2. Domain Name

Get a Free .COM Domain Name

Dave's Tech Shop — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:27:46 GMT

I'm going to give away some .com domain names for free. Here is the list of free domain names:

Sorry, this offer is over now.

However, for the right project, I may have a couple more domain names I'd be willing to give away. These include:

SEQUM.COM
HUBUM.COM
BLOG-ABILITY.COM
SPANISH-BLOG.COM
OWNBLOGGING.COM
HIPREPORT.COM

Contact me if you want one of these domains names for free. Most are paid through Oct 2008 as of this moment.

Set up Google Mail for Your Domain - For Free

Dave's Tech Shop — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 14:22:40 GMT

The email with Google Apps for Your Domain is a separate service from regular gmail. It uses the same gmail application, but your email address is not yourname@gmail.com -- it is yourname@YOURDOMAIN.com. The Google email option I am describing in this article is very professional and very full featured. I have not seen any other free email service that comes anywhere close to this level of professionalism and quality. It doesn't get much better than gmail at your own domain.

This article has a no-cost theme. Therefore, I assume you are doing almost everything the free way. I even assume you are hosting your web site from your house with a dynamic IP address. Probably the only thing you have to purchase is your domain name and I assume you already have that.

Prerequisites

You must have an existing (free) Google account to get started with Google Apps for Your Domain (as of the time I write this). You can use an existing gmail account as your "admission ticket" and you can use other types of Google accounts too (such as Google Groups). If you don't have a gmail account, you need an invitation and then you need to sign up for that basic account before you get started with Google Apps for Your Domain. (BTW, I do have a few invitations for gmail accounts if you need one.)

If you don't have one already, set up an account at a free dynamic DNS provider such as ZoneEdit.com.

Other managed DNS providers you can consider include these:

www.2mydns.com (the free service does not include a primary MX record so it will not suffice for the purposes of this article. However, you can obtain a Privileged user by donating ANY amount to 2MyDNS.com.)
www.dnip.net - free
www.easydns.com not free - $20/yr
www.changeip.com - not free - $15/yr
www.minidns.net - free
www.xpertdns.com - not free - $6.95/yr
www.dnsmadeeasy.com - not free - $14.95 for 3 domains. This is the service I recommend if you are not choosing a free service. In fact, this is the service I will be using myself. (For those using a this non-free service, the DirectUpdate client software includes a default setting for use with DNS Made Easy and other clients work as well.)

Don't forget that you need an update client for the dynamic DNS service. There are several good free clients. Here is a good list (and, fyi, here is one client recommended specifically for DynDNS.org).

For this article I am basing my instructions on ZoneEdit.com because they have a few quirks that can cause you problems. If you can set this up at ZoneEdit, you can set it up anywhere! Furthermore, ZoneEdit.com is free (for small accounts) so it fits the "no cost" theme of this article.

If needed, set up your free account at ZoneEdit.com and log in. Set up your IP Address. I won't cover these initial steps in detail because they aren't related to setting up email.

If you have the prerequisites out of the way, here are the steps related to setting up Google Mail for Your Domain.

Get started by going to Google Apps For Your Domain. Click "Sign up now" and sign in with your Google account. Fill out the information on the page. The second piece of information requested is Type: Business; Personal; Education, etc. For those of you with advertisements on your blogs, I am not sure whether the type should be business or personal. Maybe it depends on how much advertising revenue your blog generates. I'll leave that choice up to you, but if anyone gets feedback from Google, I would be interested in hearing what they feel is the right type for a blog with advertising on it. When you are finished entering the info, click "Submit info."

At this point in time it seems to be a roll of the dice whether you will be instantly approved or greeted with the following message at step 3:

3. We'll let you know when the beta is available

There's been a lot of interest in this service, so we can't guarantee that we'll be able to respond to every inquiry. But stay tuned... we'll definitely let you know if you've been selected to be one of our beta testers.
Thanks,
The Google Team

I have set up Google Apps for Your Domain for several associates with web sites ranging from serious start ups to personal or educational sites. A good proportion get approved instantly. However, some do not get approved and I have not recognized any pattern in those that are given instant approval vs. those that receive the "don't call us, we'll call you" message shown above. In one case I tried resubmitting the application (several times) for a site that did not get instant approval and I had no better success the subsequent times.

