The first step to getting on the IndieWeb is to have your own domain.

This is an easy step for me because I’ve already got one, so I thought I’d explain how I got it.

Ruler

Years ago I registered my name as my domain.

I’m not a company, so I didn’t want .com, but there weren’t many options, and so to make me “Paul Tibbetts from the UK” I went with .co.uk.

Some time later .uk was made available and to make it fair to the .co.uk owners who wanted to drop the .co you had to also own the .co.uk version to register it, so for a while I owned both.

This was all before the newer extensions like .blog and .dev came out. When they did I considered changing but decided against it.

Registrar

I registered my domain with Heart Internet because that’s who we used at work and I didn’t have any kind of preference.

They don’t expose my personal data when you run a whois query on the domain so I haven’t found a reason to move away from them.

Renewals are £9.99 per year.

Management

For a while I managed the domain using the interface on Heart Internet but since then I’ve moved it to Cloudflare.

To do this I changed the nameservers that the domain uses from Heart Internet’s to Cloudflare’s.

Records

There aren’t that many records right now.

@

The apex domain, as in the bare one without any subdomains (https://paultibbetts.uk), points to a really small landing page I made for myself.

I’ll be redoing this soon so I won’t talk about it yet.

www

I don’t use the www subdomain.

I know there are people who think this is wrong but growing up sharing links with others the moment I discovered you could get rid of it I did and haven’t looked back.

Maybe one day I will revisit this.

micro

micro.paultibbetts.uk is powered by Micro.blog.

I could run my main domain with Micro.blog but I want to have a go at doing that myself.

I followed the Micro.blog guide to set up a custom domain and used a CNAME on my domain to point micro to https://paultibbetts.micro.blog.

Emails

Once upon a time I hosted my own email server.

The company I worked at, Sixth Story, had an email address iwanttowork @ sixthstory that I thought was clever, so I wanted hire @ paultibbetts for myself. Applying for jobs as a web developer I thought it would help me stand out.

Even after all the work though I still found myself using my regular Apple email address because I knew it was more stable, and less likely to get marked as spam, so when Apple announced you can use custom domains with iCloud mail I got rid of my email server and used Apple’s instead.

This means I have some MX and TXT records to allow that to work.

In review

I have always been jealous of others with better domains than me.

Difficult to spell

I have trouble getting people to spell my surname correctly.

I don’t blame them, there’s lots of Bs and Ts, and saying “technically there’s 3 Ts” isn’t helpful when they’re typing the double T towards the end.

Potential fix

Aral’s ar.al domain is much better than mine. It’s short and easy to spell.

Maybe I could find a short domain and set it up to redirect?

Time for another disappointing trip to IWantMyName to see all the good domains have been taken.

Did you mean the other one?

I share a name with someone way more famous than me.

It’s spelt a little different but search engines will assume you meant the other Paul.

Potential fix

There are a few ways I can improve my search engine rankings.

I’m going to try writing lots of content to go on my domain, hoping that does it.

I will not do what the other guy did.

dot UK

My .uk address works whilst I live here but it wouldn’t if I moved.

Potential fix

I don’t have any immediate plans to move abroad so I’m not too concerned with this.

If I ever did I can setup redirects.

Not a cool internet name

Jeremy Keith’s adactio.com domain regularly reminds me I’m not creative enough to come up with a cool internet name.

Potential fix

Maybe another decade of thinking about it will help.