2016 has flown by with considerable speed as of late – it’s already near the end of March the beginning of April, and I haven’t published a single blog post…

“So, what’s up with you?”

I will admit it – much of the radio silence on my blog stems from my own complacency. My desk/work area had accumulated vast amounts of detritus, many of them being half-done projects that never reached completion and years of deprecated audio equipment that wasted a good 1/3 of my entire desktop area – not to mention plenty of dust. All of this resulted in a workspace that made typing for any extended period of time quite uncomfortable; even attempting to play computer games had the risk of me breaking something, or vice versa.

This school year has been going pretty well. I’ve left Electronics Engineering and have started Broadcast Systems Technology; it’s essentially a mix of basic electronics, IT, radio and audio/video equipment. With that sort of fresh start (and extra credits that allowed me to free up considerable amounts of time), I’ve begun to clean up my area – a process that started in January and only recently has progressed to a point where I could “re-format” my desk space to maximize its usability.

Now that I’ve finally cleaned up my workspace, I can finally type in comfort again. I have several draft posts in various stages of completion, and I want to be able to get them finished up and published sometime soon (of course, no hard deadlines are set as I likely wouldn’t meet them anyway).

Domains & Advertisement Monetization

Over the years that I’ve been running this blog, my viewership has increased to levels I would have never anticipated when I first started writing blog posts on here, and I’d like to thank all of my readers for that.

As of late, I’ve averaged around 10,000 views per month, with significant peaks now and then. Because I’m currently running on the WordPress with a non-Premium account, most of my pages have advertisements in them that I have no control over. I can pay a hefty fee to go Premium and remove the advertisements completely, but I would like to at least to be able to get something out of those advertisements.

After looking online about WordAds, I’ve found out that I would need to register a proper domain name for this blog, which makes total sense – why bother putting branding on a .wordpress.com subdomain? Because of this requirement, I need to register my own domain… but what should I choose?

The whole issue of picking a domain for registration was one reason that I’ve been putting it off for so long. I could go with a domain with my name on it (literally!) in a similar vein as Gough Lui’s blog (disclaimer: I have absolutely no affiliation with him; I’m simply using his domain as an example… but on that note, his content is definitely worth checking out!), or perhaps simply remove the .wordpress portion of my blog’s URL.

With that decision in mind, then comes the choice of whom to register with. WordPress has their own service that ties seamlessly with their blogging platform, but incurs a higher cost than other providers. Alternatively, I can choose a lower-cost provider, but then I would need to manually connect that domain with WordPress’ platform. Admittedly, I have little experience when it comes to Web hosting; it’s why I started my blog on WordPress in the first place, and also one of the largest factors in my reluctance to register a domain for it in the first place.

Voice Your Opinion

Either way, domain registration and advertisement controls are decisions that can be put aside until later. On that note, if I were to register a domain, what do you think would be a good choice? Leave your choice in the poll below!

-Jason