I can say that it does not matter whether you agree to receive emails from Google (feedback, product announcements, etc.) or not. I have seen instant approvals both ways. The type of web site (business, edu, personal) also does not seem to matter, in terms of instant approval.

When you are approved (whether instantly or later), there are two setup steps. First I do the "Set up email delivery" step. I have found that Google is often able to detect the fact that I have changed the MX records for the domain and automatically verifies ownership of the domain without me having to manually complete the second step.

Again, Google has excellent instructions. They are located at an address similar to this: https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/YOURDOMAIN.com/Setup?emailinstruction=1. You'll notice they do not have instructions for ZoneEdit.com, so that's what I'll cover here because ZoneEdit is one of the free dynamic DNS services available.

You can use the following information. Currently this is exactly what Google lists on their help page and I do not expect that it will change.

MX Server address Priority
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 1st
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 2nd
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 2nd
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 3rd
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 3rd
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 3rd
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 3rd

I set the TTL (time to live) value to 600000 seconds, which is about 1 week.

Start by logging in to your ZoneEdit account and clicking the link for Mail Servers (MX) at the top of the page.

There are 3 fields where you need to supply information. The general format is:
the google mail server handles mail 1st for yourdomain.com. I show this below.

Before you click "Add New Mail Server" note the following. Google says:

MX records often require the specific format of DNS records, including a trailing dot (".") at the end of any full-qualified domain names (e.g. "server.example.com.")

DO NOT USE THE TRAILING DOT WITH ZONEEDIT.COM

The mail server values I have listed above have the trailing dot removed, but the same names on the Google page include the trailing dot. Other managed DNS providers require this trailing dot, as Google explains. However, ZoneEdit.com will give you an error if you do not remove the trailing dot.

click "Add New Mail Server" button, then confirm by clicking "Yes" button.

When you have done this for all the MX records, you should see the following information on your ZoneEdit page.

Now click "I've completed these steps" at Google.

Sometimes you will have to perform the second step: Show that you own this domain.

Google's instructions are very good. However, to make it a little easier, here is the html you can copy and paste into notepad.exe and save as googlehostedservice.html in the root folder (such as Subtext.Web) of your blog (or other web site). Change the code in the body to the one Google supplies.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>googlehostedservice</title>
</head>
<body>
googleffffffxxxxx
</body>
</html>

When you finish and click "I've completed these steps" at Google you should see a success message like the one shown below.

Here are the steps I used when setting this up for my blog. I assume most small web sites will want a very similar setup.

Add user accounts in Gmail as required. Click the link to "Edit settings for <user>":

Under "Privileges", check "Allow <user> to administer <yourdomain.com>" and click Save Changes button.

Click "Domain Settings" under the navigation menu:

click Advanced Settings [edit] and specify a catch-all address.

For the Catch-all address, select Forward the mail to <user>@yourdomain.com

On this same page, set time zone and enable contact sharing and click the "Save changes" button.

You can also set info in General Information [edit], etc. Here is an example of an account I set up for a friend where I customized the logo (that's my friend, not me in the image).

Now you can sign into your email account at Google Apps For Your Domain and go to Inbox > Settings > Forwarding and POP3. Select 1) Enable POP3 for all email and 2) archive <user>'s copy and click the "Save changes" button.

See Google's excellent instructions for email clients. I use Outlook 2003.

Configuration Instructions

(And here is some info related to which SMTP port to use.)

Test your settings. You now have your own professional quality email at your domain. For free!

I've been really happy with the quality and speed of the email service. It is superior to the email service I was previously paying a premium price for.

Deciding upon a URL style for your Subtext Blog

Dave's Tech Shop — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 13:57:27 GMT

Subtext allows you to decide how your blog's URL will look. A good document describing this is found here.

Your Options

Let me give some examples and then I will make a recommendation. You can use a URL like any of these for your blog:

http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com -- let your blog be the default web application.
http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/blog -- use a path element to specify your blog.
http://blog.YOURDOMAINNAME.com -- use a subdomain name.

Multiple Blogs

In my opinion, Subtext is by far the best personal blog publishing platform you could use if you want to host multiple blogs. Why might you want to host multiple blogs? Simple: most people have more than one interest. In most cases, it helps you attract readers if you keep your blog focused. Therefore, it becomes natural to expand into multiple blogs.

Another great thing about Subtext is that you can start with one blog and expand to multiple blogs on the same installation. You do not need to reinstall the software or add any extra modules or anything.

