ameristani.com technicals

The site is basically setup now. I’m sure I will keep tweaking and adding things to the site but essentially the core is done. In the past, I have always used webhosting companies, wordpress, gallery, etc. for my domains. However, no matter which webhost I used, there were always technical issues, downtime, significant manual configuration, tech support calls, etc. This time I wanted to avoid the hassle and use existing web services using my own domain. Here are a few details about the components I used to put it together.

• Blogger with custom domain: Easy to setup, great online tools, owned by Google [free]
• Google Apps: Provides gmail (woohoo!), calendar, docs, and more for custom domain [free]
• Domain ameristani.com registered using Google Apps [$10/yr private registration]
• Feedburner for feeds and email delivery, owned by Google [free]
• Flickr for photos [$25/yr for pro]

It was fairly straightforward to set everything up, except for a couple of things. Even though Google Apps and Blogger are both owned by Google, they do not know about the existence of each other when using a custom domain. A big pain was getting ameristani.com to forward to www.ameristani.com. After some tweaking and trial and error, I think I have everything working.