Namecheap ran a promotion for students offering one year’s registration of a .me domain name. Coupled with this, there was a choice of either a ready-to-go GitHub Pages website, or a premium subscription to about.me.

I use Namecheap as my domain registrar for tteoh.com already, so registering another domain was straightforward. I already had GitHub Pages set up, so the preconfigured site option was less appealing.

Instead, I upgraded my about.me account to premium. The service lets anyone create a profile page for free; premium adds a custom domain, removes about.me branding, and adds analytics. I’d had an account for years but without a custom domain, the usefulness of a profile page is limited when you already have a web presence.

The entire process from claiming the domain to having everything set up was automated to the point of confirming my student account and clicking the provided link.

Update: After getting featured as a staff pick, the stats page looked quite out of character: