Findability

Should you buy a domain name?

Probably, yeah. If you’re happy with your github id, then maybe not. But otherwise, you have $10 and an hour or two to figure this out, so why not?

Setting up a domain name

There’s a lot about domain names that you don’t really have to understand. But the short story is: a domain name is an easy-to-remember shorthand that points to a specific IP address, and that domain name + IP address has to be kept track of by the Internet.

My recommendation is to buy the domain name / registration via some company (I’ve used namecheap for a while).

Then follow the steps in an online tutorial, like:

• this one
• or this one
• or this one (which is really the worst)

This gets kinda scary, if I’m honest. There are almost certainly steps you won’t understand, and it can take a while for the Internet to update the domain + IP mapping – and during that time it can seem like you broke your whole page. But it basically works, and once it’s in place you don’t have to worry anymore.

Making pages findable

Well, first buy a domain name.

After that, a few tips:

• Give your page a relevant title
• Make sure your content is up-to-date
• Link to your page from other pages (GitHub; Google Scholar; CUMC, if you can)

Maybe use google analytics?

This doesn’t have to do with findability, but it’s maybe helpful – google analytics can provide insight into how much traffic you get, where people go, etc.

This tutorial helps.

I set this up for p8105.com recently. After creating an analytics account, the steps were to

• copy the necessary code into header.html
• modify the _site.yml to include that in the header for every page

There’s more about header.html in HTML and CSS.