Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

What Do You Do With a Personal Domain? 286

Posted by timothy from the you-hope-someone-rich-and-famous-buys-it-out dept.
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?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

What Do You Do With a Personal Domain? More

What Do You Do With a Personal Domain?

Comments Filter:

  • Stay With Me Here (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:31PM (#28201681) Journal

    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).

    I think you should go with a really well thought out image that speaks to your audience with no words needed. Ok, stay with me on this one, ok? Picture this: your head ... superimposed on Chuck Norris' body ... punching Clippy ... into the fires of Mount Doom.

    WHAT? How can you not like that?

    What do non-bloggers do with their personal domains?

    Something really interesting and original ... which kind of puts the ball back in your court. If you have any work you can showcase, do it ... otherwise I would suggest you actually take sometime to make it personal. Otherwise just make a portal to sites you like or profiles on social networking sites with a theme that you enjoy (you could do this easily with nvu, blufish, etc or any WISYWIG open source editor out there).

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think you should go with a really well thought out image that speaks to your audience with no words needed.

      goatse?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 )

      I think you should go with a really well thought out image that speaks to your audience with no words needed. Ok, stay with me on this one, ok? Picture this: your head ... superimposed on Chuck Norris' body ... punching Clippy ... into the fires of Mount Doom.

      You might have missed the part where he said he wanted something professional (having opted to avoid the GoDaddy parking advertising). Obviously he should replace Clippy with a "PC Load Letter" printer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Saija ( 1114681 )

      I think you should go with a really well thought out image that speaks to your audience with no words needed. Ok, stay with me on this one, ok? Picture this: your head ... superimposed on Chuck Norris' body ... punching Clippy ... into the fires of Mount Doom.

      hehehe, with the princess peach laying caged at the right of that picture??

    • Well, the question was "what do non-bloggers do with their personal domains?" no "what SHOULD non-bloggers do with their personal domains."

      The answer depends both on how you define the terms "blog" and "personal domain" of course. If you're posting family photos that's arguably blogging. (Since we seem to need to incessantly name thing, maybe it should be vis-fam-blogging?)

      I recall reading something Tim Berners Lee where he basically figured that the web was the best way of showing family photos, and sharin

      • You don't have to use a blog as a blog, either. WordPress has excellent CMS features, even if you completely ignore the blogging part of the software.

        But yah, I don't see how we (random message board posters) can possibly answer this question.

    • Re:Stay With Me Here (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @06:06PM (#28202317)

      Well this is what I do.

      First off I have Dreamhost which allows unlimited domains, space & bandwidth. It's not 6-nines, but it works for me. Full SSH, SFTP, etc access.

      1) My 'domain' is blank. It points to nothing.

      2) Every picture I've ever taken is at pictures.X.org. Password Protected. If I want to show someone something I'll open a folder for them using htaccess. It's also my off-site backup for my pictures.

      2) SVN. Dreamhost lets you easily setup SVN. I honestly just discovered version control in the last month (More or less took the time to learn it) and absolutely love it. So all my pet projects have an svn.X.org page.

      3) Sub domains for where I post the most. Since I post quite a few photoshops/images to Fark. I have a fark.X.org that is nothing but pictures. I have a vw.X.org for posting pictures of my Dubs to VWVortex and TDICLub. I try not to move the directory around at all. I hate digging up a 6 month old "how to" and find all the images are broken.

      4) Unlimited e-mail. I have catch-all turned on. slashdot@X.org, fark@x.org, facebook@X.org, I know exactly when and where spam comes from. (Damn you USA Rugby*).

      5) Subdomains to my computers. Both my linux desktop and mac laptop have scripts to update mac/linux.X.org with the current IP.

      6) gallery.X.org for people in my family to upload stuff. (With Gallery2).

      7) A few friends have websites at name.X.org. I create a new FTP or SFTP user for them

      8) If you have SSH access, I route everything through at work. Dynamic proxy and I don't go through the work proxy servers.

      Half of those blur the line between domain/host but you get the idea.

      * Why the hell are you giving out my e-mail address?
      [Sir, we're not]
      Then why is it I'm getting spam at usarugby@X.org?
      [Well you must have given that e-mail address out somewhere else]
      No, why would I do that?
      [Um, it's not our fault]

  • Resume? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jfinke ( 68409 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:33PM (#28201713) Homepage
    Why don't you post a copy of your resume and redirect all hits to your domain to that page?
    • THIS! And if you want to make things easy, use Plone: www.plone.org

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by mabinogi ( 74033 )

        Did you seriously just suggest Plone as a simpler alternative to a single HTML page?

