I had an email today from a good friend, asking for recommendations about setting up a personal domain name. I get asked this quite a lot, so I thought I’d Blog the answer for future. You know it makes sense.

Right, if you’re simply after a domain name for your email – i.e. having a nice personal email address such as joe.bloggs@artiss.co.uk – then this is easy. I use 1&1 who can supply them for £2.99 for 2 years. This gives you the domain name, but no email facility. You’ll need to keep your existing email but use the 1&1 Control Panel to divert your new domain name to your existing email address.

That means if you move ISP and therefore ISP-based email address, then you simply change the forwarding, and your friends don’t need to know anything different – they still use your personal email address.

Not only that but you can set up different diversions for different email addresses.

The down-side to this is that when you reply from most email account it will use your “proper” email address as the “from”. In other words, if you’re using an ISP supplied email address, it will use that when you reply. Google Mail, which I highly recommend, isn’t ISP dependant and will allow you to reply to emails using your personal email addresses.

Now, that’s the email covered. What if you want a domain name for a website as well? Well, the 1&1 offering will allow you to divert the matching website address to anywhere else. So again, you can divert, say, artiss.co.uk, to that free space given to you by your ISP. But, again, there’s a downside. The forwarding works by creating a frame with your website inside it. That means the URL doesn’t change as you move around pages, and makes providing specific links to page rather difficult. Now there is a way around this by pointing the “name servers” directly to the web space. However, this is dependant on both your ISP and domain name provider allowing this. It’s also a bit of a technical jungle at times.

So, if you want a website and want it to look all cool, froody and sophisticated, I’d suggest you look at getting a host – i.e. a company that can provide the domain name and webspace and link them together automatically. The additional upside of this is that they’re likely to provide a better quality service than the free offerings from your ISP.

Streamline.net provide a “power” option for £47.98 for 2 years. This includes your domain name, email forwarding, 750MB of space and even PHP & MySQL if that’s your bag.

UPDATE: A Blog reader has kindly pointed me to Microsoft Office Live. They provide a FREE small business package which includes email, 500MB of space and a domain name. It looks as if the email is their own mail service and you may have to use their own designer to create the website rather than upload your own. Plus I suspect it won’t allow PHP, MySQL, etc. So limitations you should be aware of… BUT it’s free, so worthy of investigation.

Right. It gets technical now.

It seems my problems at work where my laptop takes an age to sign-on is due to it making a copy of your profile onto our LAN. For “roaming” purposes. Therefore the more you have in your profile folder, the longer it takes.

So I set about reducing this down. And in the process, I came across a number of useful workarounds and general tips.

As part of this (because IE puts its temporary files in your profile folder) I’ve created a “Temporary Files” folder on C:\ (both at home and at work) where I’m trying to get as many apps as possible to put their cache, temporary folders and general bog.

So far I’ve found that I can move IE Temp Files, Firefox Cache, OpenOffice Temporary Files and Java Temporary files. All in a single neat folder, out of the way.

Oh, the reason I’m doing this at home as well, is because it reduces the amount I’m regularly backing up, if I can remove the bog to a single folder out of the way.

Anyway, here are a couple of workarounds to problems that I came across too…

Move Firefox Disk Cache

• Type about:config into Firefox’s Address Bar and press Enter.
• Right click on the resultant screen and select the option to create a new string value.
• Name this entry browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
• The content should be the location of where you wish the cache to be located

And that’s it done.

Move a Firefox Profile

• Shut down Firefox
• Move the profile folder to the desired location. For example, on Windows XP, move the profile from C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default to D:\Stuff\MyProfile
• Open up profiles.ini in a text editor. The file is located in the application data folder for Firefox on Windows Vista, XP, 2000: %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\
• In profiles.ini, locate the entry for the profile you’ve just moved. Change the Path= line to the new location. If you are using a non-relative pathname, the direction of the slashes may be relevant (this is true for Windows XP)
• Change IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0
• Save profiles.ini and restart Firefox

Now my day-time job is not a particularly geeky one. It’s programming an 80′s Basic language on a text-based DOS system.

Never-the-less I’ve realised I’m doing quite well at making it look otherwise. The picture (taken on my Sony Ericsson K800i phone) shows my Dell Latitude D620 laptop (in a dock) to the left, connected to an external display, keyboard and mouse. Both monitors are in use so I can move between them. Pandora is running on the laptop screen (and that HAS to be a geek sign), Sennheiser headphones lying on the desktop.

Just sneaking out of the right hand side of the laptop you might be able to see the shiny blackness that is my own WD Passport (60GB). I use this for my own personal documents and files.

To the very right is the silver stand that my phone sits in. Thanks to some great software, I can operate, sync and modify the contents of my phone from my desktop. I can easily type out SMS messages and even operate the keyboard. Nice.

Unfortunately missing from the shot is my red and black cafetiere cup. Oh and the third monitor further to my left attached to a development server (my own personal IBM eServer x200). Under my desk is also a Dell Optiplex GX520 that I no longer use.