However, it does help if you plan ahead by simply not using the URL architecture in option #1 (http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com) I mentioned above. Either of the others (and more) will work fine.

If you want to host multiple blogs in a single Subtext installation, this is easily accomplished with both the 2nd and 3rd options listed above. For example, if you wanted to you could do this with subdomain names:

http://CSharpBlog.YOURDOMAINNAME.com -- your C# blog.
http://VBNetBlog.YOURDOMAINNAME.com -- your VB.NET blog.
http://CookingBlog.YOURDOMAINNAME.com -- your cooking blog.

You could accomplish the same thing with paths like this:

http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/CSharpBlog -- your C# blog.
http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/VBNetBlog -- your VB.NET blog.
http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/CookingBlog -- your cooking blog.

My Recommendation

I personally prefer the subdomain name: http://blog.YOURDOMAINNAME.com

Here are my reasons:

It requires less typing.
It follows the convention established by the big boys like Yahoo and Google.
- mail.yahoo.com
- groups.yahoo.com
- groups.google.com
- etc.
It is flexible.

Pro Blogging Recommendation

If you plan to get really serious about blogging with multiple blogs, I have another recommendation. Establish a clear focus for each blog and get a good domain name for each one. If you do that you can still host all the multiple blogs on a single installation of Subtext. You have any of the above choices of URL architectures, or you use the following choice, which is what I recommend:

http://blog.YourVBNETDomainName.com -- your C# blog.
http://blog.YourCSharpDomainName.com --your VB.NET blog.
http://blog.YourCookingDomain.com -- your cooking blog.

If you do not have any other web applications at those domains, you can let your www-based URL point to your blog also. Subtext will handle that as well. For example:

http://www.YourVBNETDomainName.com -- also points to your C# blog (at least for now)

If you add another application or a home page in addition to your blog, you can handle the www-based path differently later.

You can also do things like this later:

http://store.YourCookingDomain.com -- your cooking supplies e-commerce store.

Compatibility

Everything I have recommended is compatible with Subtext 1.9 and WebHost4Life.

Advanced Topics

Subtext also allows you a lot of control over how your blog's articles are named and how your URL is rewritten. I'll cover those topics in a future article.

UPDATE (4/22/2007):

Search Engine Optimization

This post is in need of revision from a search engine optimization perspective. When it comes to SEO, we need to carefully consider how using a subdomain name, as I have suggested above, could dilute your impact in the search engines. For personal blogs, it might make more sense to consolidate everything under one domain name and organize content with path segments rather than subdomain names. I'll write more about this in the future.

Choose a Good Domain Name for Your Blog

Dave's Tech Shop — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 14:24:25 GMT

If you are not sure why you need to do this, read Get Your Own Domain Name For Your Blog. It's important to understand why before I explain how.

Here are the minimal steps:

Pick a theme for your blog. I offer my opinion on my it is important to have a well-defined focus in this article.
Pick a word (or two) you believe most people will type into a search engine (such as Google) when they want to find information related to your blog.
Use Go Daddy to find an available domain name with those words. It can include a dash (hyphen). ".com" extensions are best.
Make sure your name is short and easy to type.
Go to Go Daddy and register your name. (If you want to save $1, read on.)

It can be that simple. However, if that isn't enough detail for you and you question why I recommend Go Daddy instead of eNom or Cheap Names or someone else, then I offer more detail below. I will also discuss what makes one domain name better than another.

Which company should I register my domain name with?

