Social | Adam Welch . Co . Uk

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Building a Brand

Today is my 12th anniversary. I registered AdamWelch.Co.Uk on the 6th of February 2002. Nominet Listing

I don’t think I knew it at the time, but on that day I started building a brand. My digital footprint had come much earlier, I was lucky enough to get online at home in 1995. I took to the internet quickly – I could find out facts, publish my opinions and even talk to people across the globe. My first website went live within weeks of getting online. For my first few years online, I did this all through an alias, hidden behind a silly name.

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Welch2Be Storify

We were so pleased that so many of our friends and family got involved with our #Welch2Be social media experiment. It would have been even better if we hadn’t crashed the wifi at Monk Fryston Hall Hotel.
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Web Tech

Anyone who knows me should also know that I love technology. They should also know that I love the web. I created this website when I registered AdamWelch.Co.Uk on the 7th of February 2002. So the ten year milestone passed me with little celebration (as it did you I’m sure) a little over a year ago. In 2002 not a lot of people had personal domains, definitely no where near as many as those that do now.

With that in mind, I thought I’d document – for myself mainly – the history of the site, and explain in a little more detail how it all works now.

2002 – 2006 I used a few different hosts at the beginning of the website. Non of which were very good, but they were cheap, and very few people viewed the thing anyway. It first hosted a few html pages I hacked together from code I’d learnt, and a little later a nice php based gallery system for my photos (well ahead of facebook me you know).

However in January of 2005 I made the Cillit Bang Experiment which even today proves quite popular. If that had been released today, and proved to be as popular, it would have been considered as ‘going viral’. Back in 2005, it was just considered to be very popular (tens of thousands of hits within a couple of days). Unfortunately this success caused some issues for my webserver of the time, enough so I had to offload the images to my ISPs host (which thankfully had reasonably fast servers which didn’t have bandwidth limits). With the experiment still proving popular a year later, it became clear it was time for a new host.

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Social Wedding

After much thought and testing we’re happy to launch our very social wedding.

We’d like to get as much input from our family and friends before, during and after our big day as possible. So to that end we’ve created various pages, hashtags and social streams.

So if you are using social media to talk about our wedding, tag Welch2Be on Facebook and use the hashtag #Welch2Be on Twitter and Instagram. Hopefully we’ll be able to use a vine tag too before the day.

So like us on Facebook, tweet us a photo, or visit our wedding website to get involved. We’re dying to see what you post.

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Twittering, Revisitied

It’s been just over a month now since I started tweeting. I came out of discussions at work and thoughts I had about promoting my site. I didn’t know much about micro-blogging, and I felt my opinions were strong, but my knowledge too weak.

I think it’s fair to say I have immersed myself in the world of twitter enough now to give a more balanced view on the subject and how it has changed my digital life.

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Your very own URL shortening service

So I expanded on my Twitpic service in this post admw.tv/l. However people keep asking me in the street, Adam, how do you make those little web addresses on your site, and on twitter? Well let me tell you…
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Google+ comes to Apps

Yesterday the day finally came where google released their social network Google+ to apps users. Finally I can intregrate google plus into my google life… and you can too. Go to plus.google.com and sign up. You shouldn’t need an invite any more either.

Apps customers need to manage their domain, and click Organisation & Users, Services, and finally turn the app on. Read and agree to the terms and you’re ready to go! You will automatically generate a circle for all your apps users in plus too.

Google are working on a tool to allow people like me who have a G+ account using their gmail account to be migrated to their apps account. No idea when this will arrive though.

For those that don’t know, google plus is a Facebook / Twitter / Linkedin hybrid service. It is in my opinion the only platform able to topple the three rivals. Every part of it allows you to give granular permissions to different groups (circles) of people, it allows you to follow celebrities and only show your boss a limited amount of info.

More info on google+ for google apps is available on this google blog…

There is however just one issue. The Google+ iPhone / iPad / iPod app doesn’t like google apps accounts at the moment. It asks you to register with an invite. Mobile browsing works fine however.

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Twittering

I’ve been working really hard over the last few days on this site. If anyone has visited over the last few days, you won’t have noticed any difference, but work has been going on behind scenes.

I’ve started twittering to take advantage of some of the things I’ve developed on my new site. I’m quite proud of two things in particular.

1. I’ve bought another new domain; admw.eu is my new super short domain, I am using it to host my own twitter pics, just like twitpic or yfrog. The difference is that the copyright stays with me, as does the traffic. So if I end up taking an image that gets broadcast around the globe, I can make the money from it!

2. I’m using my domain adamw.eu (my next shortest domain) to create a url shortening service. Using the url shortening system yoURLs, I can make this posts URL to adamw.eu/i from adamwelch.co.uk/2011/10/twittering. Clever eh and really useful in tweets and facebook status’?

It’s all very geeky, but I’m a geek and a proud geek at that! Oh, and this post should be tweeted within the next few minutes on my twitter account @AW_101

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