building your web-empire - 1. Setting up a Blogsite

People sometimes wonder why I spend so much money on a personal website and private email-addresses. They are referring to my own sporck.it domain (you're on it now). When I tell them it only costs me a couple of euros a year they're always surprised.

Somehow a lot of people think a decent website and email-address must cost over a 1000 euro's, but in facet it's almost for free. All you need to pay for is the (yearly) registration fee for a domain name (which for most common domains is around € 10,-/yr). If all you need is a not too complicated website, let's say a blog where you want to put some personal stuff, some pictures, maybe some videos, a template-based Blog-site will do. For the email I use Google Apps FREE since a couple of months and I am very pleased with it. Not only email, but also a calendar, an address-book and even documents (Google Docs). All for free!

There are many ways to register a domain name. Via Google you could register a .com for just US$ 10,- per year. But if you prefer a website ending on .nl, .eu, .it or whatever you will have to find a local partner. Just Google (in your local language) for domain registration and many (sponsored) hits will lead you to many companies willing to provide you with your own domain. You do not need any services from them, no hosting, no server-storage or space, just the domain-registration and full control over the DNS, this last one is vary important because you will need to reroute to the various applications (blog, email, calendar, etc.)

Once you have registered your domain-name you can start setting up the blog and email. From here on I divided this blog into two parts:

1. how to set up your blog and give it a domain-name (this blog);
2. how to use Google Apps for your own email domain (coming soon)

creating your blog
There are several blog-apps on the internet, the most used/popular ones are:

• Google's Blogger
• WordPress
• Tumblr

Just Google for "Blogger Wordpress Tumblr compare" and you'll find enough tests and comparisons and why you should choose one above the others (som many bloggers, so many opinions). I choose Blogger some time ago and I do not regret it; Blogger is easy to set up, hosting is for free, there are a lot of templates available out there in case you might not like the build-in ones, scripts & applets to spicy your blog, etc., etc. I haven't come across something I was not able to implement.


setting up your blog on Blogger
Once you decided for Blogger the first steps are pretty easy. Just go to blogger.com, register and follow the steps in which you choose a name for the blog and one of the default templates. Afterwards you can always rename your blog, choose another template.

giving the blog your own domain-name

Blogger Publishing Settings

Now you're blog will have an URL in the blogspot-domain (mine used to be http://sporck-it.blogspot.com/) you can replace it with the one you registered. Since I registered the domain "sporck.it" I chose "www.sporck.it" to replace the "sporck-it.blogspot.com". When logged in on Blogger (the back-end) go to the Settings TAB, click Publishing and click on Switch to: Custom Domain, then on the right click on Already own a domain? Switch to advanced settings here you can enter the domain you registered (for example www.sporck.it, but also blog.sporck.it is possible). At this point we have to be patient, before we can access the blog on this new URL you need to make add and edit some records in your domain's DNS which Google explains in an easy step-by-step guide on their site. Once these modifications are made to the DNS you need to wait at least 12 hours, but sometimes it can last up to 2-3 days before these modifications are known to all DNS-servers. In the meantime you can work on the content of the blog or set up Google Apps (also here some DNS-modifications are required).

Once the DNS-servers are updated the domain is forwarded to Google's servers and your blog is reachable under the desired URL!

#Barbera2 or a Twitter Wine Tasting Event

Tomorrow (or probably today when you read this) I will be guest at the #Barbera2 wine tasting event, together with my wife and some friends. Why? How?

Once you fully understand Twitter and you are really interacting anything can happen on/via Twitter. So it came that (on a photo) I recognised a bottle of wine in the arms of an Italian Barbera-producer visiting a Dutch tweep (Twitter-friend) and wine-importer. I tweeted all details of the wine (had a pic of the label on my iPhone) so both men were impressed, as a result the wine producer and I started following each other on Twitter and Facebook.

When some time later the wine producer was in the neighbourhood he drove by for a cup of coffee and invited us for some wine tasting event in May, #Barbera2. Also the Dutch wine-importer would be there... Tonight Samuel, his partner Loes, my wife Maddy and I enjoyed a dinner together and tomorrow we'll drive to Nizza Monferato to taste 5 Italian and 5 American Barberas with over 100 other wine enthousiasts, wine producers, wine bloggers, wine
journalists, etc. and afterwards we'll enjoy a pick-nick in Cascina Garitina's vineyard (if it stops raining). And all thanks to Twitter... and my memory for wine bottles... and the fact I always photograph the label of a good wine with my iPhone ;-)

I'll bring my iPhone and iPad along, so via Twitter and Facebook you can follow what's happening! I even believe there will be a Live Stream covering the event on the Internet, I'll tweet the link as soon as I have it.
here's the link to the Live Stream

For more information on #Barbera2 I would like to refer to the Barbera2 Blog

create your own "newspaper"

I hardly don't read newspapers anymore, well not the way I used to which was folding page by page, quickly scanning the bold headlines and sometimes reading the first lines and maybe an entire article. But today there's Twitter! Important and less important news is brought to me by tweeps (people you follow on twitter). Anything from yesterday's bomb at Moscow airport to the 123rd glimp of the iPhone5. Sometimes it is brought to me by a serious journalist, a news channel or just a friend with an even nerdier interest in gadgets as me. Important, funny, useful and useless news, it's all there for me.

