Finally! The new db4free.net Website has launched and along with it comes a new (slightly stronger) server and some simplifications with the service itself.
So what is new? Of course the new website which now is up to modern standards again, using a responsive design. While the old site was only designed for desktop (no surprise if you consider it was created in 2005 and remained more or less unchanged since), the new site adopts to small screen devices like mobile phones and tablets as well. Also the look is totally different:
db4free.net old
db4free.net new
The service now has a few simplifications. It is no longer allowed, or necessary, to set a collation and define IP addresses or hosts from which db4free.net can be accessed. Most users didn’t change the default anyway and many who did locked themselves out. As for character set and collation, UTF8 should work fine in all languages. If you really need to change it, you can do so from your MySQL client.
Now to the biggest new feature (Woohoo!). You can now easily help us translate the db4free.net website. The old website had the texts spread across many files in various places so there was no easy way to share them so to allow users to contribute in ways like fixing mistakes (I hope there aren’t any, but who can be sure?), improving linguistic style or even add an entirely new language. The new website fixes that and allows me to publish all website texts in a GitHub repository at:
https://github.com/mpopp75/db4free-net-l10n
You can fork this repository, fix texts and/or add translations and send a pull request back, so your updates can be integrated into the website. Find instructions how to do that in the new Translation page and if you need further assistance, please open a ticket at GitHub. I will be happy to guide you through the process as good as I can.
Also still quite new is that db4free.net is now on Twitter. Please consider following the account so you can easily stay up-to-date.
Where is your data which you had already stored in a db4free.net database? As like the last time when db4free.net moved to a new server, the old server and service will remain available at db4free.org until August 15, 2014. Since the migration process is exactly the same as last time, please reuse the good old and still valid instructions.
If you have any questions, please use the Comments section below or drop me a line on Twitter. Enjoy!