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?"

Comments

Stay With Me Here

[eldavojohn]

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:Stay With Me Here

[0100010001010011]

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]

Re:Stay With Me Here

[rtb61]

A little be better would be do donate the page to charity. So first up a digital answering machine for when you are not digitally there, with what ever information you are willing to put up about yourself and your household, generally fairly minimal. Beyond that, issues, so what ever issues you wish to promote or link to, so you like wikipedia, a nice graphical link to wikipedia, you like the red cross then a neat graphical link to the red cross site etc. The more links to the more socially worthwhile web sites the better their public exposure.

You could also drop in a little, leave a message slot ie. people you know drop by your digital home or even you actual home, they can leave a little vid mail message.

Resume?

[jfinke]

Why don't you post a copy of your resume and redirect all hits to your domain to that page?

this

[HaeMaker]

http://www.hae.com/

for my personal blog

[Simon (S2)]

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.

A wiki?

[tepples]

When I had the money for hosting I just put up a page where you could post comments.
Nothing special, took about 10 minutes in Perl and anyone could leave a comment!

So for someone who doesn't want to code, would you recommend phpBB or MediaWiki or something else?

Re:Personality - you need one.

[KefabiMe]

Personality - you need one. Get a personality and what to put on your web page comes naturally.

Why do you gotta be a dick? Have you never asked someone for advice? What's your advice to people who ask technical questions? "A brain - you need one."?

For others of us, while we may know some HTML, and perhaps can even do some php and database programming, we just don't have the time to build a web presence from scratch. The guy even stated he's looking for a free app to help him out. He is experiencing a TIME issue, not a PERSONALITY issue. If you ask me, refactored (260886) is the one with a personality problem.

Yes, whitespace is your friend

[ynotds]

"Web designers" keep not wanting to know the most critical single factor in Google's original success ... no clutter.

I've got way too many placeholder pages which vary from one liners, to blatant lies about "coming soon", to a single link to some other discussion of the site's intended topic.

Lately, with bandwidth being cheap and no shortage of photos to choose from, I've been tending to add a single image which speaks for itself.

(Was going to also add the parent's exact suggestion so replied rather than duplicating.)

For Fun

[Anonymous Coward]

A blank text field and a submit button that simply appends the contents of the text field to a file on your server. It might be funny to see what shows up.

In my case...

[shish]

You come up with a neat idea, then discover that someone more famous than you had a similar idea, and spend the rest of your life being called a copy cat :(

Family Connections

[Kral_Blbec]

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 I thought Id throw it out there anyway as another use for a subdomain.

Re:MyDomain.com

[dintech]

I love that someone is typo squatting it. :)