Since 140 characters are usually not even most of these tweets contain a link to a blog, a newssite, a YouTube video, etc. When travelling I just bookmark this links for later. I use ReadItLater which is integrated in my iPhone's Twitter-client and is integrated (via a Plugin) into my browsers on my laptops and PC. ReadItLater offers me the possibility to read the complete news-article, watch the video on a larger screen when I want to. 

Today a suggestion to one of the journalists I follow, @italiansweep a Dutch correspondent in Italy, led to a discussion with another tweep about the impact of my suggestion. So I started to search for an easy and fast solution, to prove I was right. My suggestion (to the journalist) was the following "why don't you share the most interesting articles you come across with us, and why not make a paper.li-like newspaper from it". I presume that as a foreign correspondent part of his day is filled with scanning the local (in this case Italian) media for interesting news. News that could be interesting for his home-country (the Netherlands in this case). Sometimes this results in an article for a newspaper, a blog or a video-item for an news website. Sometimes even an entire documentary. But many times he will read interesting news but decide not to use it or it is rejected by his clients (newspapers, radiostations, etc). But I am personally very interested in what @italiansweep considers interesting and would like him to share this info with me and others. Of course he  needs to oblige certain rules (copyright etc), but pointing his followers to interesting content is no problem. 

Okay so far the background, now to my solution. I've created a 5 step manual:

1. go to ReadItLater and register;

2. download and install one of the ReadItLater plugins into your browser(s), this adds a button to your browser allowing you to add an URL to your RIL-list;

( 2b. if you use a smartphone, add the App there as well and/or add it to your twitter client allowing you to save links included in tweets )

3. go and collect articles, pictures, video's... in other words: CONTENT and bookmark them to your RIL-list;

4. go back to ReadItLater, login and check the result, maybe delete some content; 

5. register for the RIL-Digest and share this with the world like I did, here is my public ReadItLater-list in Digest presentation

so from now on publishing your "newspaper" is nothing more then bookmarking interesting articles, et voila, they are added to your RIL-newspaper (Digest). Of course you regularly have to delete older content to keep it dynamic and clear!

to be continued...

More then 10 months ago I wrote my last blog-entry, how to get more out of your iPhone. Surprised by its success, it got over 1000hits within 2 hours after iPhoneclub.nl tweeted about to it, I didn't know how to continue. Should I focus on iPhone related stuff? A personal nightmare, my mother's cancer and her death in July this year, a new job in Switzerland I started in March, and lots of other less important things dragged my attention away right at the moment  my blog had gotten some attention. I don't mind. There are more important things in life then MY Blog.

I decided to restart blogging and to write about anything that I feel the urge to write about. About life in Italy, work in Switzerland, gadgets I use and the stuff (apps) I put on them, what I cook and what I eat, and God knows what... I also decided to switch to English in my blog. I started in Dutch, since at that time I saw my blog as a way to inform friends and relatives back in the Netherlands about my/our life in Italy. But on Twitter, where I have become pretty active lately, I currently have quite a variety of nationalities following me, mostly from the Netherlands and Italy but also some Swiss. In order to avoid spending too much time writing my blog in Dutch, Italian and German I'll stick with English.

Keep in mind: the fun of social media and blogging is not in the writing and reading alone but above all in the INTERACTION. So please respond, react, interact and whatever; in a reaction under the blog or in a tweet!

is hyves een hype ?

Zo... vandaag is het er dan van gekomen! Aangemoedigd door nogal wat uitnodigingen de laatste weken en maanden heb ik vandaag mijn eigen profiel op Hyves eens aangemaakt. 

Ik ben nu eigenlijk wel benieuwd of ik snel veel vrienden heb of dat het toch zou tegenvallen... en wat moet ik dan doen? maar zeggen dat het toch niks voor mij is, me afvragen of ik inderdaad zo weinig vrienden heb? 

Dat brengt me bij de overweging waarom lopen mensen nu zo te koop met zichzelf? of zie ik het verkeerd? (laat maar weten als überhaupt iemand de moeite neemt dit te lezen). En waarom doe ik er nu weer aan mee?. Op die laatste overweging kan ik zelf natuurlijk meteen inhaken. Ik heb het zakelijk en privé erg druk en eigenlijk zou ik dus niet nog meer tijd hierin moeten steken want het risico is dat het verslavend werkt, dat het daardoor nog meer tijd gaat vreten... en toch doe ik het! Ik heb nu mijn profiel en zit zelfs al een BLOG te schrijven. Is het dan toch mijn (sowieso al niet te kleine) EGO dat gestreeld wil worden? Zijn het de verhalen dat de moeders op het schoolplein je ineens heel ANDERS gaan bekijken als ze je tegenkomen op Hyves (gehoord van een vriend/co-Hyver die me na 5minuten nog steeds niet heeft toegevoegd als Hyve-vriend  ) 

Anyway: mijn voornemens zijn in ieder geval veelbelovend. Ik ga proberen regelmatig (dat is minimaal 1-2x per week) mijn gedachtenspinsels, ervaringen, en wat al niet meer aan deze BLOG toe te vertrouwen. 

Gegroet, 
Dagmar 

(of hoort dat niet onder een BLOG te staan)