March 1, 2010

Six Tips for Effective Domain Name Management Using Watch My Domains or Domain Punch Pro


1. Always backup your data. You can backup your domain name management data by simply backing up a folder. Please see this blog post for more details.

2. Don’t fillup the projects with data you don’t need. Software like Domain Punch Pro and Watch My Domains ISP allow you to obtain and store a large amount of related data for each domain. Lookup only the data you need. You can selectively lookup the required data by using the “Lookup Some” or “SQL lookup” options in these products.

3. Use the domain Finder tool for finding domain names. Domain Manager is for managing your domain names. Use the “Finder” tab (available in Watch My Domains ISP and Domain Punch Pro) for finding available domain names. It is built for that.

4. After you have retrieved all the data for domain names, enable auto-update and set it to re-lookup the data at leisurely intervals.  Don’t enable auto-lookup at the beginning, especially if you have a lot of domains.

5. Manually check your domain records, probably, once a month. You can quickly sort using the Expiry date or Admin contact and find domains that need to be renewed or emails that don’t seem to be correct.  You should also manually inspect the raw whois data (lower panel) for your important domains.

6. Always make sure that your contact emails work and that you can receive emails from your registrar. Any email you use as domain name contact should be well protected using a strong password that is never used for anything else. For example, never use the same password for registering at an online forum.



Filed under: Domain and Site Management — Tags: , — admin @ 6:05 pm

February 23, 2010

How To Invoke a Private Webpage Script When a Domain Record is Changed


Did you know that you can use Domain Punch Pro and Watch My Domains ISP  to invoke a private web based script, after whois lookups, if any domain record has been modified?

The information about the changes is passed as a POST variable to the script. You can set this up from the “Config” tab using the “Domain Alerts” button.

First check the “Web Script” option under “Alerts”. Then scroll down and specify the details about your server script. You have to provide the full URL of your script along with the name of the POST variable that should be used. For a sample PHP script, please see “Domain Alerts, Web-scripts and more…”

You can use this to send email alerts too. We recommend this method instead of SMTP because SMTP method may fail if your ISP uses grey-listing to prevent SPAM. Most ISPs do use it.



Filed under: Domain and Site Management — Tags: — admin @ 4:46 pm

February 22, 2010

Watch My Domains Pro and ISP versions Updated


We have updated Watch My Domains Pro and Watch My Domains ISP.

For Watch My Domains ISP, the update fixes a minor issue with some regional settings.

Watch My Domains Pro gets better support for doing whois lookups through a web based script. Please see http based whois for more details.



Filed under: Domain and Site Management, Software Features and Support — Tags: — admin @ 9:00 pm

January 19, 2010

New Updates – Domain Name Portfolio Management Software


We have updated the following domain name portfolio management software products.

Domain Name Prtfolio Management Software

The new additions / changes include

  • Now you can define http based proxy for any specific whois server. Please see http based whois.
  • Support for HTTP/1.1 based whois proxy script (only if you use web based whois). Previous versions worked only if the whois script was uploaded to a hosting account with a dedicated IP address. It now supports virtual hosts.
  • Name servers are always displayed in lower case now. Previously it was picked up exactly as it is in the last read whois data. This caused the NS data to be shown in mix of lowercase and uppercase.
  • Secondary lookup support for CC domains. CC domains require a second lookup (similar to NET/COM/TV domains). The software does it automatically now.
  • When you open a new document and lookups are in progress, you will be prompted to stop the lookups.
  • The “Whois Setup” dialog displayed a harmless “”Delete Selected”” button that did nothing. This was removed.


Filed under: Domain and Site Management, Software Features and Support — Tags: — admin @ 12:00 pm

January 5, 2010

Special Offers on Domain Name Management Software will end Soon


Our traditional year end special offers on Domain Punch Pro and Watch My Domains ISP will end in two days (Jan-7-2010).  Don’t miss this offer if you have been planning to buy Domain Punch Pro or Watch My Domains ISP.



Filed under: Domain and Site Management — Tags: — admin @ 6:05 pm

October 22, 2009

Quick Tip: Domain Punch Pro – How To Sort Based on Domain TLD


Here is a quick tip! You can sort the domains in Domain Punch Pro in order of the domain extensions (TLD or ccTLD) by simply clicking on the # column (click twice to sort in reverse order).

This can be turned off from the Application Settings option in the Config tab. If this is turned off the # click will sort domains in the original insertion order.



Filed under: Application Notes, Domain and Site Management — admin @ 8:17 pm

October 4, 2009

Software Updates: Domain Name Portfolio Management Software


We have updated the following domain name portfolio management software products.

