Setting Up

Well, here we are, lo, many years after I promised myself I would… at long last, I’m putting together my own titchy little website.

Over the past few days I had a lot of unfamiliar decisions to make, and especially when $$$ is involved, making unfamiliar decisions feels kinda like taking up a new sport for the first time. A team sport. One I’m not good at. Like, any of them. Curse you, Knightian uncertainty!

I eventually got here, such as it is, but not without a few hitches and stops. So in my first post or posts I’ll document the process and maybe give a product recommendation or two, something I did not easily find (well, not from a well-known and trustworthy blogger like me.)

First stop was name.com, where I registered a few likely looking domain names for gratifyingly cheap. $5 a year per name? Nice.

Second stop, hostgator.com, $9 a month (google ‘hostgator coupon’ and immediately find one for $10 off) gets you unlimited domain names, 600gb of space, all the bells and whistles. Also they lived up to their reputation for helpfulness. I had a dumb question about URL forwarding, I got someone on live chat within 2 minutes, and they helped me out. Thumbs up.

That’s it so far. My nascent blog is Wordpress (duh). My photo gallery is Jalbum, a (free) program that makes nifty galleries out of the jpgs on your hard drive, then you just specify the web address, username, password and it uploads the whole thing in one go. The only downside, thus far, is that whenever I tinker with it or add new photos I have to rebuild the WHOLE gallery (all previously uploaded photos, folders, etc) and that seems like it could get tedious - right now it takes about five minutes with < 100 photos. Over time is that gonna turn into half an hour every time I want to tack on a couple more vacation shots of the Burger King in Branson, Missouri? The uploads are incremental, though.

Tag: hostgator