Work Better, Not Harder

What if you woke up this morning to discover your domain name has... disappeared? Likely you would make this discovery because your website is down, or perhaps your email isn't working. Or what if you are contracting for a new website and have no idea how to wrangle your domain name for your new website designer? Recently a client I haven't worked with for several years wrote to ask if I knew the whereabouts of their domain. I get it, not everyone is a control freak like me. But every small business owner needs to have control of their unique business domain name. If you aren't sure where your domain is registered, or under whose name, you can find that out here:  whois.icann.org/en  (or if it's a .ca domain, cira.ca/ca-domains/whois ). If your domain has private registration, you may not be able to view the name of the registered owner. But at least you can find out the domain registrar and can contact them through their support channels. Click to Tweet...

There have been many good things about moving my website to a WordPress platform late last fall. And there have been a few frustrating things. I'd been doing a pretty good job of ignoring some of those frustrating things until I received an email from Google Search Console with the subject line:  Increase in "404" pages on daleyprogress.com . Oh no! That sounded pretty ominous. The accompanying graph was even more so. Here's the backstory: all my website links changed with the move . Previously my pages all ended with '.html' and now that's truncated. There's a plug-in for redirecting when people click on an old link out there somewhere, so I set that up for every current page. I also had to move several documents and files hosted on my old site to the new one, and then go change all those links on my various blog posts about them. Tedious, painful work but I thought I had it handled. It turned out I was so very wrong. These '404 errors...

I've been thinking recently that launching businesses are likely having difficulty getting their desired domain name or even something partway relevant. It makes me happy to have my own little stash of domain names. I'll always recommend buying a .com domain, and a .ca domain would be your second choice if you're in Canada. The short, snappy, relevant domain names are mostly all snatched up. I know because I'm often searching for domains for clients or event promotion. If you're unfortunate to be stuck with very limited options, you might instead opt for a domain name that's more memorable, if perhaps not so easy to guess. The first round of new domain extensions are already live, and more will be launching - in fact, 243 of them! Here's what's trending for March 2015:   (source: Netfirms) .space .website .nyc .club .ninja .solutions .photo .global .buzz .guide Aside from choice and variety, there's fun to be had, too. How ab...

To the 'person' who has hijacked my domain: For 3 weeks now you have been making up email addresses that end with my domain name and sending spam emails on my behalf. Is it working for you? Are you making lots of money? Or just having a thrill? Please go find something more useful to do. Earn an honest living. Volunteer those techie skills for a good cause. Leave me alone. I don't want to get blacklisted again! Click to Tweet this Article

It feels like someone was messing with my credit score this week. My domain daleyprogress.com was blacklisted. There are a couple of things about this I'd like to share. How did it happen? Apparently, a link to an event in one of my newsletters pointed to a domain that was blacklisted. (Or at least that's my understanding based on the little info I've been able to get.) The immediate implication? Do I have to check every link in my newsletter against the blacklist to prevent this from happening again? I don't really know but, wow, what a pile of work that would be! How did I discover the problem? The hard way! I was sending test and regular emails that weren't arriving, even to myself. I initially thought the problem was with i-Contact . They were great about pointing me in the right direction. Then I had to contact Network Solutions which hosts my domain. They were quick to investigate and 'clear my name' for me. How can I know if...