For some time, I’ve considered developing the vacant davezatz.com into a simple landing page directing folks to my various online haunts. But I never found the time or motivation. Enter: Card.ly.
This new web service offers pretty much what I was shooting for, currently supporting a few dozen web services and providing a number of visual themes. However, all free profiles are hosted on card.ly. For $3/month or $26/year, premium accounts come with additional perks – including custom domain hosting. Sort of. If you’re network savvy, take a look at the pic below to see card.ly’s forwarding hackery in action. Card.ly’s founder, Daniel Blake, suggests this will be improved/corrected in the future. However, my continued membership is more dependent on the continued flow of attractive themes, additional web service integration, and customization options.
And while we’re on this topic of web identities and outposts, I just registered OvercomingGravity.com as the possible future home of my occasional Posterous personal blog. Until Twitter gives me a way to host my entire history in a usable format.
Click to enlarge:
Overcoming Gravity is a great name for a site and I’m not even sure what it means. Card.ly seems like a good option for someone who wants something quick and easy and doesn’t already have a blog, but can’t you just add your site onto your hosting package and create a landing page yourself? Probably would take a bit more work, but I bet you could put something together in an hour.
Yah, I can host multiple sites in the same account where my blog is (MediaTemple) – I had three going for awhile. I just need to build whatever page I want for davezatz.com or have something like Card.ly build it and utilize the domain. And I did move my Posterous account to OvercomingGravity.com this afternoon, but it’s still mostly unused. Same deal – I could just install WordPress and host it myself if I wanted.
In one hour, I could write two shorter posts or one longer post. Or I could build my welcome mat (well, maybe two hours for that). If I can offload/outsource, I will. Card.ly’s just not there yet. But it’s better than nothing. Not sure how I feel about $3/mo in its current incarnation, tho. They’ve got 30 days before they lose me.
“Overcoming gravity” is a lyric from a Red Hot Chili Peppers song and it stuck with me. I’ve flip flopped a few times between that and “Superunknown” (Soundgarden) for my personal blog title.