So I’ve decided to take some of my new found spare time and embark on an experiment. You can see the start of it at cygwin.rafaelhart.com (UPDATE: now offline).

Cygwin?

Unless you work in IT, or some fields of scientific academia you probably won’t know about cygwin, which is perfectly okay, since it’s absolute nerd stuff, and I love it. It’s a set of utilities that allow you to run a relatively complete linux shell environment on a windows computer.

So the experiment is some software I’ve never heard of?

Well… no. All the sites I’ve worked on professionally have all been relatively well established, and by the time I’ve become involved in promoting, it already ranks pretty well, and the analytics don’t really tell you much about how the initial userbase was acquired. Almost everyone I know has had a website at some stage, either a blog, professional site, author page, etc, so this is something that interests me.

I’ve deliberately used a subdomain - cygwin.rafaelhart.com, rather than a proper domain name, because I want to start the site out with no optimization to bringing up the search engine rankings, and see what the effect is as I add them.

More to come. The first few pieces of content are on the site - I’m not using this to practice copywriting, so it’s pretty much just groups of instructions and configuration files at the moment.

So far…

My main insights so far is that it is not at all easy to push your page up on Google’s ranking, even if you follow their advice. Social media seems to help when it comes to improving your ranking, and there are a great set of tools available at feedthebot.