I’m a big fan of Nearlyfreespeech. I think they’re a great webhost, and so far I haven’t been proven wrong. Sure their interface is a bit ‘simplistic’ and they’re site looks a bit dated, but overall I like the speed the provide, their infrastructure hasn’t failed me and their security hasn’t been compromised. The same can’t be said about my dreamhost account, for which I happen to pay nearly USD7/month for.

The best part about nearlyfreespeech however, is their pricing plan. Unlike other webhost that charge a flat fee per month, nearlyfreespeech charges on a pay as you go model. Basically if you don’t start a website, or nobody visits it, you don’t pay a thing. While many beginners look on the pricing plan as ‘risky’ since you could end up paying a lot of money once your site ‘really starts take off’, the real risk beginners should consider is subscribing to a 3-year plan for a blog they’ll stop updating past the first 3 months. The real risk is paying these webhost large one-off payments and use no where near the amount of bandwidth or storage to justify the $5-$10 dollar per month price tag…for the next 3 years.

While blogging over the weekend, I stumbled across an interesting article on marketing blogs. Part of the article advised on creating a blog identity, a sort of superhero that represented the blog. This would make your blog more memorable and thus help differentiate your blog in a very very crowded space. A superhero could be something quite simple, just a adjective and a noun and one of my favorite blogs, the evil HR lady springs to mind. Although I read the blog so often, I can’t remember the name of the author, but the branding is persistent and it just sticks. So I thought I’d create an online persona that fit my blog and a logo to go along with it. After all, keith’s blog is just as memorable as John’s blog or Mark’s blog, there really is nothing ‘sticky’ about it.

Previously I shared how I reached my target of getting 1000 hits/month on my blog. To many that’s a pittance of a target, considering some bloggers average that in a day. However, blogging isn’t just about getting the hits, to me it was also a period of self-discovery, to truly see what I could do and what could be achieved once the gloves were off, and to be honest I loved every moment of it.

Even though I work in IT for one of the biggest corporations in the world, I felt I couldn’t really explore the cool IT stuff I’m so passionate about. I may for a Fortune 500 company that reports profits in the Billions of dollars, but up until last year I was using a laptop that had Windows 2000 installed. That’s a 10 year old piece of software (and OS mind you) that I was running, and people say IT moves quickly??

Mission Accomplished…GWB style!

When I started this blog on my birthday, I wasn’t so sure what was going to happen. I didn’t have a target, I didn’t have a goal and all I wanted to do was to start a website and keep it to myself.

Over time as I learnt about the awesomeness of wordpress, and the wonderful stuff you can do on the web, I knew I had to share that or at least write about it. So I started blogging about setting up wordpress blogs or Joomla on nearlyfreespeech, dreamhost and amazon web services. If you didn’t know how much I loved wordpress, let me tell you now…I Love it a Lot !!(arms stretched wide open)

So I set about a goal to create a blog that would get a modest hit rate of 1000 hits a month, and as of yesterday I finally crossed that target and now have had 1003 hits in the past 30 days….AMAZING!

What is a top-level domain, in simple terms it’s the part of the url after the last ‘.’ , so in my case my blogs url is http://keithrozario.com , my top-level domain would be .com.

There’s a long list of top level domains besides the regular ‘.com’ that you should be aware of if you’re hoping to start a website. Consider the case of Guy Kawasaki who bought 55 domains for his startup truemors, just to prevent cyber squatters from getting their hands on an obscure truemors url. If that doesn’t convince you, take a look at one of my favorite blogs, the EvilHRLady who in her own words:

These past few weeks has been hectic, I’ve been moving into my new house which inevitably involved talking to a lot of contractors/plumbers/repairmen and I had a very busy go-live period for my project. (Go-Live refers to the point of an IT project when it successfully becomes available to the users). To top it off I upgraded my blog from wordpress 3.1.1 to 3.2 and the upgrade wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be.

Reflecting on my blogging and my goal to reach 1000 hits/month, I think there’s a lot I learnt from this blogging experience so far from a technical perspective (setting up a website/installing a database..etc etc), but there’s a whole lot more I learnt about other things as well. Here’s the top 3 things I learnt from blogging that have nothing to do with programming.

A lot of my blogs are tech-centric with a focus on web 2.0 technology. However, this decision to start this ’new’ blog and abandon my old political slanted blogger blog was in part due to a book I read by Guy Kawasaki. Guy seems to be of the opinion that good is good enough, and if you’re going to do something…do something first, and then improve it as you go along.

In that spirit of doing first and improving along the way, I started www.keithrozario.com, which is the blog you’re reading right now. I’m absolutely loving blogging about tech and it’s an inner passion I should have pursued much much earlier in life.

Google has just hit back at Facebook with the new +1 button. Similar to facebook’s like, it’s a one-click button to symbolize you ’like’ the site. However, that’s where the similarity ends:

Ok Cool, so I’ve got Social Media widgets on the side and the option to tweet and like my post.

If only I could include facebook share on the page, without messing up the design.