Domain Name Prtfolio Management Software

For Watch My Domains Pro, it is only a simple maintenance release.

Domain Finder (the tool in Watch My Domains ISP and Domain Punch Pro that identifies available domain names) will now work faster and better. It will also automatically identify the invalid IP addresses (for DNS based lookups).

The “domain name finder” checks if a domain has a valid A (DNS) record as a first step while deciding if the domain is registered or not. If it doesn’t find a valid IP address, it will do a whois lookup. This minimizes the number of whois lookups and also increases the speed of lookups. Also, this method will appeal to people who are paranoid about their domain name searches.

In the earlier builds the above method had a problem if you used OpenDNS for your DNS or if your ISP automatically resolved all domain names. The fix was to manually add the OpenDNS IPs to the invalid IPs list. After this update, you need not do it manually.



Filed under: Domain and Site Management, Software Features and Support — Tags: , — admin @ 6:33 pm

October 3, 2009

Watch My Domains ISP – SQL Query To List or Lookup Domains Based On Categories


If you have a lot of domain names managed through Watch My Domain ISP, you probably make use of domain categories to group them. 

Any domain category you create in Watch My Domains ISP is stored on the database using the following Boolean field name.

GRP_<category name>

For example, if you have a category called “Business Domains”, the corresponding field will be

GRP_Business Names

Any domain that belongs to “Business Domains” will have the above field value set to TRUE.

With the above information, you can construct SQL queries. Here is an example query that lists all domains that do not belong to the “Business Domains” category.

SELECT * FROM [Domains] WHERE ([GRP_Business Domains] <> 1 OR [GRP_Business Domains] IS NULL)

 You have to do the NULL check because the value may not be set for many domains.

You can also do multiple checks. The following will list all domains that do not belong to the “Business Domains” and “Important Domains”

SELECT * FROM [Domains] WHERE ([GRP_Business Domains] <> 1 OR [GRP_Business Domains] IS NULL)  AND  ([GRP_Important Domains] <> 1 OR  [GRP_Important Domains] IS NULL)

Other SQL Query and Domain Database Related Posts

You may want to try all or some of our domain name portfolio management related products at domainpunch.com. Thirty day free trial downloads are available for all the products.



Filed under: Application Notes, Domain and Site Management — admin @ 7:20 pm

September 30, 2009

ICANN Gains Independence From US Control


The US Commerce Department and ICANN have entered into an “affirmation of commitments” that will see ICANN gaining some independence from US control over it’s operations.

Here are some quotes…

“DOC affirms its commitment to a multi-stakeholder, private sector led, bottom-up policy development model for DNS technical coordination that acts for the benefit of global Internet users…”

“DOC recognizes the importance of global Internet users being able to use the Internet in their local languages and character sets, and endorses the rapid introduction of internationalized country code top level domain names (ccTLDs)…”

Read the official announcement.



Filed under: Domain and Site Management, Web/Tech — Tags: — admin @ 11:56 pm

September 27, 2009

A Simple PHP Whois Script For Domain Name Lookups


We have had some requests for a server based whois script to use with Domain Punch Pro and Watch My Domains ISP.

So, here is a simple PHP script (less than 130 lines) that you can use. Upload it to your server and specify the appropriate settings in your whois setup (within Domain Punch Pro or Watch My Domains).

Please note that this script uses port 43 whois servers. It doesn’t support domains that have no port 43 whois server. It is useful if your company network doesn’t allow connections through port 43 or if you are unable to lookup some domains using your ISP.

Click here to download simple PHP Whois script.

Previous blog post about web based whois.

The script supports a number of port 43 whois servers. You can add more by editing the script. It is simply provided for your guidance. You can use it as it is or modify it as you wish. We are unable to provide additional support for this script.

Here are the required settings (assumes that it is uploaded as yourdomain.com/scripts/whois.php)

Whois Server: www.yourdomain.com
Port: 80
Comand Line: GET /scripts/whois.php?domain={D}

Important: Please note down the other settings like date format, search token, etc. for any port 43 whois server you want to replace with the server script. You will have to add them back after you change the above settings.

Also, be aware that other people can use this script from your server if they know the URL to it. We suggest that you modify it to prevent others from accessing it. You could, for example, change the name of the GET parameter used for passing the domain name or add additional verification data.

Click here to download simple PHP Whois script.



Filed under: Domain and Site Management, Web/Tech — Tags: , — admin @ 3:43 pm
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