I (heart) the internet.
For the last 3+ years, I’ve worked for a web-based company. I have a pretty active online life, between Twitter, Facebook, and the articles I write. Hardly a weekend day goes by that I’m not on the computer. I now write just about everything I publish in HTML. And, as I mentioned before, this blog isn’t the first I’ve started.
But with all of this, I still have never bought my own domain name.
I have plenty of excuses for this, including the fact that the URL I want is already taken (this, I think, is a damned good excuse), but much of my avoiding the whole thing comes from completely not understanding how to do it.
I finally asked my friend Sara, who’s been bugging me about setting up my own website ever since I met her and who has an addiction to buying URLs, to help guide me through the process. I sent her a big padded envelope full of crazy flavors of chewing gum*, so hopefully that’ll work as a bribe so she’ll help me. Who knows, maybe I’ll actually buy a domain or two in 2010.
Really, this is yet another reason why I’m so thankful I have a tech team at work to whom I can just send my random questions and then – voila! – it’s fixed. Because as much as I love The Interwebs, I absolutely hate trying to figure out what’s going on under the hood.
* Sara lives in Milan, where chewing gum isn’t the creative field it is in the U.S. The flavors tend to be all mint-related, and not nearly as fabulous as the wacky stuff on our supermarket shelves. So I bring gum to Sara when I visit Milan. She gets more excited about it than anyone here would ever get about gum, which is fun. I’m sure I’ll be the same way about something equally as mundane when it’s no longer in my face every day, too.
1 comment on “Am I the last person on earth without her own URL?”
I bought my own domain and set up hosting about 2 years ago but I didn’t do it so that my blog could become better. I did it to learn about building and maintaining websites without ruining the official website at work I was asked to upgrade. Originally, I was going to create a static personal website using Microsoft Frontpage.
In the end, I never learned how to create websites and the domain and hosting I was paying for just sat there. My girlfriend encouraged me last year to use the site for a blog.
I’m so glad that I did. I’ve finally learned all the things that I didn’t understand those years ago. And I can now write down all the weird things that go on in my mind, that my friends find too boring to listen to.
If I had started my journey around the notion of keeping a blog then I probably wouldn’t have paid for a url and hosting. WordPress.com would have suited me fine.
I think you can customise your blog url if you pay wordpress.com for premium services. This will work out cheaper than buying your domain from a registrar and for hosting every year.
Good luck with it all.