Domains – AdamClark

As you may have noticed I got a new domain(s) adamclark.me and adamjamesclark.com .
When I got the new domains there are a couple of things I’ve done & I wanted to catalog them here.

As a matter of transparency, you can google most of these things 🙂 having them in one place does provide value to me though.

Helpful links

Here are some links to other content I found useful. Do your own research though & don’t trust everything on the internet 😉
https://dnschecker.org/
https://wordpress.com/support/sitemaps/
https://wordpress.com/support/markdown-quick-reference/

Host a website

Just buying the domain doesn’t create a website, so you’ll need to do that yourself or get hosting.

WordPress.com Hosting

I’ve chosen to do wordpress.com for my hosting.

Some things I like are:

Fairly inexpensive
Easy to export from the admin console
WYSIWYG^{[^2]} editing, I don’t need to make a PR^{[^3]} then publish a static site

Some things I don’t like are:

Editor is obtuse and harder to use than it should be, this could just be me needing to get used to it though

Don’t forget to configure your WordPress

Make the site private before you’re ready to publish it
Add tags & categories in the wp-admin section
Add a link to the RSS feed & sitemap to the homepage so it’s handy for search engines to find

Alternatives to consider

While you could use wordpress.com to host a site there are other ways too:

Create a static HTML page & put it in a s3 bucket
Create a github action to add pages to a s3 bucket on a PR
Other hosting providers such as wix, squarespace
Other wordpress/drupal/joomla hosting providers etc….

Get access to webmaster tools

These go by various names such as search console etc… the functionality is similar though: being able to gain insight how search engines see your website and be able to make changes to get it to rank better in search.

Google

Getting access to this is simple, I used their DNS validation to create a TXT record. FYI you’ll need to create the text record at the domain level such that:

host=@
value=google-site-verification=*************_*_*******************************
type=TXT
ttl=15min

FYI I used a short TTL incase I fat-fingered copying the value, but once it’s working consider using a higher TTL.
I also masked the token in this example so nobody accidentally copy-pastes it because it only works for my domain 🙂

Bing

Getting access to this is simple, I used their DNS validation to create a CNAME record. Bing had me create a random subdomain with the value verify.bing.com.

host=*********************************.adamclark.me
value=verify.bing.com
type=TXT
ttl=15min

Other Webmaster tools

It seems like everybody is making webmaster tools now a days. Facebook, Pinterest, and Yandex also have tools.
While I didn’t enable these they are options.

Get access to analytics tools

Getting access to these tools is similar to the webmaster tools, I used the DNS based methods to add my site.

Google Analytics

Cloudflare Analytics

Microsoft Clarity Analytics

Create a route53 public hosted zone

I have a personal AWS^{[^1]} account for hosting pet-projects and POC/POT’s^{[^4]} for personal use. So far I haven’t used a domain but I added my new domains to route 53 so I can easily access/edit DNS in route53.

Create the public hosted zone in AWS
Copy the NS records it generated in the new public zone & copy-paste to your registrar
Validate via nslookup

FOOTNOTES:

[^1]: AWS stands for Amazon Web Services
[^2]: WYSIWYG is an acronym for what you see is what you get
[^3]: PR is a acronym for pull request, a request to “pull” code from one branch to another, typically used when working in github source control.
[^4]: POC: Proof of concept, validating a conscept works, typically slightly bigger scale than a POT
[^5]: POT: Proof of technology, validating a individual/small scale use-case works in a given technology

Category: Domains

Things to do when getting a new domain