What Do You Do With a Personal Domain? 286
bmerr71 writes "I bought my own domain name to use as a self-promotion tool. I use a subdomain, 'profile.mydomain.com', which I selectively put on my email signatures to link to my linkedin profile. I also loaded up Google Apps to use for email. But when you go directly to my domain name, there is nothing there. I didn't want GoDaddy getting ad revenue off my name (and it doesn't look very professional), so I killed the ad page, but it seems like I should be able to put something up on my main page. But, I am not interesting in blogging, I do not want too much personal information up there, and I do not want to spend a lot of money (none, if possible). Are there any free apps that I can load up on my domain to fill the blank space? What do non-bloggers do with their personal domains?"
"Self-promotional tool" (Score:4, Informative)
We can't help you if we don't know what you're trying to accomplish.
What is a personal domain? (Score:2, Informative)
Boiling it down to what you asked, I think the question then becomes "What do I want to share with the world?" And it is truly the world. As you've said, you don't want too much personal information out there, but a website about you doesn't have to be just the facts about you.
I've thought about this recently for my own site. I don't care to be a blogger either. Here are some things I can think of that might spur on your creativity:
1) Articles - write articles on things you like. These aren't blog entries per say, although they could be. But if you find yourself interested in some topic, and would like to write your ideas down, an article could be a good avenue for that.
2) Works/Portfolio - if you have a hobby or career involving something that you can show off or demo, put it up there. If you are a photobug, put your favorites pics up, or if you craft things out of wood, take pictures and put them on your site, etc, etc. Find out what you like to do and/or are good at and share it with us!
3) Personal Photos/Videos - photos and videos say a lot, but they don't necessarily give away your information. Pictures of yourself, friends, family, co-workers, places you go, things you eat. Anything.
4) Resume - an easy one. Could also expand it to include links to companies you've worked for previously or links to works you've done.
5) Profit!! - Hope you enjoyed that oblig. slashdotters. Ok, snap out of it, this isn't a step-by-step thing. But seriously though, if you have a lot of junk in your house you need to get rid of, you could use your site as real estate for selling things. Not really a long term idea -you might run out of stuff to sell- but it could work.
Remember what web pages are: text, images, videos, sounds, colors, interactive media.
Take what you like to do and want to share and apply it over those mediums.
It's a personal domain, so make a personal site! When I go to you.com, I want to know about YOU!
Hope I helped.
My domain (Score:5, Informative)
What do you with your domain? Anything you damned well please.
Check out http://jwsmythe.com [jwsmythe.com]
I have an redacted copy of my resume, some tools I use on a regular basis, my portfolio of some of the more unique and complex work I've done (and some lame stuff to fill space).
Under my site, if you know the directory names, you'll find work I did for particular customers that I wanted to make available, some personal projects, and other crap. My full resume is also hidden under an unlinked subdirectory, so I can give out the specific link to the full resume with my full name, address, companies I've worked for, etc. Sometimes I just need to move a file from point A to point B, where I can't FTP or SCP to either one, so it's a good transit point for me. Copy it over, and scp it down.
My site takes up 30Gb, even though the visible part is maybe (just maybe) a few Mb.
So, what do I do with my site? Anything I want. I don't have a blog on there yet, but I'm writing one from scratch. I've picked up a few new paying customers since I was laid off from my full time job, the paying customers take priority over anything I want to do for myself. Since I advertise myself as a sysadmin/programmer/network engineer/security engineer/DBA/etc, it would be silly to put a pre-packaged blog software on there. :) It also has my rate sheet, so if someone asks me, "Can you do this for me?", I can point them directly to it, so they can reference it any time they want.
My other domains, I put whatever is appropriate on them. You'll find my news site linked from my personal site. That makes a little money. You'll also find my cryptography site. It doesn't make any money, but it gets a lot of traffic from various places including universities and government/military facilities. I have to assume some have integrated my open source software into their own applications. It would be nice if they told me, but no one ever does.
I have a couple dozen other domains. Some are almost completely dormant (with Google or Amazon ads). Some got a good Google PR, so I keep them around to help raise my rank on other projects. :)
Re:MyDomain.com (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My domain (Score:3, Informative)
If I'm a programmer, why would I use someone elses programming. Of course, I won't reinvent the wheel. It will have other parts in the back end that are other people's work (PHP, MySQL, Imagemagick), but something simple like a blog shouldn't be something that I give up and use something else with.
My biggest problem with doing that is the available exploits in other people's code. On my news site, I ran Slashcode. It was big, heavy, and hard to make significant changes to. I switched to PHPNuke, which got exploited twice The second time, I said "screw it", and wrote my own. My own is lighter, faster, and a lot easier to make changes to. I wrote the base of it for functionality in a couple nights (a Christmas holiday at that). I got the rest of the functionality working over the next few weeks, when I had time.
As far as the users knew, we were down for a couple days. It was better than seeing "You've been hax0red by the Chinese Mafia". They had hit me with a 0 day script kiddie exploit, that wasn't fixed for several days after. I don't remember exactly who claimed to have done it, but it was embarrassing. Since then, no exploits.
How would it look if I, as a programmer, had my own blog exploited. Of course, it would coincide with a prospective customer or employer looking at it, and that's the last thing I want to happen. It would look like I know nothing about security, so any programming I did was therefore potentially exploitable.
Re:Stay With Me Here (Score:4, Informative)
The standard edition of Google Apps is free whether or not you buy your domain through Google. You could also use make use of the fact that using a plus sign, like username+somethingelse@myappdomain.com gets delivered to username@myappdomain.com, rather than explicitly setting up aliases for different sites, although perhaps at some point spammers will get wise to this and start extracting people's "real" email addresses from addresses of this form.
Re:My domain (Score:2, Informative)
Indeed, I have the same cynical exploitation that most PHP based blogging solutions are security problems waiting to happen.
So I too wrote my own blogging system. It is different than many in the sense that it outputs a collection of entirely static HTML files.
I wrote a script that converts *.txt into a hierarchy of individual pages, rss feeds, and tags.
The software [steve.org.uk] is simple and it is in use by myself [steve.org.uk] and many others.
There is certainly a place for dynamic applications, but blogging is more often a write-only medium.