        • Indeed I did, as it would let you put your resume AS WELL AS anything else you would want on your site. If you're in IT, more than likely you have little or no free time. I've found Plone useful in this situation, so I suggested it. Feel free to have your opinion on it's complexity.

    • Perhaps he doesn't want anyone who knows his name to be able to see the details of his life..

      • funny, but I've found that people who have hit my resume from search engine have not bothered to look at the rest of my web site, but just contact me. apache web logs are fun, you can even see what the hot buzzwords are in your resume from the search engine query strings.

      • Perhaps he doesn't want anyone who knows his name to be able to see the details of his life..

        Fair point, but you could put a sanitised version there with relatively "anonymised" contact details (a can throw-away-and-replace-if-it-starts-getting-spam email address, or some sort of mailform (though good luck stopping bots bothering you in either case). Just a list any major projects that you have worked on, that you are permitted to talk about, with links where relevant, would be useful if a prospective future employer decides to Google you. Much better that they find that than just some junk people

    • Re:Resume? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:53PM (#28202089)

      indeed, that's what has kept me employed for the last seven years. not any job site, not any recruiting firm, but contractor and now full time work from someone at the hiring company using a search engine that returned my resume.

      and certainly not sites like linkedin, useless and lame

      • and certainly not sites like linkedin, useless and lame

        I don't use it to find work (I'm fortunately employed as of this moment); I use Linkedin as a social site for the reasonably clued. It's a contacts tree, not a HR blog. And some of the questions are fun to answer.

  • Seinfeld (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ukab the Great ( 87152 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:35PM (#28201745)

    Be master of your domain.

  • Perhaps you don't need web page (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:35PM (#28201749)

    If you have nothing to say, perhaps it's foolish.

  • this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HaeMaker ( 221642 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:36PM (#28201763) Homepage

    http://www.hae.com/ [hae.com]

  • behind a login of course

  • Speaking for myself... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by laron ( 102608 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:38PM (#28201817)

    I use my personal domain for my "good" email address and also to host personal stuff like photo albums, avatars, bookmarks and such.
    Call me old fashioned, but I like to keep my private stuff away from corporations, so I try to avoid photobucket, flickr etc.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nursie ( 632944 )

      Likewise

      I have a mail and web server (NSLU2) under my bed and use it for pictures, my mail domain and ssh into my home so I can access my music on another machine.

      Of course you need a static IP for this, but that's ok with my ISP.

  • Just redirect your main page to your subdomain.

  • "Self-promotional tool" (Score:4, Informative)

    by NotBornYesterday ( 1093817 ) * on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:41PM (#28201875) Journal
    What exactly are you trying to promote about yourself? What do you do? Do you want visitors to learn something about you, or are you just filling your corner of the internet with random web apps?

    We can't help you if we don't know what you're trying to accomplish.

  • The fact that you have nothing to post on your site tells me you probably don't need one. Not trying to be snarky, but why grope around for stuff to post? If there's anything you really want to say to the world you'll probably think of it. Until then why merely fill space?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xtifr ( 1323 )

      He said up front: he doesn't want his domain being used by a third party (his registrar) to sell advertisements. Seems reasonable to me (at the very least, he should get a cut of the pie). It's a little sad that he's so utterly lacking in imagination that he has to ask slashdot how to create a placeholder page, but not wanting to have his name and domain associated with random webspam is perfectly reasonable.

      At a bare minimum, I think a simple page saying "hi, this is my domain, which is primarily used fo

  • Put something on your page... Anything! My page is very basic; but occasionally I add a page that describes a project or expresses an opinion.

  • That's the most professional course of action. Particularly if you have questionable photos posted.

  • I don't quite get it. You say ""I bought my own domain name to use as a self-promotion tool" but then you don't seem to know what it is that you want to promote. Not your self personally, I assume, since you said that you don't want to put personal information on it.

