Here I am, going into the business of blog posting as advised by John Sonmez in his Blogging Course. What will it be about? I have no idea, so far. Or I have many different ideas but none of them seems very good and capable of providing enough topics for many blog posts. So, we’ll see. Either way it will have something to do with programming and software.
I’d like to share the experience of starting the blog. Mainly it was about two things:
- Choose and register a domain
- Choose and setup a WordPress hosting
Choose and register a domain
I wanted to have a nice domain, not some random *.wordpress.com. Since I didn’t know what the topic of the blog will be, I went for my nickname, slaweet, which is a fairly unique identifier of my person that I’ve been using for over 6 years. The nickname is kind of my personal brand as it evolved from my name – Stanislav Vít -> stanislavvít -> stanislaweet -> slaweet. Then it was just a question of whether I want slaweet.cz or slaweet.com. In the end I went with slaweet.com as I want to write in English and the topics should be for global audience.
Registering the domain was pretty straightforward, using Active24, the registrar I had good experience with from previous projects autoskolachytre.cz and outlinemaps.org.
Choose and setup a WordPress hosting
While John Sonmez recommended in his course some hosting for $4 a month, I wanted to look what’s out there for free at first. I found https://www.endora.cz/ (Czech only) with some free plans that display ads in the bottom of your page. Then I found out that they offer a paid plan for as little as 14CZK/month (that’s less that $1/month), which got me sold.
Than I spent some time trying to figure out how to use the domain I purchased already. At first it looked like I have to register the domain through them, then I found an option not to do that. Then it was a bit of a haste to find the IP address that I can set to DNS of my domain. Finally, there was an error when I tried to deploy the WordPress, twice, with no explanation of what the error was. That was a crazy UX. I ended up emailing user support and got a reply at about the time my third attempt succeeded saying that my hosting was probably too fresh. So finally I got up and running so that I could write this post.