Head Tale

…I might as well sit here and talk to myself until I get this bandwidth issue resolved or the end of the month comes and it gets reset. 

Since I can still manipulate the layout of the site, I think people should be able to find me so that's good.  I put up a “Read This” element on the left navigation bar that leads to a plain text file where I posted an explanation (and also just realised I can copy my “behind-the-wall” updates there for the time being.)

So what else should I say at this point?  For the most part, I've been extremely happy with NetIdentity who provide my personalized e-mail (jason@hammond.net), web site (https://headtale.com) since 2001 and blog (https://headtale.com) since February of this year.  I'd seen them before (I think they were called NameBank.com) and at the time, I was like “who would ever pay for that when you get a free e-mail address and web space from your ISP?  But when we were moving to Calgary (and knowing we'd be moving back to Saskatchewan eventually), I realised that there was an enormous hassle in updating e-mail subscriptions, address books and so on everytime you got a new e-mail address. 

To get around this, I looked into registering my own domain but I wanted something brief and memorable and relevant to me but unfortunately, hammond.com, hammond.net, hammond.org and all types of similar variations were already gone.  So I answered my own question by becoming someone who would use the NameBank (which had become NetIdentity.com) service.  For about $50 USD/year, I got my own e-mail and web domain.  These services are a bit limited in some ways (I can't run databases and other advanced features on my web page) but for the most part, they're easy to use and exactly what I needed.  It also gave me an e-mail address that travelled with me (and possibly will travel with me for the rest of my life – assuming I don't get all PO'ed by this outage and switch over to something else!)  In this day and age, I really think that's worth its weight in gold. 

The ready-made blog software they've offered for the last few years is a similar story – fairly robust while still lacking a few major features and not having the ability to tweak these types of things as you can with WordPress or other services which can be frustrating.  But again, for maybe $50/year more, it's worth it…at least for me, at least for right now. 

Web hosting prices have dropped since I first looked at my own domain – I think back then, it was a minimum of $8.95/month to host a basic site but now you can literally get web hosting for a couple bucks a month.  So NetIdentity is probably a lot more expensive than it needs to be.  But again, the convenience is a big selling feature is the personalized domain. 

Uhm, this wasn't meant to be a commercial message but I
think I'm still a member of NetIdentity's affiliate program so if the idea of having your own personalized e-mail address for the rest of your life (you can buy only the e-mail service for $24.95 USD/year) appeals, contact me and if you sign up for me, I get a big $20 credit to my own account.    Whoo-hoo!