wells has now called on people to provide a new name for canonical plugins, as many have no idea what it means and having to spell it out takes away the focus from the core ideas behind the concept. So, will web hosting users get involved and suggest a new, catchy name

There are a number of options partaking web hosting users can choose, including Standard, Core, Premium, Validated, Official and, wait for it … Canonical. As for the latter, the WordPress team said perhaps once people are familiar with it, the term may not be so confusing.

The WordPress team recently announced that beta-2 of WordPress 2.9 is ready to be tested. Web hosting users can see what they make of it by downloading it at their own discretion.

Everyone wants to be online these days. If you aren’t, chances are you will be forgotten. Unless you’re in a niche that word of mouth can solely keep you afloat, it’s time to think about getting your site up. This article will hopefully help you through the clutter of setting up a website and help you focus in on what you really need to claim your spot online.

Starting your website tip 1:
When choosing your domain it’s best to select one that is short and to the point. If you own a bakery for example, by this point www.bakery.com is spoken for. However if you last name is Smith or your bakery has an individual name like Blue Hill Bakery, you can try Smithbakery.com or Bluehillbakery.com. Most hosting companies have a tool to help you figure out if the domain you want is already taken, but my favorite is www.instantdomainsearch.com. It’s simple and gives you suggestions on available .net .org etc. variations on your domain search. The shorter the domain the better, not only with this help with people remembering your domain, but it can’t hurt your organic page rank either. Also, make sure that your provider offers unlimited subdomains. Most do without question, but double check before buying, otherwise you could spend a lot more then you should for a site with only a few pages.

Starting your website tip 2:
Usually when you purchase a domain with a provider, chances are you’ll use their hosting services too. You can aim your site from a domain host to a site provider, but if you’re just starting out it may be wiser to host the site and domain with the same company. Depending on the function of the site, be it a blog, corporate, or retail site, you’ll need to decide your storage space and bandwidth allotments. If your site is going to have multimedia you may want to bump up these selections. I’ve found that it’s much easier to back down your package after a test month then it is to have your site crash or be billed for the overages. Once you have an idea of what the site is going to be, within your accounts Control Panel, or cpanel, there should be many options offered by your provider to help you install the needed Content Management Programs on your hosting server. Little tip, I’ve found that WordPress is the most efficient when it comes to blogging, but Joomla is the best I’ve found when setting up a retail site. Both are very easy to dive into and are very robust, but Joomla seems to have better options when it comes to shopping carts.

Starting your website tip 3:
Traffic and tracking are the bread and butter of the internet. Being able to drive customers and track what brought them there is the name of the game. There are many options when it comes to these topics, but I’ll give you what I’ve found to be the best options to start you out.
When it comes to analytics, Google is a staple. You can sign up for a Google Analytics account for free, and they will walk you through the set up process. Be sure to have access to the HTML code on your site because you’re going to have to place some Google code to allow the analytics to gather information. There are other options out there, many of them, but Google does an excellent job of tracking all information and seems to be the default in the industry.
Now, the age old question of “how do I get traffic” I won’t go into too much detail hear because to be honest there is just too much to write about, but I will clue you in on the basics depending on your end goal. If you own a retail site and you’re pushing a product, your best bet out of the gate is to buy targeted traffic for your site. Be very careful, you really do pay for what you get. You can buy very cheap traffic and never have a sale, or you can overpay for targeted traffic that converts. If you have the budget, stick to targeted, if not, try a mix, but all cheap is definitely not the way to go. If you’re a blogger looking to drive traffic organically, well there are volumes written on this topic. What I suggest in the beginning stages is to make sure your topics are relevant and articles filled with great keywords. But more importantly starting out are links. Once you get some content, go out and find similar sites to yours and try to do a link share with them. The more links back to your site, the better your ranking will become.

I could go on for days about tip 3 but I’ll save those for later articles. I hope this gives you a good idea of what to look for when starting a new site. Be sure to ask questions. Most providers have large staffs waiting to help customers. If you find a good rep ask for their name and see if you can reach them directly if you get stuck. It’s a learning process, use all you can to help teach yourself. Once you get it down, you’ll look back a realize it really wasn’t that big of a deal to carve out your spot on the net.

Red Hat has closed its acquisition of hybrid cloud computing provider ManageIQ as part of an effort to boost its cloud portfolio.

The company said that the $104m deal, which was first announced in December of last year, would allow it to better manage hybrid cloud deployments which mix public and private cloud platforms. Based out of offices in the US, UK and Germany, MangeIQ develops automation products which allow administrators to automate day-to-day activities on private clouds.

Red Hat said that the acquisition will allow it to better orchestrate management and integration across both its on-premise cloud computing and public enterprise cloud computing brands.

The company said that it will be offering the ManageIQ products alongside the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and CloudForms infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) brands.

“We’ve worked with ManageIQ as a partner to our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation platform and saw an opportunity to expand our hybrid cloud management capabilities with an even closer relationship with ManageIQ’s compelling portfolio,” said Red hat cloud business unit general manager Bryan Che.

