teh hayley

Another day. Another attempt.

Not quite, but in my time, I've been through a whole bunch of blog systems (and blog names) in the pursuit of the perfect system.

The problem? A perfect system doesn't exist. Half the time, I want full-blown hackability. Half the time, I want to just post and forget about it. I want it to be beautiful be default.

So something like Wordpress or Tumblr would be perfect for the second situation. Easy to use posting systems with beautiful themes available... for free.

But at some point, I decide I want to do something custom, and I only ever really like tweaking Ruby stuff, so then I'm screwed.

And then there's the name. Oy vey.

teh hayley

The truth is, I'd rather just have hayley.com, but it's not available. Remember when domains were $50/year and didn't come with anything like free email forwarding or DNS (oh, that was at least another $50/year for that service)? Yeah, the good ole days. Well, that's how old that domain is.

I've registered several variants over the years, but a dot com is always best. My most recent attempt was "the hayley". The problem? It's often gone on the social networks (and I've got this thing of wanting a social network name available... just in case). In addition to social network availability... well, ranking for "the hayley" looks like it's going to be tough or even impossible.

Google has been taking away the "exact match domain" bonus more and more in recent times (if you're not familiar with EMDs, an example would be spidersoli.com getting a boost for the search query "spider soli" just because its domain exactly matches the search keywords.

Also, I've been amazed to find just how many people get to their favorite site by searching for it. These people already know the name of their site, yet they'll throw that name into google instead of just typing it into the address bar (for those web browsers that still have a separate address bar and search bar) and putting .com on it and be done with it.

The point? It's pretty important that you actually rank for your site's name. I got burned by the late September EMD update, and I don't care to ever be in that situation again (not even ranking for your own name).

So on that note, "teh hayley" looks like something I'll be able to rank for. The big thing is obviously overcoming google asking "did you mean X?"

I guess we'll see what happens on that front.

the blog system

I'm back with Middleman on this go. I almost went with tumblr. I had signed up for tehhayley.tumblr.com and had already blog somewhat. On the day I was going to finally register tehhayley and make it "the one", I decided that I would just settle on tumblr.

And then tumblr was down.

Tumblr's been down before. I specifically remember one instance where I had fortunately just backed up my blog prior to a major Tumblr outage (in fact, this one might've been the first major outage (it was ages ago)).

But it just really gave me pause. And made me really focus on what I already knew: I'd never really be happy with Tumblr.

I've had a personal blog with tumblr before. Tumblr's not the only one either.

The now defunct German blog "sunlog" is what I started with. I've also used serendipity, geeklog, pivotlog, tumblr, posterous, wordpress. And the custom blog written in Django. And in more recent times, hacker tools like jekyll.

Since Middleman is my hammer everywhere else, I figured it's the best choice since nothing has been perfect for me.

I've got my goal of bloggin 1,667 words/day in November (to coincide with nanowrimo), so my goal for the rest of October is to get this blog ready to go. So I can just blog and not have drama about where to blog.

So yeah. That's the ending. This one is definitely the attempt that's actually going to succeed.


teh hayley