iwantmyname Blog

Wellington (NZ), remote OK, Content Marketer (full-time) at iwantmyname

You love to write. Your content would appear on the iwantmyname blog, guest articles on other sites, marketing copy, emails, or our FAQ. You're a true storyteller and inspire others to be awesome at what they do.

iwantmyname is a small international start-up (there's 6 of us at present) where creativity, transparency and happiness are the company's core values. Our team is a bunch of geeks who love building the most awesomest domain management service on Earth. We are frequently involved with local user groups, conferences/events and have a large following in the developer and design community globally.

Full details: https://iwantmyname.com/jobs/content-marketer

We have a lot of ex-pats working in NZ (including my fellow co-founders at iWantMyName).

http://iwantmyname.com

You need to make a trip down here and get involved in the tech and business networking scene and meet some people. The start-up scene is smaller and more fragmented than in the Valley. You just have to get out and network.

I would also recommend reaching out to established companies to begin with. Most "start-ups" here are not venture funded, whereas larger firms are more likely to be seeking talent.

UP is an excellent tech community that runs some cool networking events. Also, sign up for the New Zealand StartupDigest.

http://up.org.nz/
http://startupdigest.com/

Namecheap is a decent registrar, and I'm glad to see they support a free and open internet.

But if you want a good registrar:

[1] https://iwantmyname.com

[2] http://www.gandi.net

iwantmyname has a refreshingly clean interface and absolutely no frills. Register a domain (tons of TLDs), set DNS. Done.

gandi claims it's a "no bullshit" registrar. More features, like auto-setup of vanity nameservers, but less focused on domains.

Both better than all the alternatives. You pay ~$5/year extra for the lack of features (how ironic), but it's well worth it. No intrusive interstitial ads, no sad excuses for DNS managers, no cluttered control panels, and no constant upsell attempts.

Cole with Brace here (http://brace.io). We recommend redirecting the apex domain to a "www" subdomain. Note that even using apex CNAME records (Alias records) are still a new idea, and depending on the implementation may reduce reliability or performance. (https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2014/01/why-alias-type-records-break-the-internet.html)

Here are a few resources from our blog that explain the www redirect approach:

- http://blog.brace.io/2014/01/17/cnames-aliases/#cnameconfig

- http://blog.brace.io/2014/01/19/custom-domains-godaddy/ (step 3)

(edited: added resources)

Linode, Nginx, Jekyll, Git deployment using Gitolite.

Workflow to get a static site online:

git clone pr0d:www/skeleton-jekyll
cd skeleton-jekyll/jekylldocs
[... add/edit files here ...]
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit."
git remote add example pr0d:www/example.com
git push example master

At this point a hook builds the pages and sets up nginx using a template config (in the same repo), a few seconds later the site is live. Quick, easy, and can be done on any machine with Git and a text editor.

As for domains, I love http://iwantmyname.com

Hi,
I've made a really simple python script to do this. It's far from complete but you can use it as a sample to start something with your students (http://veed.fr/gugodoc/)
Of course, if you need more "power" , your best bet is to choose a more professional solution ;-) I hope you will find something that fits your needs here :

http://iwantmyname.com/blog/2011/02/list-static-website-generators.html

Regards