Choosing a domain name for your business can be hard. There are a lot of guidelines, and many of them are contradictory. I'm going to describe how to decide if your domain name is good or not, how to find out if your domain name is available, and how to buy it.
While pulling together the information for the next few posts in this series, I came to a realization. I'm going to be referring you readers to a lot of different online services, and I'm going to recommend books and other purchases. Many of these companies are eager and willing to have me sign up for affiliate plans, cutting me in on a few percentage points of the action.
First and foremost, it is important for me to establish that I'm only interested in giving good advice; I'm only interested in recommending companies that have impeccable reputations and quality products. On the other hand, I'm in the middle of a startup myself, so I'm not going to leave free money on the table. So here is my pledge to you, my readers.Lifehacker had a recent post on how to set your Ubuntu desktop background to a rendered picture of the earth, complete with accurate weather and sunlight. The lifehacker method involves downloading a new, fully-rendered image every four hours. This method is less than optimal. You can generate the same image yourself, using the same data, and update it continuously. Let me lay out how you should be automatically updating your Ubuntu background with an image of the earth, complete with accurate clouds.
There are many steps you should take before you get a domain name for your business. On the other hand, buying a domain name you're happy with can be a heady experience for a lot of people. In order to maximize your sense that you have a real business as early as possible, we're going to walk through the steps of buying a domain name. In order to understand whats going on, we're going to start with an overview of DNS, the system that turns the server names you type into your browser's address bar into the information your computer needs to actually connect up to that server.
A direct result of my nerdiness is that a lot of people ask me advice on how to build a small online business. One gentleman I've been talking to is looking at selling corporate gifts; another has an interesting niche fashion idea.
I've done enough research and thinking about building an online business that I feel pretty competent in laying out how to get started. I'm going to making some assumptions about my audience, as well as doing business online, that I want to state up front, explicitly.I've long felt that Wall Street has turned into nothing more than friction in the system, grit in the gears of "real" industry. Rather than efficiently allocating capital to companies that can make best use of that capital, the professionals on Wall Street are playing very complicated shell games with Other People's Money. Every time I move the shell, I pull out 1% as a fee...
There's a classic joke about Wall Street. I feel like I read it in one of my grandfather's old joke books, probably a musty little Bennett Cerf tome from the 1950s with jokes organized in categories like "Hungarian Diplomats" and "Long Hairs".
Mike goes to visit his old friend Fred, who has been doing very well for himself in New York City. Fred's got a job working in a mail room on Wall Street, and has become quite plugged-in to all of the industry gossip. The two go for a jaunt just outside of the city, along the shore to view the haunts of the Wall Street rich and famous. As they drive along a wharf, Fred points out the notable yachts to Mike and informs him of the owners.
Social networking, as we see it today, is only mildly interesting to me. It solves the problem of keeping in touch with people I already know, a real problem, and a pressing one, but not one I need a whole lot of help with. It also solves this problem tangentially -- if it were really intended to help us keep in touch with our friends, it would look more like a CRM system. "You haven't talked to Charlie Smith in three months. Would you like to initiate a phone call?"
What I want is something that will put me in touch with friends I've never had.I frequently find myself sending and receiving a lot of test email when I'm developing an application. I don't want to ever send any email directly from the SMTP server on my local machine, I just want all this email dropped into one mailbox where I can take a good look at it.
Several threads I've been thinking about a lot recently just came together in my head in a way that I wanted to share.
First is the death of the video industry as we know it. Television and the movies will be with us for a long time yet, but more sophisticated consumption of media is eroding the ways companies traditionally earn money from moving pictures.