I am not being compensated by any of these companies in any way. I do not receive credits, bonuses, payments or any other incentives or compensation from any of the domain name registrars. The only reason I recommend a specific company by name is so that I can help you make a decision. If I simply said, "Go find a good company and register your domain name," I would be doing you a disservice.
Do not use the free domain name registration offers you will find at web hosting companies. The pros don't do this and neither should you. The cost of doing it right is small - less than $10/year.
To start learning what some of the "pros" think about domain name registration, take a look at WebHosting Talk's Domain Name forum. Keep in mind that someone on that forum has probably complained about each of the most popular companies, so you won't find a well-known company with zero complaints. It may help to sort the forum threads by the Replies column - just click "Replies."
- eNom is a very popular company (and I have a friend who is associated with them), but this thread concerned me. Until I find out more, I am not recommending eNom.
- Cheapnames seems to be the favorite among people who have tried both Go Daddy and Cheapnames. However, Cheapnames is just a reseller for eNom and since I'm not recommending eNom at the moment, I didn't recommend Cheapnames.
  - UPDATE: Apparently I have the names wrong. I'm told it's not Cheapnames but NameCheap. Here's the info from someone who should know - the owner of Cheapnames.com: "I would be very honoured if it really was me you were referring to but I doubt it as I only register 2 or 3 domains per day. Many people confuse me with NameCheap (not enough!) . I bought the domain many years ago and have only recently started an affiliate site (with GoDaddy!) and am trying to drum up some business and get high up in Google. Which is when I saw your article. So I am guessing you are referring to NameCheap as they are pretty big and obviously sound similar."
  - You may want to check out Cheapnames after all. I like to help the startup when it makes sense.
- Go Daddy has its own share of complaints.
- If you have a favorite registrar, search this forum and others to find out how satisfied others are with that company.
At some point, you will have to pick a company to register your domain name with. I recently picked Go Daddy. My interest is in blogging, not domain name buying and selling, so I learned enough to feel comfortable with Go Daddy and I went!
If you decide to use Go Daddy, you can often get a discount of $1 (or 10 to 12%). Check out this thread. If you only plan to register one domain name, I'm not sure how much effort it is worth to save $1, but I do want to point out that you can find discount codes for Go Daddy there (example).

Choosing the best domain name

It should be a ".com" name in my opinion.
It should be short. I like domain names that are 10 characters or less. Twenty characters is the max I would consider.
A dash (hyphen) is OK in my opinion. It can actually help search engines identify the important words in your domain name. People who wrote articles on this subject in the pre-Google era often recommended against using dashes. Today, it is not as clear cut. If your domain name includes a single dash in such a way that it is still easy to remember and easy to type, and also separates out the keywords (see next point) in your domain name, then the dash is a good thing.
Use keywords in your domain name. This is one reason I suggested you determine a well-defined focus for your blog before registering your own domain name. If you have a clear purpose, you are more likely to be able to determine which words potential readers of your blog will type into a search engine when they are looking for articles to read. You want people to be able to find your blog. Google places a lot of importance on the URL of your blog when they determine how search results are displayed (ranked). Use the words people are commonly searching for (these words are called "keywords") as part of your domain name and people will be able to find your blog more easily.
Here is an interesting (entertaining) article on domain name facts for the more geeky among us.

How can I select a better domain name?

Read some of these articles:
- How To Select a Good Domain Name or Two
- How to Pick a Good Domain Name
- 10 Tips for Choosing a Good Domain Name (I disagree with Tim about the dash, but he makes some other good points.)
Use a domain name search program such as Mozzle.
Use your own creativity with the help of poetry.com.
Learn more about keywords and use the "right" keywords in your domain name. I will cover this in more depth in a more advanced article. If keywords, in this context, is a new subject to you (as it probably is), then you may not be able to (and probably should not) allocate the time to become an expert on the subject right now (because your goal is to get your blog started). All you want to determine is what keywords are most often used in search engines when people try to find the information you will be blogging about. Playing around with some of these tools can give you an idea if you are on track.
- Ranking.com
- UrlTrends
- Alexa
- Overture (Yahoo) (bidtool, inventory)
- Market Leap
- Word Tracker
I realize that I may have taken you from not even considering the need to own your own domain name to now looking at detailed aspects of how to choose the best domain name. Therefore, I need to emphasize where the balance is. Unless you are really, really serious about blogging, it is probably enough to pick a short ".com" domain name that includes a word or two you used when you defined the focus for your blog. Once you have done that, you can get on with blogging.

Should I purchase a premium domain name?

If you do plan to become a professional blogger, you may want to consider a premium domain name. However, even at a professional level, my advice is to not get too distracted by the domain name aftermarket. If you want to take a look at the domain name aftermarket, or if you can absolutely not find a domain name you like via other means, one place to start is BuyDomains.com. Another place is Go Daddy's aftermarket (although the names are not exclusively premium names). And if you really want to get distracted from you blogging mission, you can read some of the blogs dedicated to the subject of investing in domain names. Here is one article, as an example. And don't overlook DN Forum (or maybe NamePros) if you really want to research deeper.

What extra features should I look for when I register my domain name?

Here are the features that I found to be important. If you took my "quick advice" earlier and used Go Daddy, all these (and more) are included free. You can probably find other companies that offer an equivalent basket of free services if you don't like Go Daddy for any reason.

