Tailoring a domain with free and reliable tools

In this post, I’ll discuss about how to tailor free reliable tools for your domain.

Buy a domain from any service provider who provides DNS service also.. Some service providers charge excess to the actual domain cost. If DNS service is not free, buy it and make sure you can create at least 50 records.

This post doesn’t cover how to setup everything using Google Apps or Live Domains or Blogger. But I’ll list out the options for each service.

As a brief list out, for using any one of the following features, just go through the steps provided by provider and it won’t take more time than 1 min to setup DNS record and setup your mail account. Assuming you’ve own a domain already.

 

Creating Home Page:

          The first step for any domain is creating a home page. The available options for free (if the domain provider doesn’t gave you any default home page)

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Google sites	Ease of design Configurable themes Professional site look Simple integration with Google analytics and Google webmasters Support to include Google gadgets Integrated sitemap Support to directly display Google docs on page Mapping site to a sub domain under main domain Integrated search engine Ability to create unlimited sub domains using Domain mapping feature	No support to Javascript Footer ads from google	9/10
Google Pages	Simple look Easier maintenance Traditional single content web pages	Google stopped developing Google pages and focusing on Google sites	6/10
Live Office	Professional designs Simple footer ads from Microsoft Integrated sitemap ASP.net pages Integrated search engine	Not available for all local domains	9/10

E Mail Service:

                  Who don’t want email for their domain. Every one wants…. Well, there are two options for free.

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Google Mail	It’s Gmail! Contact sharing with in entire domain E mail up loader software from Google allows you to upload entire your outlook contents to E mail.	No support for folders. Closed membership, admin has to invite	10/10
Hotmail	It’s hotmail Availability of open membership option	No integration of IM (Microsoft release they will be releasing new version soon)	8/10

Blogging:

                 After, home page and email the next look is for blogs.

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Blogger	It’s just blog spot Excellent maintenance of post structure Any user can have their own blog as a sub domain	Admin has to create DNS records for each user’s blog. Not automated process	9/10
Live Spaces	It’s Live spaces	Only one blog can be created, but address bar won’t retain the domain path once page opened	7/10

IM:

                 Instant messaging service although not required for a domain with less users, it is very good feature for schools and enterprises.

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Google Talk	It is Google talk All Gmail powered users can be added as buddies Online storage of conversations Easy to use	No rich text support for chatting No webcam support	9/10
MS Messenger	It’s Microsoft messenger Complete rich text support	No online storage of conversations	7/10

Calendar:

               Google, is winning this race comfortably based on fact that Microsoft has no calendar service for domains.

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Google Calendar	It’s Google calendar Integration with Google mail for domains		8/10

Documents:

                 Both Microsoft and Google are competing in this area.

Service Provider	Pros	Cons	My Rating
Google Docs	It’s Google docs Open document format support Created can be documents can be placed in Google sites with out copy and pasting content, thus preserving format. Support for PDF files too	No support for MS Office 2007	8/10
Office Live	It’s web based version of MS office Integration with MS Office 2007 desktop version	No support for PDF files to upload in to office live	9/10

Switching to Miriyala.in

This post is not only intended for users of www.miriyala.in but also applicable for users of the domains supported by Google Apps

Changing and Managing your Email address:
                 This is the biggest challenge for anyone, changing the email address to  <Email>@miriyala.in. I will list out simple procedure for this.

• Set forward email address in your existing email account on standard sites like Gmail, Yahoo etc.,
• If your existing site doesn’t support mail forwarding, setup POP3 service in Miriyala.in mail settings. For any clarification on setting POP3,  contact your Email service provider.
• Importing contacts, save all your contacts to CSV file using Export feature provided by almost every email provider. Use that CSV file to import contacts.
• Start using your <Email>@miriyala.in for future subscriptions.
• Reply to the mails from Miriyala.in domain instead of replying from existing mail accounts. Which will make your friends know your new mail ID.
• The mails can be checked from your GPRS enabled mobile phone too. Each page in www.miriyala.in has WAP version and hence there is no need to enter a different address for mobile phones.

Switching IM:  
                   This is applicable for only Google talk users. Other IMs are not supported at this time.

• All Gmail contacts can be added in IM service for miriyala.in as it is based on Google talk. This is little bit painful but advantageous in some cases.
• Painful because each GTalk contact shall be added again
• Advantageous because, it prevents Orkut contacts to be added to IM.

Maintaining sub domain: 
                   User is responsible for maintaining their sub domain with use of Google sites. However to setup a sub domain, user shall contact admin of the domain.

Maintaining Blog:
                   Once again user is solo responsible for maintaining blog. We suggest using blogspot.com instead of Wordpress.com. Why we suggest blogspot.com for this is, simply because it supports free custom domain forwarding option. 
To setup  blog, user shall contact admin of domain.

 

For any additional queries, contact admin.

The Technology used behind www.miriyala.in

Buying Domain:
                       Our domain provider is http://mitsu.in, We just bought the domain with out the file hosting service. They charged ~4USD per year.

Setting up Domain services:
                      The basic services required for any website are Email

http://blogspot.com Tags: Google Apps, Domain Technology

and file hosting. But to get those services from our domain provider, we need to pay more than 40USD per year. To keep the price low and the services effective, we opted for Google Apps. For a review of Google Apps, visit the review written on Pradeep’s Blog. 

Why Google Apps?
                      Many of the existing users use Google services extensively and to maintain seamless feeling of switching to use our services, we opted for Google Apps. Also, it requires less interaction to maintain. Less complex and more reliable service. 

For blogging: 
                     Providing blogging support is being challenge from many days, because Google Apps doesn’t provide any blogging support. Hence we opted a third provider, the famous blogger. In fact the same can be done with http://wordpress.com but which will cost more 10$/year.

For Sub domains:

                    For all users, we can provide sub domains with help of domain mapping feature from Google Sites for Google Apps.

Challenges We’re facing: 
                     Providing a Signup form for users. This feature is available from Microsoft Live. However we will not be moving to Microsoft Live. 
                      Automatic creation of blog address and sub domains. These creation can only be done by admin at this moment. Hence for creating blog/sub domain one has to use the channel through interaction with admin. Hence it will consume some time.
                      http://miriyala.in will return in a page not found error, while http://www.miriyala.in can only open the home page

For Users

For all the users of www.miriyala.in, here is the useful information.

The home page, www.miriyala.in
To check your mail, http://mail.miriyala.in
To upload documents and maintains, http://docs.miriyala.in
To use online calendar http://calendar.miriyala.in
To visit the start page (also can be called as iMiriyala) http://start.miriyala.in
To create your own site under the domain, visit http://sites.miriyala.in 

To visit the old home page, http://www2.miriyala.in 

Member pages created till now

Mira	http://mira.miriyala.in
Arjun	http://arjun.miriyala.in
Dileep	http://dileep.miriyala.in

Blogs under the domain

Main Blog	http://blog.miriyala.in
Arjun’s	http://pradeepblog.miriyala.in

మొదటి లేఖ (The First Post)

Today, on sep 24, 2008 we are launching blog for www.miriyala.in, where we will be posting the updates, tips and tricks to the site.

For user accounts and interested in site administration, contact administrator by sending a email to admin@miriyala.in