“With the closing of the acquisition, we now begin work to integrate ManageIQ’s enterprise cloud management and automation technologies with our complementary Red Hat CloudForms hybrid IaaS solution and our open Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation management solution.”

Making cloud platforms more interoperable and compatible has emerged as a top priority for Red Hat in recent months.

In December, Red Hat unveiled a series of updates to Enterprise Virtualisation and CloudForms designed to help both platforms better integrate with hybrid cloud models.

A successful hosting experience does not end after a web hosting company is contracted and a hosting plan chosen. A knowledgeable webmaster understands the importance of search engine indexing in over overall website achievements. Having a website properly indexed by search engines is the only way for people browsing the Internet to be able to locate the webpage.

One of the best things about the technology industry is the breakneck pace at which it moves, offering up new innovations, ideas and products with regularity.

However, this can also mean that no sooner have you got your head around one trend or new skills to take on board than three more have come along that need attention and understanding too. Blink and you’ll miss it.

For those in charge of numerous aspects of their organisation’s IT operations 2013 looks set to be no different. So, we at V3 have come up with what we see as 10 of the top skills worth honing for the year ahead, and which just may land you that dream job. If you have your own ideas, please leave a comment at the bottom of the article.

Honourable mention: IT support and management skills

Even though IT support roles are likely to decrease in the future as business users become more tech savvy and use their own devices in the workplace, IT support professionals are still currently very much in demand. As enterprises embrace bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategies, and allow employees to adopt their own chosen cloud applications, there is often actually increasing work for IT support professionals.

General IT management skills also continue to have a place in businesses. IT managers will be especially valuable to a business if they have demonstrable knowledge of which applications best suit the cloud and experience in deploying a BYOD strategy. Digital asset management is also useful knowledge to have as business users adopt more and more profiles on line.

Predictions made that the corporate IT department will soon die off are a long time coming.

10. Windows 8

Following the release of Windows 8 last year, organisations are having to face up to the likelihood that they will see systems with the new platform hitting their network sooner or later, even if it is much, much later, if IT chiefs have any say in the matter.

Microsoft maintains that Windows 8 client devices will fit easily into an existing Active Directory domain alongside earlier versions of Windows, but it is the stark difference in the user experience that marks out Windows 8, and users will be looking for guidance to help them make the transition.

However, Windows 8 will also call for other skills in the area of app development and support, if organisations wish to take full advantage of the new “Modern” user interface and its associated app model.

Not only do the new apps use a different development process from existing Windows apps, but large organisations will need to get to grips with the process of “sideloading” in-house apps to Windows 8 clients on their network, a process that is not as simple as it may first sound.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) has introduced a 1.2TB 10K RPM Ultrastar drive, claimed as the highest capacity enterprise-class hard disk available and enabling datacentres to cram 33 percent more capacity into the same rack space.

Shipping now, the Ultrastar C10K1200 is a development of the firm’s existing Ultrastar C10K900 line, but adds a fourth platter within the same 2.5in drive format to boost total storage capacity up to 1.2TB.

This enables datacentres to fit over 28TB of storage into a 2U rack-mount server chassis, according to Hitachi, which is now part of Western Digital after being acquired in 2011.

Like Hitachi’s existing drives, the new Ultrastar uses a SAS 6Gbit/s serial attached SCSI (SAS) host interface and spins at 10,000RPM. It is aimed at enterprise customers and cloud computing service providers, who seek ever greater densities to meet ballooning data storage requirements.

“This is a key product for large storage arrays as you can fit a higher capacity within the same space restrictions. No one else in the industry has a higher capacity than 900GB in this segment at the moment,” Hitachi senior sales director for EMEA, Nigel Edwards told V3.

The new drive also meets customer requirements around quality and reliability, Edwards said, with an estimated mean time between failures (MTBF) of two million hours.

While the adoption of solid state drives (SSDs) has been growing in the enterprise market, conventional hard drives will continue to make up the majority of datacentre storage because of their larger capacities, Edwards said.

“We see the two technologies complementing each other for the foreseeable future, because of the huge demand for space,” he said, with SSD serving the role of a cache for hard disks or as a small “Tier zero” in the storage hierarchy.

Hitachi is currently “squeezing the maximum it can” from the current perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, before introducing drives with a newer Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) in the 2015 timeframe, a technology that uses partially overlapping tracks to achieve a greater recording density.

“Today we’re sitting at 4TB as the maximum for desktop drives, but it won’t be long before we will be up at 8TB or 9TB in the 3.5in space,” Edwards predicted.

Later this year, Hitachi also plans to introduce helium-filled drives, which it claims will cut power consumption by 23 percent because helium is less dense than air and thus less power is needed to spin the platters.

Disks with this technology have the potential to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership for enterprise and cloud customers simply by reducing energy bills, according to Hitachi.