Blogging – Getting Started

My desk during a blog break

With the hope this may help someone, creation and maintenance of this blog will be documented from time to time. Here’s Part 1 covering how the domain name, domain registrar, and hosting company were selected.

Domain name

The hardest part about this blog so far has been the domain name. It took well over a year to settle on eyeversonic.com. The obvious domains, markiverson.com and iversonic.com, are long gone. While I own markiverson.net, I decided to forge forward in search of a .COM domain. A college friend who has his own blog about corn futures used to refer to me as “I”, the first letter of my last name, and I liked that. “Hey ‘I’, how’s your non-existent blog going?”. “Hey ‘I’, why don’t’cha pass me that beer?” Part of the allure is it reminds me of the word “eye”. He meant the letter of course, but I liked the word. My mind thought of “third eye” and “eye on this” and “eye on that” and “I have my eye on you”. I also like “iversonic”, a play on my last name that not only sounds cool, but also pays homage to Pacific Northwest staples like Tacoma’s legendary raw garage band The Sonics, Boeing Supersonic jets, and our stolen NBA team, the Seattle Super Sonics. It’s my Twitter handle and used for other social identities, but unfortunately someone else registered the domain several years ago. Then a couple months ago it hit me. Combine the ‘eye’ and the iversonic to create “eyeversonic”. Of course the first time my wife saw the word she looked confused and said, “Is it ee-versonic or aye-versonic?” Fortunately, that was after committing to the domain with my wallet, so now it was on to selecting who to work with.

Registering the Domain name

The next step involved selecting a domain registrar. At the time I had several domains parked at Verio. Verio was referred to me by a group of friends who ran a web design company many years ago. Since then the company changed hands and its UI went from bad to really bad. To be fair, their tech support was top notch, but I couldn’t deal with the clunky interface, so I did research for a new place to park. The two that seemed best for my needs are GoDaddy and Namecheap. The demeaning Super Bowl ads from the past clouded my opinion of the former, and the word “cheap” in their name didn’t help the latter. However, good reviews and the fact that Namecheap never resorted to tasteless television advertising sealed the deal. Namecheap it would be, and so far so good.

Hosting

Hosting companies are plentiful and can be difficult to choose from. I relied on Google to find current reviews of hosting options. There are several that sound like they’d meet the needs of a simple blog like mine. A few contenders were InMotion, Dreamhost, Arvixe, and Bluehost. PCMag has a good analysis of options here, as does Top10Reviews. I opted for Inmotion and so far am pleased. The interface is straightforward and the one question I had was answered via an online chat in a few minutes. My question had to do with setting the nameserver at Namecheap, where my domain is registered. Nameservers have two IP addresses and two hosts listed by InMotion. I wasn’t sure what to do with these and learned the IP addresses aren’t needed when pointing my domain to InMotion, only the host URLs.

More information about choosing WordPress, a theme, and which plugins to use will follow in Part 2.

This post is brought to you by:
* Re-Mit by The Fall
* Streaming sessions from Tableau's 2015 Conference
* Bad electronic music played between said streaming sessions

 

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