Happy Summer!  The kids are out of school and already bored.  My oldest son though is really into reading this year, I mean REALLY into it.  He has probably read 10 books already on summer break.

His school has a degree program for reading books during the summer.  Basically the students get a star for each day they read more than twenty minutes.  My son has been doing much more than that I thought it would be great to keep track of it.  I am sure looking back at the list at the end of the Summer he would be pretty impressed by the list too.

My first thought is that I would set him up with a blog, and he could type in the books he read on any given day.  He and I have done some basic web page building together, so I thought he may get a kick out of this.

So I added a new blog to my account here at WordPress and picked a theme I hoped he didn’t think sucked.  When I went to add his as a contributor to the blog I discovered he needed an email address to that.  Hmm….

Well I have thought about setting him up with an email address in the past, but never did it as there was really no reason and he is only eight.  So I went to Comcast to set him up with a family account.  The didn’t have the name I wanted, damn.  Well I found one close enough and went with that.  At least Comcast has some parental controls, I’ll have to look deeper into that.

I set him up with a WordPress account and when there to log him in.  When I logged in with his account to verify everything I was greeted with a page of many, many blogs.  Well this is not good, he doesn’t need to be exposed to to this, too young yet, too dangerous.

Going to the next level

As I pondered this in a background processes it hit me, what about setting up a new domain and hosting the stuff myself!?  I checked at GoDaddy and shit, the domain is available, excellent.

$10.67 / year for the domain, not so bad.  $9.99 for privacy, what!  that’s a bit outside.  Then it hit me again, Dreamhost.  Dreamhost has a free domain with a paid subscription and I never used it, perfect.  Off to Dreamhost…

I was able to create and host the the domain on my current account and loaded up a WordPress blog in about 10 seconds.  Added an email address and we are ready to go in a more “controlled” environment.

So a simple idea has bloomed into a fully hosted domain with private emails and sites, all for an eight year-old.  I am the Tim Allen of the Internet!

So my son and I went over some of the stuff I put together and he is pretty interested in it all.  As expected he is a bit overwhelmed.  That’s OK, we’ll take it a step at a time in what ever direction interests him most.