Freitag

A Big Change

I let my hosting plan run out today. This is the first time in 12 years that I am not paying to have my domain hosted and it’s all due to the fantastic tools that people have developed over the last few years. I believe that custom domain names still look professional and I’m using custom DNS with my domains to point to online tools. 

chrisfreitag.com

Tumblr hosts my personal blog. They have their moments but I’ve been mostly happy with the service. It’s a relief to not have to keep updating my Wordpress site to the latest software. Truth is, I’m not very back-end savvy and I can’t even remember how I set it up back in 2006. I don’t have a clue what my password for my database was. It was something I fumbled through and didn’t really understand. I’d say that probably speaks to about 90% of Wordpress installations.

creativefriday.com

Krop hosts my portfolio and resume. They have done a fantastic job making a good looking site with excellent tools for displaying creative work. I completely feel at home when I’m at Krop. I’m really going to put some effort into getting some side work and I will happily point people to my Krop.com profile.

A Few Concerns

There is a little bit of fear this. I used to use my hosted site to upload web pages that I created for clients so they could preview a live version. The next time I create a site for someone, I’m going to try the built-in web server on OS X and just host the site right on my iMac at home. I also used my FTP client to upload large files to my server. Dropbox will take over here, easily. And, I had an area walled off for family and friends to see photos of my kids. I’m not sure what my answer is for this yet. Flickr sucks because I have to force all of my family and friends to sign up with Flickr so I can add them as friends and they can see my private photos. What I wish Flickr allowed me to do is create a link that can be accessed by anyone with the link, just like YouTube. I really haven’t found a good service for sharing photos and videos privately.

The DNS is still propagating so my sites may not load correctly for a few more days. I notice that if I slap a www in the front of the domain name that the site has a better chance of loading. But it’s all starting to come together and I think everything will be working right by the end of the week.