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What Do You Do With a Personal Domain?
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?"
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.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
What do you with your domain? Anything you damned well please.
Check out http://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. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Yea, this is actually specified by RFC 2606. example.com/.net/.org are all reserved as well as the TLDs .test, .example, .invalid, and .localhost.
When I'm reading tech books with people not following this RFC it always jumps out at me as unprofessional.
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.