By Danny Greg:
I am sure that a lot of you reading this, own domain names and websites. It’s interesting to see how different people retrieve information for their various sites, but most use a variety of web services Alexa. This is sufficient if you own a few domains, but if your like me, you can end up with a lot of information on a lot of sites which can be hard to manage. Domainer from Rage Software helps you manage the data on all your domains. This new app, aimed at webmasters, provides a great way to see information about all of your domains quickly and easily.
The interface is intuitive and extremely easy to use. Although I’m not sure about some of the colors used, there are some neat, translucent, HUD windows which fade in and out to provide basic information about each site in the database.
On each HUD you can edit the URL and then most of the information is filled in automatically for you. Information such as when the domain was created, when it expires, the registrar, the registrar URL, the owner as well as the hosting details and its Name-Servers. You also have the ability to save your FTP information for the site in this HUD, as well as some notes regarding it.
There is also a handy iTunes style sidebar (no doubt we will see a lot more of these when Leopard comes around), which gives you the option to add “groups” and “smart groups.” If you have a lot of domains to deal with, I can see this as a killer feature. Particularly as with each smart group there is a wealth of information you can filter by such as Domain name, Alexa rank, registrar, host, owner, the list goes on and on. This exceptionally powerful and flexible feature makes this program brilliant at handling large numbers of domain names.
Finally, there is a standard toolbar at the top allowing the easy addition and editing of domain information as well as a search feature. The app shows various page ranking statistics as well as some basic stats about incoming links. This makes it is useful if you want to quickly check the performance of multiple domains. Domainer, however, has one more neat trick up its sleeve. It can sync the dates that your domain names are due to expire with iCal. Although this doesn’t sound that spectacular, I can see it being particularly useful if you manage a lot of domains.
However, all this functionality comes at a price. Domainer is $40, and I think RAGE may have priced themselves out of most of the shareware market. But if you own a lot of domains, or you make your money buying and selling, this app may well be a must-have. Domainer is shareware and it is available from the Rage Software site, all links will be in the show notes.
