The Halo-Halo Blog: 2015.05

Design Guide

I enjoyed putting together this website for Mariefe and I. This is a quick guide to some of the features I added over the years to make it our own.

Home Sweet Home Page

Got a custom domain name? It turns out that you can also knock down a wall or two to make an addition to an existing home. This section explains how.

$The top of a house does not yet have a roof. It was removed and there are wooden beams spanning in the form of a triangle. When the frame is ready there will be flat boards that will cover over the frame. You will not see the frame when the roof is done. \\just in case, to explain, this photo is not of our home\\ The framework still supports it all once the last component completes the roof.$

Own It. Add it to Your Domain

Custom domain names are reserved through a name registrar. There is a annual fee to keep your chosen domain name so keep this in mind. Most registrars charge about 10 to 15 USD a year. The cost is less if you can pre-register for multiple years in advance.

What to look for: DNS Hosting. This will allow you to set up a forwarding order from the registrar's records to where your home site is now.

Types of Domain Names: This is a very broad topic, but have fun when you look. Up until early 2012, just the standard country codes and the stock .edu (only schools can have that one), .com, .net and .org endings were available. Now there are others such as: .villas, .directory, and others. These names with special extensions usually cost much more.

.com (commercial): is the most common, but may confuse your site with a commercial entity.
.org (organization): is my choice for general, non-profit or personal projects.
.net (network): used to be reserved for Internet Service Providers (ISP's) that maintain their own networks. Now it is a way of reserving a domain name that was already taken for com and org.
.info (information): a nice secret selection. Inexpensive if you reserve for multiple years. Once the initial contract is complete, the annual lease on this name is the same as the above three.

Married couples may appreciate our own choice of domain name: mariefeandrich.com.

The use of a subdomain just adds another part to the "top level domain" (TLD). With a DNS record, you can use it just like it is its own unique domain name. The subdomain can point to a different resource so you can organize disparate resources under something called a "canonical" naming structure.

apple.mariefeandrich.com
atrium.home.mariefeandrich.com
veranda.home.mariefeandrich.com
... and so on. (These are just good ideas I've thought up!)

A Zone Record gives instructions to the internet on how to forward and route requests made from users and systems. Requests for a website or blog sent to a specific domain name uses a zone record to identify the actual location on the network. A custom domain name is really just an alias for handling these requests.

Adding a custom domain name through a CNAME

There are many registrars available. If you search for DNS Zone Hosts, you will also find they are able to register a domain name for you. By using the latter, you can be sure to have both features needed to complete this design task.

The example here is for cloudns.net. If you need a free domain, they offer extensions to their brand name. I am showing my project, "Up Close Maui" whose address is: aloha.upclosemaui.cloudns.us (.us is a location based Top Level Domain extension for the United States) I also have a blog hosted on Blogger identified by this name.

Most blog hosting companies usually have documentation on how to make a custom domain setting compatible with their service. This is what you need:

Make a DNS Record with these settings for Blogger:

Type = CNAME, Value = orange..net, Target = ghs.google.com

Google has their own domain name registry (Google Domains), I am using a different registrar to demonstrate that setting up a subdomain using either registry really can accomplish the same thing when compared to one another.

The domain name customization completed looks like below when requested from a browser. The default domain I chose when setting up the blog also still works and forwards to the same location. (Old links still will work).

Tah dah!

Pin Up Modeling

Memories from some generations are of the calendar models and their poses hanging on the wall in the garage. Pinterest is a break from the original thought of the "pinup". Pinboards are places where images of many sources are shared and organized in personal collections.