We are moving!

Hello again

The removalists are here! I mentioned some time back in my other blog on careers and innovation that I was planning on moving my blogs to a single new blog at http://www.OwenMcNamara.com and to use WordPress instead of Blogger - see this article for the reasons why. Well that day has at last come. So from now on my blog posts will be on the new domain which you can get to by clicking here.

Why use my name as the URL? Well, many experts recommend that if you work a lot on the internet, which I do, that you should protect your own name by registering it as a domain (so if you haven't already done that I suggest you do - it costs very little per year and you don't need to do anything with it but at least it will be yours.). I tried to come up with a new interesting name for my blog, and couldn't. My previous blogs were about quite different topics and my new blog will also cover a range of topics that interest me so for now I will use my own name as the blog name. It is the best name I could think of at the moment.

My aim in the new blog is that my posts and newsletter are full of content, not ads, and so you will notice most of my articles in the new blog are longer than the average blog posts you have seen. Yes, there are some ads in my posts but only a few select ones. My aim is to keep them to a bare minimum.

Sometimes I write a blog post or article once a day, and sometimes none for a week or two. It depends on what other projects I have on. I develop and maintain my own commercial websites in a number of different market segments, and I work as a Consultant in Technology Project Management, Software Management and Internet Business Management and Marketing. For your information, my main consulting business website is http://www.KnowledgeStream.com.au which I will completely update sometime in the not too distant future but it gives you a guide.

In addition to my blog posts I do sometimes put together more comprehensive newsletters that people will enjoy and find useful. These will be in the form of a PDF newsletter that I place on my new blog site and then email you a link so you can download at your leisure. My new blog has a simple free newsletter subscription form where you can enter your email address and automatically be sent a short email with a link back to my blog whenever the site is updated or there is a newsletter. That saves everyone time.

I hope you find the new blog and newsletters interesting, informative and valuable to you. Don't hesitate to contact me with any comments, questions or suggestions at my new blog.

Until next time

Owen McNamara

http://www.OwenMcNamara.com/

Latest Alexa Rank and Time to Change Domain Names

Lately I have been working more and more on our e-commerce site which has left me less time to do some blogs, which is a pity because I enjoy blogging. I will get back to it soon with some more results and lessons from what I have been doing. As for that Alexa rank I mentioned in the last few posts - well it continues to grow as our traffic grows. Today it is under 485,000 and continuing to rise up the rankings. The e-commerce site (not this blog) now has around 2000 people per month visiting it and that is growing rapidly as well. It is going to be very interesting to see just how high the site goes before it settles down. I also continue to expand the site and its content and range of offers almost every day so it has a way to go yet.

On a completely different topic, the problem of propagation time for a new domain name cropped up for me this week, not a big problem, but definitely an annoyance. On Tuesday morning at 4:30am in fact, I finished off a small site for a friend of a friend in the UK. Yes, I am in Australia, and my host is in the US, and she is in the UK. Isn't it great to live in an internet enabled World? The site was fun to do and we ended up with a great result using a mix of text, and video for a particular sector of the health market. But what was interesting was the time it took for the new domain name to ripple throughout the internet DNS systems. I had read that it can sometimes take 2-3 days before a new domain name is active but previously it has only taken a day.

I registered the domain at my US Host company, and under a day later the domain worked for me. But the person who needed the site in London urgently couldn't see it until over a day after I could, over 2 days after registration. It was interesting how the domain name servers in my network had been updated a full day before hers. I am not sure why, but I have read enough to know it happens. In this case I could see the domain here in Australia, another person in Ireland could see it, but not on the particular network in London. Normally that wouldn't matter too much but this time we were in a hurray, with very short notice to get the site up and running. That is the way it goes. It is up, and running and everyone is happy but I am still curious about why it takes so long for the DNS systems to update.

If you are actually transferring an existing domain from one site, host, or address to another then there are ways that you can change the TCP TTL values a few days prior to the switch so that your actual domain name change takes as little time as possible. To read more on this consult the DNS article in Wikipedia. But you still have to make those changes a few days before.

Until next time


Owen