If you don’t like saying words like ‘supercalifragilisticexpialdocious’ – unlike Julie Andrews – then if you are tossing around for a name for your domain for either business or personal use you will have discovered that finding one with only a few letters is almost impossible. The trend for very long urls is well on it’s way out, they are pain to type into browsers, and they are difficult to remember. Most people now, when doing a domain name search, are looking something short. I have seen some urls which are frightening, such as the B&B in Ireland whose entire name, including four words, made up the domain and it was in Irish!

The shortest you can hope for now begins at three letters minimum – you cannot get a two-lettered one – but you have to be very decisive about what you want, and make sure that nobody else has thought of it first. If you can get a domain with one or two words then go for it.

So where did 2010 go? for me it seemed to race by and even if you don’t agree with that then you would have to agree that 2010 was a mish-mash of the good, the bad and the downright ugly, but mostly people seem to concur that it was not the best of years in general. Volcanoes erupting, earthquakes, floods, strikes, disputes – given that we really couldn’t do anything about them happening makes it all seem that much more dreary and a year we would all rather forget.

As we go into 2011 in a few short hours time I hope you will join with me in hoping that the next 12 months will be a hell of a lot better for the human race and this over-burdened planet of ours. If we all just take the time and make the effort to see that the space we occupy on earth is nicer, cleaner and more positive for those around us then at least we can say at the close of 2011 that we gave it our best shot. I would like to hear less, a lot less, about man’s inhumanity to man and in saying that I mean that I want to see less of it happening. I want to see our most vulnerable children in society get a fairer deal from those charged with looking out for them and I want parents everywhere to realise just how precious their children are and make every moment of their childhood matter in the best possible way. I have always said that when you get older you can in some ways recapture your own youth – but you can never, ever recapture your children’s youth…once that’s gone  it’s gone – know what I mean?

I hope that if there is a higher power watching over us all that ‘it’ gives us all a smoother ride throughout 2011 and that we all recognise more the importance of watching out and caring for those around us, in that regard we can make life nicer for everyone else and it doesn’t do us any harm either. Drive that little bit slower, take one less glass of booze, smoke one less fag, read that bedtime story to your kids that you’ve been meaning to do for ages now – it’s the little things we do that can make such a difference to life in general.

Happy New Year

My son has been watching me tapping away on the computer for the past three years and wondering what on earth I am writing about most of the time. Now and then I ask him to review something I have written on the blog if it relates to teenage issues and he gives me his opinion on whether or not I have said anything sensible. Now he wants to join the blogosphere himself and is designing a blog about astronomical matters; the moon, ufo’s…

He certainly knows his way around a keyboard but like most teens his activities are usually confined to Facebook or YouTube so writing paragraphs of text on a particular topic will be new for him – because he has to make it interesting. For now I am setting him up with a free domain hosting site while he decides what to do and then once he has a respectable amount of posts up and running we will take another look at what he needs to enhance his site. In the mean time I will be keen to see how his new, and very first blog, takes shape.

It’s crazy. When I was 13 and in first year of high school one of my subjects was French – and I was not good at it to say the least. The teacher gave me every impression she thought I was a scatterbrain and graded me accordingly on my term report. Not too bad considering that my needlework teacher the following year, in Form 2, wrote on my report the words ‘disruptive influence’…to this day I have to agree with old Mrs Noonan on that one. I was very disruptive…

I left a message on Friends Reunited a month back when I saw my old French teacher had a profile on my school’s site – she was young and newly married then – and reminded her about how she gave me a D on my exam and how rubbish I was then at French. But I also told her how I went on the own a hotel in France and become quite fluent in recent years – how ironic was that…?

She replied recently and left a very nice message, and part of it in French…very poor French at that. How funny – I speak better French than my teacher!

Well, yes it does actually. As it’s very much an online thing there’s an avalanche of information around as to where to host your website but, when you look into it, most of that info leaves out the really basic information that you need to know.

When you start looking around at website hosting you’re likely to not even notice those lapses in information and it’s really only after you’ve chosen a hosting service that you discover there’s some information that you’d have liked to have known about in advance. For example, there’s a surprising number of comparison sites that don’t bother to mention whether or not there’s a ‘control panel’ interface. That’s important because when the time comes when you want to move your sites to another host, it’s a whole lot easier if they’re running a control panel.

Almost always not covered is where the hosting is located. That’s basically because the majority of comparison sites are based in the US and don’t even think of the implications of people from outside the US using a hosting service. In fact, there’s a major difference: courtesy of how google’s geographic system works it’s much better to have your site hosted in the country where your customers are based. In one case, I’ve seen a huge difference in site hits on moving from a US based hosting service to a UK based one where the customers were generally based in the UK. Even within the US this could potentially have implications for you where your site was hosted on the east coast but your customers were on the west coast.

So, think not just who your site is hosted with but where it will be.