Changes bring Google Exposure

I don’t know how many people have noticed but I am slowly working my way over to a new website design. The purpose of this is not to make the site look better than it did before, but rather to move the site to free services on the internet. This will allow me to shut down the computer I have had running constantly for the last 6 years tucked away in a corner of my house. This will hopefully allow me to save a little electricity but really moving it of site has the bonus of not needing maintenance. Or rather I no longer need to spend time trouble shooting it. The Gallery software is a service, the blog is a service, and actually the way I have the new site laid out leverages free online services. Therefore if there is a problem it is someone else’s problem to fix. This is nice as for more than six months I was unable to upload new photos to the old site. Other times it was hard to keep the blog software running. With all of the changes in my life since I graduated I really don’t have the time to dedicate to keeping the software/hardware up to host my own sites anymore. So I am moving into the public domain.

The first step was finding sites that would allow me to customize the look and use my own domain names - for free if possible. I almost accomplished this feet. Using Google’s Blogger site I can create many pages and direct masked URLs to them. Hence the new http://www.mattglaeser.org, http://Blog.mattglaeser.org, and http://wedding.mattglaeser.org are set up as on Blogger. Two are static pages while one I routinely add content too. The link http://pics.mattglaeser.org will direct you to a site but the URL becomes un-masked to the service I was using. It seemed silly to spend another $60/yr just to have the name be perfect, the links work and the URL will let you navigate fine. The second step was trying to get them to look and work together seamlessly. I was also able to use the same template for all of these sites. That was nice. Unfortunately the limited options make it pretty plane and boring, but it works. Really for the use free services, I can give up some style. The third step was just setting up the naming services to point to the various service providers. Lucky for my I have a free service for that because I was one of the first people to sign up for dyndns.org and so I have a lifetime account that takes care of my DNS needs. So wa-la my new site was born. It does lack the “links”, “about”, and “games” section of the old site, but those were really space fillers. I may still bring back the games.

So an interesting side effect of being on public hosted sites is that these sites are indexed. Due to this fact I have now created an actual on-line presence on search engines such as Google. In fact my blog/website is now the number 1 hit if you type in Matt Glaeser and search: http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=Matt+Glaeser&btnG=Google+Search
The old site never ended up in the public domain because there were no links to it and as it was a private web server it was not indexed on search sites. So there was no visibility to the site. To access it you literally had to know the website address or randomly type or enter www.mattglaeser.org to access the site. Now if you search for my name on Google, Yahoo, and even MSN my site shows up in the ranked listings. So as my photo gallery is part of the listed site I have locked down the family sections and I am considering doing the same for the rest of it should anyone complain that their photo may be online. I really don’t think this is a problem as none of the photos have names, addresses, or other personal information but if asked I can lock it down. But never having much exposure on Google before I thought it was interesting that I now am at times the number 1 result.