Get an online presence

Create yourself a blog.  There is no reason you shouldn’t create one.  There is a lifetime worth of reasons to create one.

The biggest reason for creating a blog is simple, you get found.  If you are looking for a job in IT, I will put money on your name going into Google before that interview.  It has happened to me and everyone I know.  Especially if you are going in the summer of code programme.  What will they find?

Well in my case they don’t find much.  It seems my name is too common, or some semi-famous people have it.  Anyway, point is if they find bad stuff like a publicly viewable Facebook or Bebo page, it will be embarrassing.  You should control what they see and make a good pre-first impression.  Create a blog, write about anything you learn at Uni.  Use it as on online CV.  WordPress is a good tool to start with, it isn’t just a blogging tool.  Many quick websites have been created with it.  This blog is on wordpress, it is very simple to setup.

Where to put it? Well I run a VPS and host many sites on the one box.  It costs me about $60 a month and then the domains are around $30 a year.  You could get a website hosted for you with ftp access but they are limiting.  There are two points to this blog you are about to create, one an online presence, and two experience setting it all up.  The second of which I think will help you the most in your career.  Can’t afford $15 a week on a Virtual Server?  I don’t blame you, I raised this issue about it.  Get together with a bunch of your mates (pick at least one with a credit card) and sort yourselves out a automatic payment system.  Split the cost between yourselves, you will have plenty of bandwidth and space for all of you (probably up to 30 people if not more).  Your first website is going to be very little traffic, there is no much you can do about it.  You will slowly learn how to bring traffic and get Google’s love but there is a lot of computing power for $60 and it can easily go around the lot of you.

So, share the cost and double the enjoyment.  With more of you incharge of the server the quicker you will solve and fix problems on it.  There is a lot of optomisation tricks you can do once you have everything setup and running to increase your page loads and get more traffic to your site! (Faster your page loads the more love Google will bring, tip 1).

Got your bunch of friends? head over to rimuhosting.com (I don’t get paid for refering you, I just use em and I wouldn’t recomend the last VPS host I had openhost.co.nz, they didn’t keep the OS’s they offered upto date and as such lost me as a customer.)  Get a MiroVPS1 or 2, I’m on a 2 plan at the moment.  The 400mb of ram comes in handy when you want to host Rails apps.  You probably don’t need it and could stick to 160mb for now (though if you can afford it, go up to the 400mb).  I will create a post on my wetware blog about how to setup wordpress, get into all the gory details.