jazzsequence

that’s right, update your bookmarks because i got me a domain. the zapto.org address will remain active indefinately (because it’s free!) but you don’t need to remember that long url to get to the site.

this is the first step of several in an effort to get an e-commerce site (or several) running. the first thing i’m working on right now is /music (pronounced slash-music). my plans for /music are just beginning, but i want to start selling music. right now i’m trying to get a list of indie labels and their distributors compiled, and then i will send out a letter to all of them requesting a catalog, and then the site will go up. i think what i’m going to do in the meantime is get the site up, put up my own music and music direct from artists and start there, at the same time having on the front page a notice to bands and labels to send me stuff if they want to sell on my site. when i get info/catalogs from the distributors, i will start putting up actual albums.

the second phase will be the clothing site. the site i used to do my registration (no-ip.com) — which is the same site i’ve used from the beginning to run the background service that updates DNS servers if/when my IP address changes — offers lots of services, including the ability to run multiple domains on the same IP address or, essentially, the same computer. there’s a couple different ways you can do this, either you can create a web redirect, and enter in a url for the page you want to come up at yournewdomain.com, or you can host the site using an alternate port than 80 — the standard www port used for most sites. what i’m probably going to do, then, is the url redirect, and put the tshirt site at jazzsequence.com/tshirts but it would come up as the new domain (as well as jazzsequence/tshirts). hosting multiple domains and the redirect is one of no-ip’s premium services so it’s a bit more expensive, but still not a lot. the tshirt site will most likely be thinktankclothing. thinktankclothing.com is taken, but i can use pretty much anything else, so thinktankclothing.net, thinktankclothing.org, thinktankclothing.biz, thinktankclothing.info are all available and open options. the only reason i didn’t register that domain at the same time is a) because that project is still getting off the ground, and b) bills needed to be paid. probably in a couple weeks i’ll grab the thinktankclothing domain and put up a temporary front page.

the other factor that went into all this was the fact that thinktank, in all of its guises except www.thinktank.ws (which was originally reserved for western samoa, but is now being sold as “web site” ) was taken. had that not been the case and thinktank.org was available, i’d probably have done everything on that. however, i think i like this option better it’s just a little bit more money. no-ip does domain registration for $15/year, which is actually more expensive than some other places, but you can see that it’s really not that expensive. with the premium services it was a little over 30 bucks for the year, so still not bad. i might try to find another place to register the thinktankclothing site and then just add that to my account on no-ip once i own the domain, or i might just use no-ip and save the hassle.

all of this really just goes to prove how easy it is to host a web site. you can run it on windows xp, even without apache or other web services — xp has it’s own built-in web service (you just need to find it and enable it). once that’s done, even if you just have a dial up connection, you can host a web site with something like no-ip or [url]dynamicdns.com[/url]. both of those services offer domain name registration, so you register your account to whatever domain and you got a server. after that it’s just a matter of what you want to host but there’s lots of blogger and other programs that takes the web design out of the equation and makes it ridiculously easy.

anyway, w00t. domain! r0xx0r!

related posts:

• >thinktank makeover, jazzsequence network
• >quick note about jazzsequence network…
• >new look for jazzsequence.com: presenting jazzsequence::metal::