Renew Your Domain Names
There isn’t much chance that your institution will stop using its .edu domain name, but sometimes we register special domains for a marketing campaign, admissions push or other purpose.
Often, after a campaign has completed, or your marketing materials move on to the next theme and message, those old domains are left lying around, often with residual value, search engine wise and brand recognition wise. Even though you might not be using them, it’s worth the $8 or whatever the cost is at a registrar like GoDaddy to keep them. Here’s an example.
A local cultural institution had used the same web address for years. Pretty much every tourism, educational, news and entertainment site linked to them, including my college. A year or two ago, their new marketing materials pointed people to a new domain, but they were smart and left the old one in place for all the legacy links floating around the interwebs.
Then they did the unthinkable. They didn’t renew that old domain. And guess what? It was grabbed up by someone else. I’ll give you a wild guess what kind of site grabbed it?
Yep. Porn.
On paper, it’s smart. That link has a ton of Google juice from sites with a lot authority in the eyes of Google - colleges, universities, newspapers and so on. It’s got instant page rank and existing search placements, especialy for terms like the institutions name.
In reality, it’s a pain because now I’ve got to go through and find all the links, and of course, many are on pages I don’t have access to. I’m not alone either - lots of other sites have to now go through their sites and make fixes.
The moral of the story - even if you are done with a domain name and a marketing push, renew that domain name. It’s cheap to do, is good for your institution, and saves your fellow web developers a bit of work.
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Google App Launcher for Mac
Google has created a new Mac app that makes managing and launching your app at Google App Engine much easier. It’s also bundled with the development IDE.
The Launcher is a true native Mac application. Installing the Google App Engine SDK, embedded in the Launcher, is a drag install. App Engine projects can be added to the Launcher with drag and drop. And your deployment password is saved in a Keychain (if you want).
I haven’t had time to even think about Python. Soon, I hope.
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My App Engine Invite Has Arrived
This morning, my invite to try out Google’s App Engine arrived. They must be rolling out the next batch of invites after the initial 10,000.
I don’t know thing one about Python, so it will be a good learning experience for me. I also don’t know what kind of app I should build. Any thoughts?
You can read more thoughts about App Engine here.
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