Me, a Domain Squatter?

Squatting in South Africa has always been a bit of a problem (still is) and you obviously also get squatters in the digital domain. People who buy domain names in the hopes of selling them to the big corporates for a pretty penny. Most times there are panels that you can approach to resolve the dispute over a domain name, but in some cases "first-come first-serve" rule is applied and you can only hope that you are the first.
Only two weeks into owning the blum.co.za domain I have been approached to sell it. I do not know to whom, but a hosting company in Munich has offered me $1 500 for the domain name. I suppose it is for hinge giant www.blum.com. In any event I have told them that I do not wish to sell it(for any less than $15 000) and I believe I have a legitimate claim on the domain since it is my name :)

Update: It has been a week since my ridiculous offer and no response. I must say I am glad to keep my domain, but I was warming to idea of making some quick cash :)

Community Overload

As you might have noticed I have recently started blogging and looking at all the other services people use to stay in touch. These are the community sites and services I currently have accounts for;

• FaceBook - massively popular community site, I am here
• Flickr - photography site, check my pics out here
• Twitter - micro blogging site, follow me here
• Blogger(of course) - you guessed it, you are already here:)
• Gmail - the best free email solution :)
• Skype - chat application that can make landline calls and send SMS messages, phone me here
• Zyb - site that allows you to back up your phone contacts and attempts to create a community based on that information, find me here
• Remember The Milk - site to manage todo lists and your calendar, looks to have a nice iPhone app as well
• TripIt - I am still playing around with this, apparently this site will manage your travel itinerary, I am here
• Digg - site to discover and share content from anywhere on the web, I am here
• delicious - social bookmarking service, I am here
• FriendFeed - site that aims to bring together all others to consolidate and sumarize them, find me here
• XBox.com - official XBox-360 site, find me here
• www.xbox-360.co.za - South African XBox-360 community site, their leaderboad can be found here
• www.xbox360achievements.org - site listing helpful hints for XBox 360 achievements
• iTunes - Apple's application to overcharge for music
• Mozy - site that allows you to back up your data to the web
• not to mention all the retail sites Amazon, eBay, Kalahari, Take2, ...

I hope they all have rock solid privacy policies :)

The Big Trip: Getting Ready

As some of you might know I am planning to go on a 6 to 9 month trip around the world. My lovely sister got me a great book for Christmas to get started. It is called "The Big Trip" and gives quite a few handy hints on what to look out for when planning a longer journey. Among the growing list of things I still need to plan are;

• VISAS
• Forex
• Vacinations
• Luggage
• Insurance
• First Aid Course + Kit
• Some Tickets
• Some Accomodation
• Basic Timelines
• ...last but not least where I want to go :)

To blog or not to blog....

I would never have guessed that blogging is so much work. Well it is not like I have gotten around to do any actual posting yet, but I am talking about the setup.

1. How do I make it looks good? What template do I choose? Do I have to make my own?
   Unfortunately I do not posess the greatest artistic ability, in fact my drawings have been likened to those made by those done by baby chimpanzees, the only difference being that you can identify what they have been drawing. So templates seemed like the best option. btemplates.com has one of the most comprehensive set I was able to find and some of them look truely astounding. I was looking for a template that looked clean and elegant and above all did not take 5 hours to load. I liked;
   
   
   • Grungy
   • Black Splat
   • Nitelife
   • and many more...
   
   But with all of them either images did not display properly or they took to long to load or they did not render properly and even with the template there was still a lot of manual setup work to get it going...so in the end I decided to go for a default template which I could replace when and where I found the time(most likely not for a while). Taking the engineering view of function above form.


2. Content, where does it all come from?
   There are tons of tools that will help you publish your content onto blogger and other similar sites. Most notible or clean looking is Windows Live Writer, but there are tons of applications for every platform. A list of a few can be found here. But as with all things there is still real work to be done.


3. Statistics and Services
   I have signed up with Google Analytics which is a free tool that can supply you with some pretty detailed statistics. And finally I added this blog to feedburner here.

That is about all I could manage, I still need to add some widgest, put up reading lists and blogs I enjoy so check in every now and again as things grow...

P.S. If I am missing anything vital/interesting in the setup of the blog, drop me a line or leave a comment. Thanks.