    I think if you can answer the question of what it is that you want to "self" promote, then the question of what you should do with your web page becomes clear. The answer will be, put onto the domain stuff that showcases whatever it is that

  • for my personal blog (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Simon (S2) ( 600188 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:48PM (#28202021) Homepage

    Some pictures uploaded from my cellphone, some tecnical details I would like to remember, some pictures of stuff I put on ebay, my "real" email, and just a server I use for experiments like configuring virtual hosts with apace, trying out mutual ssl authentication, setting up a mail server and piping the mails to a script that scrapes the attachments from the mail and puts them in the gallery online... stuff like this.

  • So, the question is how to fill up blank space on a personal website that's not so personal?

    That's pretty open ended. Hmm, dancing hamsters? Already done. Stretched but holes? Done. Girl in tub? Done. Popups and redirects to random porn sites while maximizing all of the windows? Done.

    I'm guessing I'll get no mods or no positive ones, but asking a bunch of strangers what to put on a personal website thats not personal is pretty open ended. I dunno, how about making it like a wall on facebook where ran

  • MyDomain.com (Score:5, Funny)

    by neoform ( 551705 ) <djneoform@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:52PM (#28202081) Homepage

    I use a subdomain, 'profile.mydomain.com',

    BAD BAD BAD.

    mydomain.com is a privately owned domain. When demonstrating a domain, you use profile.example.com!

    • I had no idea example.com was reserved. +e insightful.

    • Although (correctly) moderated as "Funny" I think, sadly, that neoform was actually being serious.

    • Just use x.com. That way people can pay the royalities directly to paypal!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Bromskloss ( 750445 )

      When demonstrating a domain, you use profile.example.com!

      Hey, you're just trying to get us to link to your personal domain instead!

    • Re:MyDomain.com (Score:4, Funny)

      by schmiddy ( 599730 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @06:42PM (#28202867) Homepage Journal

      use profile.example.com!

      BAD BAD BAD I did a little digging into this supposedly-upstanding domain to be used for examples. Well guess what, mister -- I don't trust the "IANA Whois Service" one bit. Did you know that "IANA" is not even a part of the Better Business Bureau? And they don't have contact information on their page, so there's no one you can complain to?? They seem like a shady company to me, getting all this traffic from example code. They don't even have a privacy policy on their website!! Who knows what they could be doing with the IP Addresses they collect?!? Probably sending them to the RIAA, NSA, FBI, and various advertising agencies.

      Do yourselves a favor -- stop using example.com in example code and network diagrams, RFC 2606 be damned. From now on, I propose that everyone use the domain "doubleclick.net" in example code, comments, diagrams, URLs, etc. You're welcome.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dintech ( 998802 )

      I love that someone is typo squatting [exammple.com] it. :)

  • my advice (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ILongForDarkness ( 1134931 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @05:55PM (#28202131)
    If your domain doesn't have a logical target audience given its name, ie. it isn't something like "itsallaboutcars.com" then for the love of God don't put random stuff up there just to fill space. The best that could happen is it gets indexed by search engines and people looking for something specific end up on your page randomly which contains no unique content. Similar to database design, if its redundant it doesn't need to exist. If your domain name does have an obvious relavent market, how about finding someone that has that interest that is willing to share the costs of hosting with you?
  • I think you should ask what a personal domain actually is. In my opinion, it's a website about YOU. Not just who you are, but also your interest, hobbies, likes and dislikes. When someone goes to you.com, they are intentionally interested in YOU.

    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 fa

  • For me, it's a dumping place for whatever I want to write quickly and store online for others (not necessarily everyone) to see. I'm using dokuwiki, as it's dead simple to set up, use and maintain.

    If it wasn't for my lack of free time, I'd definitely run a devblog, too - sometimes I stumble upon a good, but obscure solution for some difficult, common problem in programming, *nix administration etc., and most good, but obscure solutions I ever read about were published on devblogs. However, writing a decent

  • I have a variety of personal sites (that are public but nobody visits them, of course), including one for my culinary experiments, music (composition), computer science, a blog, hosting random stuff that I need from other computers or to give links to people, etc.

    If you have no hobby, maybe a calendar app or to-do list that's easily integrated into "everything." Instead of using an online one that isn't. (unfortunately, I don't know of any such things... any ideas, anyone?)

  • How about redirecting to your Linkedin profile? It's quick, costs nothing, set-and-forget type thing. I know there are plenty of people here who could come up with all sorts of interesting and imaginative ideas, but sometimes we just want something that works and move on with our life, right?

