OgFOMK ArTS Web History and Impressions

6. Aug. 2017

By Alex Nuttall - Bio

The word is out or in. OgFOMK ArTS is getting noticed. It definitely has to do with our emphasis on content and getting more contributions. Also the retro-publishing is helping too. Nothing worse than sitting on old content when the Universe has not imploded yet!

OgFOMK ArTS Traffic since January 1st 2017

We have been using Blogger tepidly since 2005. In the mean time we went full on with our own domain ogfomk.com which at first was hosted with Yahoo. With Yahoo we were legacy Geocities refugees. Yahoo at the time that they bought Geocities was a stellar company with customer service you could call on the phone and get results with and of course just good help. But that changed. 

When we went with Yahoo we started to pay $16 a month. in 2004. It didn't matter because we wer proud to have our own domain and we were learning the wondrous HTML thing. Of course our website looked like poo.

Around 2007 during a failed domain purchase OgFOMK.com and all of the fancy postings were wiped out. At the time Yahoo had created an automated system for purchasing domains and hosting. The problem was that they did not allow one person to have multiple domains so we ended up buying another domain and wiping our previous work away with the hosting. We called Yahoo and customers service was no longer there. We went to GoDaddy instead.

At first GoDaddy was the place. It was so sexy and good. GoDaddy allowed Linux hosting! We could use SSH to link our computers to their virtual hosts. It was marvelous. We also were getting into the LaMP (Linux, MySQL and PHP) world of Wordpress. For once OgFOMK.com did not look like dung. But it was a lot of work. A lot.

We still were playing on the web. We were posting. But we were not generating any following. We were still learning. We also were spending less on service $11 a month.  This was nice. Unfortunately GoDaddy was getting too big for its pants. GoDaddy now had more competition. GoDaddy was stepping up their game. We followed along. We decided to purchase 3 years of hosting and domain renewal for $350. Big purchase for us. For GoDaddy it was a good haul.  We were now paying $10 a month with the renewal already built into the cost.

OgFOMK ArTS Logo

Around November 2016 we started paying attention to HTTPS. It had been something we totally missed on the technology front. Wikipedia had moved to 100% HTTPS. This was the ability to allow readers a secure end to end encrypted transmission from host to client and vise versa. Why was this important? All of your web traffic with HTTP is in plain text! That means passwords and content is sent back and forth in an environment where 3rd parties can gather information about you. With HTTPS this is eliminated. 

So we wanted that too! But we were broke. We had a fancy house and a pool without water. We checked into the SSL certificates needed for HTTPS. We knew how to make our own but the key (literally) has to be recognized by a trusted authority. Also Google search was placing a high priority on those sites that used HTTPS.  We called GoDaddy to see if we could get some help. We didn't get it unless we wanted to spend more money. There also was the matter of the certificate may not work with our existing Wordpress. We were fucked. Or we wanted to get un-fucked.

Trying to learn how to hack all of this just became more work. We were no longer creating content. We were spinning our wheels in the mud. One day we went creeping through the old  Blogger site ogfomk.blogger.com .  We had initiated ads and added some content mirroring of ogfomk.com . We had also tried this with Tumbler. 

Proudly American and Anarchistic

We made a shocking discovery! Blogger had actually paid us $0.20!  We had 20 cents in our Google Add Sense account. It had taken us 2 years to even get the Add Sense account because we had no content. So slowly we just added stuff.  This was a new revelation. That was December of 2016.

One day we noticed, again that ogfomk.com was down. Again it was down.  We called GoDaddy. This was two months ago. DNS was not working for two days. So anyone looking for us would not find anything at all. Twitter, Facebook, Google, and 20 other services that pointed to ogfomk.com were sending people no where. We fired GoDaddy. We losts $350 dollars and two more years of paid service. No refund. Ha ha!

Google domains was called. We just decided to get Google domains to point ogfomk.com to ogfomk.blogger.com. It was easy. It was $12 a year. We had already paid for 2 years of the ogfomk.com so we were paid until 2021!  Our emails we conveniently pointed to existing gmail accounts. It was also a move where ogfomk.com pointed to https://ogfomk.blogger.com . We didn't have to pay for anything extra. We had SSH! Woo hoo!

Google was the way to go.  Google has a vested interest in selling ads. So they have a vested interest in your content running. We haven't been happier. With a little work we have been able to have a good looking website. We have been able to earn some extra money. So far we are at $0.75! We also are attracting contributors and viewers.

Moving forward now we have a vehicle that is easy to run and looks great. Hopefully we will atract even more viewers and contributors. Thank you for being one of them.

We are moving forward