Projects

I've spent some time considering the best way to park a domain name to attract potential buyers, and stimulate offers. Having put some effort into pushing traffic to the name, I'd like to retain this if possible after the name has been sold. Hosting a domain in a registrar's market place is a quick and easy option, but the registrar gets all the benefits from the traffic. Hosting the name as an add-on in a multi-domain hosting plan is another option. However, there is quite a server overhead if you have a few hundred names, and it can push up the cost of the hosting. Another alternative is a VPS, but that involves more complex server management. None of these options allows for the retention of the traffic after the sale of the name.

I'm going to explore a technique that I'm going to call "Fox Foo", primarily because I own the .com domin name, and it's a nice aliterative couplet. The "flannel" justification for this name derives from the use of "foo" as a name for supporting variables in programming, and of course, the fox is a cunning and oportunistic animal. "Fox Foo" is therefore the cunning use of supporting names to promote primary websites.

The fundamental structure of FoxFoo.com is pretty simple. The main index page welcomes visitors, and provides a bit of information about the concept. There is also a list of the promoted keyphrases on the index page. The keyphrase is used instead of the domain name to enable the descriptive page to be left online after the name has been sold. For the purposes of this project I will use the name Wet Nursing.com as an example. The wet nursing information will be set up in a sub-directory called wet-nursing, and associated images and banners can be included in this directory. If a standard template is used, the css can be contained in the root Fox Foo root directory. After the sale of the name, the link to the sale page in the registrar's market place can be removed. Links to related domain names can be left on the page to help with future realated sales. URL forwarding is used to send direct navigation surfers to the sub-directory. This reduces the load on my DNS hosting.

I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the activities of Microsoft. I've got 3 computers that I use.

An HP notebook running under Windows 10, and I use that for most applications, including banking. I use this Windows machine because there are so many applications available on the Windows platform. I keep removing Cortana - Windows keyboard looging and data scraping application - but it keeps returning. Now that I hoping to use my domaining activities to increase my investment in Bitcoin, I'd like to take that away from Bitcoin. Using browser based web creation CMS means that I can be platform independant as well.

I purchased a netbook because of it's longer battery life, and it's SSD storage. I added an external SSD drive to this to handle a second Bitcoin blockchain. The computer came with Windows 10 and a load of bloatware, and I deleted all of that and installed Ubuntu. This works well, and I believe that it is a lot more secure.

My first purchase for my mobile computing project was  a Cromebook, and this worked surprisingly well. It also has a long battery life, and using SD cards with it allows for the local storage to be expanded. The big drawback is that it has to be connected to Google via WiFi.

I'm toying with the idea of getting a Raspberry Pi or equivalent for my Bitcoin activities. It's such a cheap option, and it takes the Bitcoin activities away from everything else. Also, I've become interested in Kali Linux, and I may switch to that on the netbook. Kali is a Debian variant with additional software for penetration testing.