MacGregorSailors.com

I'm interested in learning, from anyone who has one, about setting up a personal website for (sailing) info, stories, pics. What are costs, special considerations, etc...?

(Note to Moderator: I chose this category over Front Room for more visibility) - "sailing" mentioned 3X for relevancy!

!	kmclemore:
	That's fine. It will be preserved here, too, whereas the Front Room entries get purged over time.

NP

~Rich

You only mentioned sailing 2X, not 3X, but the post is still relevant

Ray

Check again - sailing appears 3 times!
I'd have expected KHE to say 2X!

Your right

My attorney always tells me to double check the small print

Ray

I have my site - www.mildredrose.com Pretty basic site at this point.

I host on yahoo - cheap ($10/mo), reliable, halfway decent tools for an amature. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/ - you get a domain, unlimited space and bandwith, tools, database, lots of stuff. I have some experience with godaddy, but did not like their tools.

K9Kampers wrote:I'm interested in learning, from anyone who has one, about setting up a personal website for (sailing) info, stories, pics. What are costs, special considerations, etc...?

What about using one of the free blog site. I'm not sure if it's ok to promote any paticular one but a couple of my son's use Blogspot.com.

http://sailingsuperior.blogspot.com/ is one of them.

Wally

WordPress is a simple, easy way to make a website for stories and comments. Although its considered 'blog' software, I use it to promote my unpublished novel, "The Guantanamo Solution". No web coding is required, just write text, then cut & paste from Word or whatever. WordPress supports text, pictures, sound clips and video. It is extremely easy to use.

I have pages with sample chapters, author bio, a description of my book, and even a sailing story on the site. Including the domain name, it costs about $30 a year. I think that you can set up a free blog at Wordpress's site.

You can see my WordPress blog here:

http://theguantanamosolution.com/

If there are any writers agents, editors or publishers out there in Mac land, let’s do lunch!

Of course, Youtube is a great way to share videos. Most of my vids are about my MacX or trips that we have enjoyed on the boat.

You can see my Youtube videos here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/markdartist

Hope that helps…

try Google Sites. Free. I use it for my family website and I also use it for posting pictures here on this forum. I can get as many websites as I wish all for free, all accessed in one place with one logon at Google. See an example website in my post on bottom paint recently.

sailing examples -

Sailing

Sailing Princeton

Shaker Sailing

Washington Yacht Club

Oxley Yacht Club

Central Sailing

Model Boats

I heard a lot of good things about this site:
http://www.squarespace.com/tour/
$8 per month
When I go to set up one this is where I am going to start..

Years ago I used Netfirms. They were free. Not any longer. When I sold the Mac I ceased maintaining my site. Imagine my surpise when inspired by this post, I looked and it is still there. Wow. And still free. Wowier! I guess I got grandfathered in.

http://thefamilybusinessinc.netfirms.com/

Used to be everyone had a free option. I guess they expect this whole internet thing to kinda catch on as nearly all the old free internet site companies are now pay to play.

Another alternative, or......"another way to scale the fish":

I use MS WORD/PUBLISHER/POWERPOINT to generate the material for the site. Apps that came with my PC. Essentially free.

I host it by using "dropbox.com", an online storage site which is free for the 1st two gig. You can share data from a "Public Folder", so I figured I'd use it as a web site for LAIKA. After I created the site locally, tested it, all I did then was place the data in the "sharing" folder and use the sharing link as the URL. BTW, when you join "DropBox" they have instructions how to do that.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2887041/index.htm

Granted it's not using a personal domain name for the URL...but it's absolutley free. And I can store other files,which are NOT public, for backup there as well, which I can access them from home, work, wherever I have web access. Yes, it's secure.

"Sub" Ed

PS, Regardless of how you accomplish the goal, don't forget to have the link added to the resources here!

Sub Ed,
Great site. Just one comment from your cover page. Could your boat have been made in Sept 2002 instead of January? The 4th to last digit in the HIN should be a letter A thru L signifying Jan thru Dec. Could your 1 be the letter "I"?

(A geeky and anal comment, I know,,,, sorry... )

Most ISP's provide free web space as part of their package. For instance, my ISP is Comcast, and they provide plenty of web space where I host http://www.ddunn.org my boating and other stuff site. My dad uses Earthlink as his ISP where he hosts http://www.bobdunnartist.com using their free space.

Just register your domain, I'd suggest GoDaddy as they are one of the cheapest out there for this. Skip all their offers to provide hosting services. Use their URL redirecting functionality to send people to your content stored on your free ISP space.

Most providers also offer tools for creating basic web pages. These might work for you, but I prefer to use a more powerful web page editor and just use a simple FTP client to upload the pages to the web space. It all really depends on your needs and your creative process. I've got some sites I do using a WYSIWYG editor (An older version of FrontPage that I like) and some that I code in pure HTML using a souped up text editor (EmEditor).

I'd agree with Duane, check your ISP for personal space if you want very simple. $10/month is not cheap for a personal web space. I'm paying half that. Plus the free domain name is not always a bargain as the host owns the domain name not you. Just try and take it to another host and see how far you get. best to buy the name yourself and then get the server space from someone else. Some of the free spaces offer extras like html editors and wysiwyg ( web editors) they may or may not offer things like Fantisco which is a collection of web add ons like blog , email software or photo albums.