The (inexpensive) making of albitron.co.uk
As I set out into the world of contracting for the first time, I have grand ambition. Maybe my limited company might become not just the place money from contracting gig goes. Maybe it may be the place that other things live. Other businesses? Book revenue? Youtube content? Who knows.
As such, having decided on the name of my company (if you're interested, its a throwback to "albitron productions" - the name I used to publish a couple of android apps in the past), I knew that securing the domain would be critically important.
Rather than do careful research before choosing a domain registrar, I typed in "buy a domain" to google and registered my domain at the first one that came up. Cost a small fortune - something like £15 for two years.
Having splurged on the domain, I was determined to reduce costs on anything else to do with the domain. So this is a little post about how I managed to prevent the budget from creeping up any further.
The first thing I figured I needed to do was to get email up and running, so people could email me at my shiney new domain.
But I had fairly modest aims - I just wanted to be able to receive emails sent to an email address, and to send emails from the same addresss. I wasn't fussed about having a separate inbox for messages to that address, or different login credentials etc. So really, what I was talking about was being able to route emails in and out of my personal gmail account.
But I had fairly modest aims - I just wanted to be able to receive emails sent to an email address, and to send emails from the same addresss. I wasn't fussed about having a separate inbox for messages to that address, or different login credentials etc. So really, what I was talking about was being able to route emails in and out of my personal gmail account.
Googling came up with a lot of ways of doing this, but nearly all of them meant paying someone or another...paying for email from the domain registrar, or paying some routing service etc. And these things weren't cheap. £5/month may not sound like a lot - but that's £120 over 24 months, totally dwarfing the investment I'd already made in the domain.
Nonetheless, I was close to putting my hand in my pocket (for the second time in a week!) when I came across this awesome article by Paul Onteri - "How to use your own custom domain with Gmail for free"
I got myself set up on Cloudflare, followed the steps in the articles and boom! I'm able to send and receive emails from my domain. For free! Thanks, Paul!
This site
Next up, I wanted a little website, for a couple of reasons:
1) When someone googled my company, I thought it would be good if it went somewhere. Just a little "about" page somewhere or other.
2) I've been trying to push longer-form content on LinkedIn for a while, but have been very aware that there's no way of monetising content there... so I've been keen to move blog entries to somewhere I have a clearer sense of ownership and more monetisation potential.
3) I'm also working on other things, notably a book, and I thought it would be cool to have somewhere that could hold information about that in time.
It seemed, therefore, that my requirements were quite simple:
1) Can host "about" page
2) Can host blog pages and retain ownership of content
3) Possibility of monetising content
3) Possibility of monetising content
4) Potential to add more pages as needed
5) Ability to use custom domain - there's no use doing any of this if albitron.co.uk doesn't take you there!
I punched all of this into Google. Number 5 is actually a big influence here...a lot of products seem to want you to pay for their premium service to use your own domain. But Blogger seemed to allow this whilst also hitting the sweet spot between freeness, ownership of content and monetisation. It also seemed pretty WYSIWYG - key for someone that hasn't done much HTML for more years than I'd care to think about.
On blogger
Getting up and running was easy enough...but I'd be lying if I said that Blogger is a delight to use.
Firstly, it misses certain key features I just assumed would be there for any blogging tool. Notably there is no native support for blocks of code. You have to workaround that. Thanks to Tarak Shah for their handy post on the subject.
Secondly, copying content into Blogger is much harder than I thought it would be. I hoped I'd copy and paste a LinkedIn article and it would just figure it out. In the end, this was certainly not the case. The HTML blogger generates is so complex and verbose, no matter how carefully you try and paste content in (pasting plain text etc), you end up with strange span tags, styles you don't want applied etc. In the end, I spend far more time in the HTML editor re-familiarising myself with HTML and CSS than I imagined would be necessary in a WYSIWYG product.
Thirdly, all aspects of site configuration, settings etc just seem a bit old and clunky...themes don't feel quite as flexible as I feel they should be. The edit and preview modes look very different...and there are some weird bugs knocking around. For example..."Why is my Blogger blog showing only one post on the homepage?"
Finally, I struggled to get the domain to register properly. This, to be fair, was a cloudflare config issue, and easily resolved once I'd found the right question to ask.
But, all of that notwithstanding...we're up and running. Authoring new articles is nowhere near as painful as importing the old ones was, and page creation is fine, too.
Money making
It seems I was naïve in thinking "I'll slap a couple of ads on, see if I can make a few pennies" - that is, after all, how things worked back in the day. So, after a few days of faffing with this, where am I up to?
Google is reviewing my site. Apparently they need to do that before they let you have ads. Might take a couple of days, might take a few weeks. So, I'll hold my breath and let you guys enjoy the site gloriously ad-free for now.
Google is reviewing my site. Apparently they need to do that before they let you have ads. Might take a couple of days, might take a few weeks. So, I'll hold my breath and let you guys enjoy the site gloriously ad-free for now.
I really need to figure out a privacy policy. Pretty much everything says I need one...and yet it's curiously hard to get hold of one. I'd have assumed that anyone that ran a blog with a couple of ads on would need the same basic policy. There's no login here, no collection of any explicit PII, just whatever trackers adsense and analytics are gonna use. I've yet to find, however, the simple version I'm after. There are sites where you can pay monthly for a policy, sites where you can pay to build a policy....sites where they give you a policy for free, if you just insert your card details on the next page...I wonder if writing "As far as I'm concerned you're anonymous" in a text document would be sufficient.
So there are a couple of things to figure out before I can start making my millions, but we'll get there. Maybe. This isn't really the stuff I want to be doing. I want to be doing interesting things. Or writing interesting things. Not spending time faffing around with the place I want to write them. So we'll see.
So. Welcome.
This is it for now. I think this is the fifth blog post on here...and there's one page. Small, but formed. And more will come. Pull up a chair, make yourself comfy. I'll see you soon.