Site History
My first site was created in HTML in Word and hosted by FortuneCity. I then hosted this in the space provided by my ISP at the time. I recently found the FortuneCity site was still there after some ten years of inactivity. (Update: As you may know, FortuneCity has now been discontinued. I'll miss it, if only for nostalgic reasons. Sniff.)
A few years ago, I created a site here, at Office Live. This service did not offer the flexibility I wanted, but I kept it because the price is right (free), including the domain. It didn't have much more than the main page, and I had planned to rewrite the site myself in html and JavaScript.
Last year, I started working on a total rewrite. But I found that they have now added additional flexibility with their "advanced design features". The page editor is still fairly basic, but you can enable "advanced design" features that give more functionality. While you still can't create your own entire page, you have to use the designer for the layout and insert code into frames, it does allow basic html.
That means that you have two choices for headers; either you can use the cheesy headers they offer, or you can create a "custom header" with the advanced features and get access to the style sheets. It's still tied to the frame ("zone") its in, and zone's can't (currently) be added or rearranged, but it's better than it had been. And your new "header" does not span the entire width of the page unless you turn off the navigation bar, but it is doable, with a little work.
They do allow using your own html from scratch, but it's an all-or-nothing decision. If you stick with the provided designer, they offer moderate reporting tools. I'd rather be able to add some from-scratch pages to the predesigned ones, but hey, it's free web hosting.
This service offers web hosting and domain registration, free for the first year. (It used to be completely free for Basics, but now it's only for the first year.) Oh, and Microsoft will also try to upsell you, but that's what you get with free.
I've moved my blog,
Random Thoughts, to Blogger. I tried Microsoft's service, but it doesn't offer the customization options Blogger does. While you can actually have a blog that looks like it's on your own server, it actually redirects to the other site if you so much as want to see the comments, so I just went to Blogger for the whole thing. And for several parallel blogs, including
Random Political Thoughts. Obviously that one's political in nature - you've been warned.
Effective January 2010, the hosting fee is $15 a year for a custom domain, like I have. Obviously I'm keeping it (you can still read this, can't you?), because that's a decent cost for registration, hosting and email with web mail. Especially since they get zero advertising dollars off of me, since they let me even take off the "Hosted my Microsoft Office Live" button. The typical low-end hosting is $3.50/month, or $40/year. I prefer $15.
In January 2010, I rearranged the site and created a new main page. The focus is a little more job-search-friendly than before. The more personal content has been moved to a sub-page
here.