  • My domain (Score:5, Informative)

    by JWSmythe ( 446288 ) <jwsmythe@nospam.jwsmythe.com> on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @06:04PM (#28202297) Homepage Journal

        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. :)

    • it would be silly to put a pre-packaged blog software on there. :)

      Would it? Unless you have some crazy-ass unique use-case that you need to fill, I could make a case that writing your own blog package might suggest that you're the kind of guy who wastes a lot of time on wheel reinvention.

      If you wanna write your own because you like to code, then fine - do it for fun, and say "I use my own blog package because I thought it would be fun to roll my own."

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by JWSmythe ( 446288 )

        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.

  • "This page is intentionally left blank"

    Problem solved.

  • I don't see why you think you need an 'app' to fill this page. (Then again, I have no idea why you decided to use a subdomain for everything in the first place, but that's another matter.) Web servers ultimately serve up html, whether they generate it dynamically from a web app or not. So, if you want to make use of port 80 on your domain to drive out the squatters, all you really need is some minimal html.

    <html><head></head><body></body></html>

    That should fill all you

  • What do you do with a canvas? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mypalmike ( 454265 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @06:33PM (#28202741) Homepage

    "I bought my own canvas to use as a self-promotion tool. I removed the plastic wrapper. I also nailed some tacks into the sides to strengthen it. But when you go to look at it, there is nothing there. I didn't want Joe's Art Supplies getting ad revenue off my name (and it doesn't look very professional), so I sanded off the logo, but it seems like I should be able to put something on the canvas itself. But, I am not interesting in painting, I do not want too much personal information on it, and I do not want to spend a lot of money on paints, charcoals, or pastels(none, if possible). Are there any things that I can put on my canvas to fill the blank space? What do non-painters do with their personal canvases?"

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm glad I'm not the only one that though the question was fucking retarded. the bar for an "ask slashdot" question seems to get lower every time they post a new one. next it'll be "ask slashdot: what should i eat for breakfast?"
  • I put up links to my favorite places and organizations, tools I like to use and promote. For example:

    OC-Pizza - Great pizza in Costa Mesa, CA [ocpizza.com]

    ThumbsPlus viewer/editor [cerious.com]

    Document Image Conversion Specialists [softechis.com]

  • What do non-bloggers do with their personal domains?"

    Nothing spectacular.. just little convenience tools here and there:

    • most of all, easy-to-use names instead of memorizing/typing out the IPs of my network and those of my friends.
    • creating email aliases so I can have custom addresses for each thing I sigh up. So that I turn them off when the address gets sold to spammers
    • centralized depository of little utilities I often find myself needing to use on remote PCs
    • for sharing photos and home videos with the family.
    • a place to put my ebooks, organized to my liking

  • I put up my photography, my open-source work, and random devblog type stuff about whatever topic I feel like documenting. I add to it as functionality is needed (galleries, bookmarks, etc.)

    If you want people to associate your name with professional experience, then the best thing to do is document what you've done. Artsy people already know this, and you'll generate hits and awareness as people find your projects. Employers frequently google potential hires, this makes sure you show up when people search fo

  • This Page Intentionally Left Blank

  • I have made a list of all the (free!) services I use with my domain at http://pages.chaz6.com/ [chaz6.com]. My home page, http://www.chaz6.com/ [chaz6.com], is a small collection of "things".

  • Just do this (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Master of Transhuman ( 597628 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @09:14PM (#28204487) Homepage

    Put a big picture of Summer Glau on the page.

    What more do you need?

  • In my case... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shish ( 588640 ) on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @10:50PM (#28205183) Homepage
    You come up with a neat idea [shishnet.org], then discover that someone more famous than you had a similar idea [jwz.org], and spend the rest of your life being called a copy cat :(

  • Family Connections (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Kral_Blbec ( 1201285 )

    I bought a personal domain not long ago intending to set up a family site so my parents/siblings can keep in touch as we are all across the country. After trying out stuffy like gallery2, wordpress, etc etc, i decided I didnt want everything piecemeal. I evenually landed on familycms.com which is an open source cms geared directly at what I was trying to do. Ive been playing with it ever since, learning php as I go to modify it to what I want.

    Not really a direct answer for something on your main domain, but

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Close