I registered my first domain with GoDaddy about five years ago. They were one of the few companies back then to offer reasonably priced domain registrations, for around $10, while competitors like Network Solutions still charged $40.

I’ve continue to register domains there over the years, and now have about ten personal and twenty for my work. Over time, they’ve added more and more bloat, and it’s taken more and more clicks to actually purchase a domain. Their management interface is overwhelming now, and the page design itself is quite the eyesore.

Junior year of college, I built my first HTPC. I had all these movies, music, and pictures and I wanted to watch them on the television I had just bought for our college apartment. So I built an extremely cheap computer, hit it behind the television, hooked it up and installed software called Media Portal which would serve as a front end and let me browse and watch all of this media from the couch.

It was really cool, and I was constantly tweaking Media Portal. A few years later, after the popularity of HTPC’s grew, I bought a sleek Shuttle HTPC. More recently, I installed new software called XBMC to replace Media Portal.

This was my second year attending Pubcon, a “Search, Web 2.0, Net Marketing, SEO/SEM, Affiliates, Domainers, Video, Multimedia : aka: Webmastery.” That’s a lot of words needed to describe a conference, but it’s fairly accurate, as Pubcon covers quite a wide range of topics. Which is one of the things I love about it.

The keynote that really stood out was by George Wright of Blendtec. I wasn’t all that familiar with the Blendtec ad campaign before the conference, but I still found George to be an excellent speaker who did a great job telling the story of a tiny company who increased their sales 700% all thanks to a marketing campaign started with $50.

Yesterday, our company purchased Mozy Pro to help us with our daily backups. We have a database file, a few gigabytes big, that’s important to have a daily backup of. Instead of backing it up to tape and worrying about bringing a tape home every day, Mozy automatically uploads the changes made to the file.*
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At my job, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our landing pages. Our main goal is not to sell something to someone when they arrive, but instead to interest them enough to sign up for our free mailing list. You’d think it would be easy to give something away for free, right?

 
Well, it’s not! People are very wary of giving their email addresses away, thanks to all those lovely princes of Nigeria who would like to send us money if we would be kind enough to send them a few hundred dollars first.