Private registration
- When you register a domain, your name, address, email address and phone number are immediately made available to anyone who wants to see them. Your personal information is exposed 24 hours a day to anyone, anywhere. I think private registration is important, but be aware that it does add another layer of complexity. I have heard of some people who could not manage their domain names properly because of the privacy. So far, I have not had any problems with Go Daddy. They use Domains By Proxy for the privacy feature. The two systems work well together.
Complete and total DNS control
- At the minimum, you need a very easy way to set your domain name servers (DNS). Go Daddy's control panel is not the most intuitive, but it does give very good control in my experience. If you read the forum cited above, you may have seen that most people think Cheapnames has a better control panel.
Email
- You want to be able to receive email at yourname@yourdomain.com at the minimum. Email forwarding is OK for this.
- You probably want to be able to send email from yourname@yourdomain.com also. Simple forwarding doesn't allow this, so you need additional email services.
Option for automatic renewal
- I personally don't want to risk having my blog be out of service because I forgot to pay a $10 or less annual fee. Therefore, I find the convenience of automatic renewal to be valuable.
Domain locking
- At the moment I'm not sure how important this is to someone who has a blog up and running. If you are simply parking a domain name that you plan to monetize later, it could be important.
Domain forwarding and masking
- This is not needed with the approach I'm going to recommend, but it could be very valuable if you take a different approach to setting up your blog.

Get Your Own Domain Name For Your Blog

Dave's Tech Shop — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 17:44:52 GMT

Get your own domain name. If you are already convinced of this wisdom, good. Just skip ahead to here and I'll give you the details for taking care of this small matter. I'll also give you some tips for choosing the best domain name.

If you are not sure why you need to do this, read on. It's important to understand why before I explain how.

One of the attractions of blogging is that it is so easy to get started. Therefore, any extra steps that add complexity to the process of getting started could be problematic. I understand that. Therefore, I would not recommend the extra step of getting your own domain name unless I felt it was important.

There are plenty of smart, tech savvy, people who have not registered domain names for their own blog. And if you are a busy person, even though you could figure out how to take care of the details, you may not want to spend the time or energy to figure out -- or remember -- everything. That's one reason I'm going to detail the exact process for getting a domain name for your blog. (Another reason is so that everyone, including me, can benefit from having a checklist. Pilots refer to a checklist during preflight every single time they fly, even if they have flown thousands of times.)

Having a checklist to follow makes it easier to obtain a domain name for your own blog when you are starting out. But there are still some other valid-sounding excuses for not getting your domain name. Some of these could include:

It costs money. Granted, it doesn't cost much, but it does have a cost.
It takes time. Again, not much time, but in today's world every minute counts.
Even with a checklist, it still takes some effort.

My opinion is that having your own domain name is worth the effort, time and cost. Fortunately, all these are small. The cost is under $10 per year. The time requirement is just a few minutes. And my checklist removes most of the effort.

Your own domain name gives you freedom and control that you would not otherwise have. For example, it gives you the freedom to host your blog where you want and to use any blogging platform you want. It gives you the power to easily make future decisions you would otherwise find difficult.

At some point in the future, you will want to change something about the way you blog. We know change is almost guaranteed in life, which means change will affect how you blog as well. You may want to use another technology. You may need better quality of service. Somehow, you can be sure things will change. Your own domain name gives you the flexibility to roll with those changes.

Owning your own domain name will let you move, grow, improve and change without changing your address. You will not lose the loyal readers you have built up over time. You will not have to put up "I've moved" notices and hope people follow you. This small step now will save you bigger headaches later. And it will give you a more professional presence from day one.

If you get serious about blogging in the future, or if you already know you are serious about it, you may want an opportunity to earn money from blogging. Without your own domain name, your choices are much, more more limited. With your own domain name, you are in a much better position to fulfill your ambitions.

Let me give you an example to help make my points more concrete. Click this link. Read at least the first few paragraphs of her story. Follow the "I've moved link" and see her new blog. Read as much of her post as you wish, but I don't think it will take much reading to see that she regrets not getting her own domain name from day one. Don't make that same mistake.

After considering the low cost, the small effort, the greater professionalism, the greater flexibility and the opportunity to conduct yourself more professionally (including for profit), I assume you are now ready to get this taken care of. Here are the minimal steps (as well as more detail for those who want it).