“All the good domains are taken!” is one of the most common exclamations among new bloggers. They’re partly right. You have to be real creative when you register a .com or .net domain these days. Domains are taken for legitamate reasons most of the time, but millions of domains are in the control of “domainers.”

Domainers, for the uninformed, are people (or groups of people) that register large quantities of domains with the intent of reselling them for substantial sums of money. Have you run into a domain owned my a cybersquater (domainer)? Usually the page displayed is generic, and contains ads. Most of the time there’s also a link to make an offer to buy the domain. Yeah, it sucks that the domainers taking half of the good domains and not utilizing them, but they’re not about to stop anytime soon. They’re making hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars off the domains they sell.

So how can you get a good domain with all of this going on? You have three options: (more…)

We all know what business cards are. “TopicCard” is a word I came up with for something I’ve been making. Do you see the image to the right? It gives a brief description of RSS, and an URL to learn more. The URL, in this case, isn’t a page on my site, but a video. Of course, it could point to a blog post on my site if I wanted, which would arguably be better.

A TopicCard is basically a business card, but instead of telling people about your business (or website), it tells them about a topic. You don’t even have to pay a printing house for your cards. If you have Photoshop and a printer, you can easily make your own business cards.

A TopicCard should ideally include

• Your logo
• The URL to your site
• A header explaining what the card is about (i.e. “What is RSS?”)
• A short text blurb explaining the general idea of the topic
• An URL pointing to a resource that teaches more about the topic. This could be a post on your blog, a category page, another website, or virtually anything on the web.

I used TinyURL for the “What is RSS?” card, as it was the first time I tried something like this (try fitting http://www.videojug.com/film/rss-in-plain-english on a 2-inch-wide piece of cardstock!). If you don’t want to use TinyURL, you can use your own redirection system if you prefer. You can either write your own PHP/MySQL/mod_rewrite system for redirection, or install a pre-made redirection script like Shorty. Shorty works great when it’s installed in a directory like “go,” so your redirects look like www.you.com/go/here. (more…)

I’ve decided to call this technique “Content Mapping,” for want of a better term. What is Content Mapping? Here’s an example. The idea is that the colored blocks will help you visualize how your layout is structured. This has several applications. It’s useful for finding ways to improve your website, or for other things as well. Plus, it’s fun. (more…)