QTVH.COM

Well I've had a busy few days turning an idea into reality...

I needed a short domain name. When people signed up for my monthly newsletter of hints and tips on the management of Anger, Aggression, Violence and Stress at www.protectics.co.uk they had to fight the confirmation email that they received. It's a double opt-in system that asked them to click on a very-long-url that often got cut in half by email programs and thus might not work...

I registered a short domain name so the confirmation email address could be short too - and it is - it's now just 30 characters long which is a lot better than the 74 characters that it used to be.

Anyway, I started thinking - what other things could I do with QTVH.COM - and one idea that I had was to allow people to use qtvh.com for their own email.

You can register your own name - so someone called 'Fred' can be 'fred@qtvh.com' - I am charging a simple one-off fee of US $20 to cover set-up and admin and it's working fine.

The fun part about the project was automating as much of the process as possible - I have to manually set up the actual email account but the availability checking and payment is automated for the service user and the welcome email (that has to hold custom information for each user) has been automated as well.

I used to do a lot of computer programming and one of my aims this year is to bring my programming skills back up to speed. I am involved in a number of projects and so far things are going well. It amazes me how powerful a website can become with just a little bit of back-end computer programming.