Caught in the web

In the February 2010 issue of Website Magazine, Editor-in-Chief Peter Prestipino states that he owns 30 domain names. In an article titled “A Day in the Life of a Google Junkie” he reveals his googling habits throughout a typical day. There’s nothing startling in the article about his web cruising habits, considering they come from a person whose primary work is in the web industry. And my focus as I read it remained less on his point – that Google has infiltrated our lives in positive ways that are at once convenient, supportive, and entertaining – and more on the idea of one person managing 30 urls. My reaction to this number of urls being in the care of one person makes me think of how people respond when I say that my mother raised twelve children.

I found myself reflecting on me and my urls and the amount of attention they require. To put my thoughts in this post in context, I didn’t have any idea how to “get” a url three and a half years ago. But at that time a life change (health related) had me reinventing the work aspect of my life. I founded a business, Syntax and Style (url #1) and built a CMS site for it – my first site ever and a baptism by fire experience from which I learned how to assist others as they put their businesses into the web.

Urls #2 and #3 came about as spinoffs of my business. Again, thinking that my clients might need assistance with blogging, I decided to write one as a learning exercise. So, using the Google tool blogger I wrote SilverLining (url #2), through the four seasons of three years, about a pond near my home. I enhanced this site with a new passion, photography, which led to a photo gallery site (url #3) that I now have sitting dormant because I don’t have the time to maintain it. (My mother couldn’t do this with her children…) 

And though I was a pretty good writer, I decide I’d better practice if I were going to offer it as a skill through my business – so I wrote a book, which ultimately became Love’s Compass, which three years later is now published. It was a good writing exercise and it spawned the recently launched url #4,  Love’s Compass.

This blog, sublime days, is url #5.

I intend to reactivate my photography url in time – but with a different focus (pun intended) than my photography only.

I have recently joined facebook and I have an author’s site at Amazon – where I am also running an ad campaign for my book. Incidentally, I am still puzzled by the appearance of this blog on my author’s page at Amazon. I don’t know (and perhaps none of us wants to know) how Amazon found this blog and attached it to me in the author’s site.

What am I getting to? How does Peter Prestipino manage 30 urls?!  I’m sure that his magazine business occupies more of his life than my small business does of mine. And I can barely keep up with my four or five sites and the adjunct online presences they have resulted in.

Something’s gotta give in Peter’s life – and I hope it’s not his magazine because I like it!