At the moment I have two domains:

• Fremus.co.za
• Fremus.net

The difference between the two is that one runs on an Apache HTTP server and the other runs on Internet Information Services (IIS). Why two different web servers? WordPress is my favourite blogging platform, and although .NET has a few blogging platforms available (BlogEngine.NET and Subtext) I have been using WordPress for a few years now and have come to really appreciate it for its powerful simplicity. I also do not want to create two separate blogging systems, one for the .NET website and the other for the WordPress one. I want to show that both systems can work together to build a single brand.

www.fremus.co.za will focus on all aspects of blogging and will cover general areas of technology, .NET specific technologies and general interest. I may from time-to-time blog about personal issues and feelings.

So then why have a web server that runs on IIS? Well I am a C# developer by day, so I thought I would like a portal where I could publish or demo solutions I develop, and .NET just does not run on Apache (maybe Mono solves this) at the moment for me. Thus its clear from this that Fremus.co.za will act as the home for my blog and Fremus.net will be used for .NET development. What is not clear is how I will use the two to create some sort of brand. Clearly both serve a different purpose, but I feel both represent some sort of personal brand.

So with that in mind I decided to fire up my mindmapping tool, Cayra, and started to map some ideas on how the two websites will feed off each other. And basically I came up with a strategy that focuses the .NET side of things to have a homepage that is dedicated to the following items (areas on the home page):

• An ATOM/RSS feed of the posts from www.fremus.co.za
• An area dedicated to ‘Social Feeds’:
  • Twitter – Here I want to look at .NET technologies that provide cool ways to interact with Twitter. My thinking is to have my own status updates plus several Twitter threads. It might be useful to write some code that assimilates this functionality. I have been looking at LinqToTwitter for this purpose.
  • Youtube – I thought it might be a cool idea to list the videos that I watch. And there are API’s available for it.
  • Galleries – I would like to write some sort of gallery application that displays photos I have taken of places I have been to. I am going to be buying a digital camera soonish.
  • I will only have links to LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, have no immediate plans to use API’s
• I want to create an area that shows/tells of the projects I am currently busy with. I have two projects I am working on at the moment, which I will detail later

The goal is to create some sort of personal brand that represents me and what my passion is. The brand should ideally be reflective of how I would express myself and how that expression would materialize to the rest of the world, and technology is a part of that brand.