[avernon]

First you need to get a metamask wallet. Then you buy some ETH for the wallet. Finally go to ens.domains and register your name.

It is very friendly with IPFS, which is how I host my blog. So I put the IPNS permalink in my ENS name contract (managed on ens.domains). The .link is there because browsers can't resolve ENS names. Cloudflare runs a system that checks Ethereum for the browser and redirects to the correct IPFS name if you add the .link.

I wrote a post on how to set up a blog like this. It is way simpler to use something like Fleek, though.

edit to add link: https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/ipfsbasics.html

[indigodaddy]

Thank you so much for this summary! Extremely helpful.

[foobar33333]

This seems like the same issue namecoin was trying to solve but never got anywhere. Does eth.link look more promising?

[KirillPanov]

Namecoin failed mainly because it was way, way, way too cheap to register names, so everything got squatted in the first few years.

ENS appears to have fixed this; the registration and renewal fees are denominated in USD (but paid in ETH) and cost about the same ($5/yr) as ICANN names.

Unfortunately ENS has the same problem that a lot of "new crypto" does: the rules can be changed at any time by a tiny handful of (mostly) anonymous people who hold the magic multisig keys to update the special contract. There is no developer/user separation, where the users can simply choose not to upgrade. The ever-present threat of this "declined to upgrade" situation is a major check on the developers' power in bitcoin/namecoin-style cryptocurrencies, and it is the central topic of discussion in any hard fork proposal.

[avernon]

austinvernon.com was taken, I had the ENS name, and I was curious about IPFS, so I used it. The system works surprisingly well, mostly thanks to Cloudflare. I've only been using it for a month, though. And its a static site with zero JS or any analytics. I haven't tried to add it to google search console or anything.