Kicking a Domain to the Curb

I started my habit in 2005.

Yes, I have accumulated more than a few domains (details in my domain interview). I can stop at anytime. Im fact, I am shucking one this month.

I credit a colleague I’ve not crossed paths with in a long time, Steve Dembo (he still has his own http://www.teach42.com/ sadly last blog post was 2018, they old blogs just keep falling).

It was rather funny, and foretelling that Steve emailed me in 2005. At the time, I had a blog on a server I ran for my work at the Maricopa Community Colleges, so the blog lived (dead link warning) at the looooooong URL http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cdb

As a frequent visitor, Steve felt this was a lot of things to enter in the URL bar, so he kindly offered to buy my a custom domain, like cogdogblog.com just to save himself from typing, if only a redirect.

That was quite generous, but I declined, and bought the domain myself, and set it up to be Steve’s Shortcut. Months later, January 2006, I accepted the offer of a colleague, Audree Thurman (savvy technologist then at Chandler-Gilbert Community College) who offered transfer and hosting of my WordPress (1.5) blog.

Like I said, the timing of all this was impeccable as in February I took an unexpected job offer and leapt from Maricopa to NMC in March 2006. So it was a good thing I had claimed both a domain and a web hosting.

But back to the domain. In 2005 there was not a bevy of places to register a domain. I knew about Network Solutions (NSI) who actually were the first authority granted to manage domain names in the early 1990s. By 2005, the commercial market for Domains was a small number. I think I mad the choice then to go with aun upstart that was also cheaper, named GoDaddy.com.

I can’t say I ever felt overly positive about that goofy name for a company, but I signed up in July 2005 for cogdogblog.com and a year later registered feed2js.org. Maybe over next few years, I registered 3 more.

Then there was the Italian domain. Looking to build out my new effort as a quote/unquote [spit] consultant, in January 2011 I came up with the idea of a company name “CogDog It!” along with the domain cogdog.it. Something like:

GoDaddy was set up with the extra steps needed for a non-Italian to register one of it’s domains, it incurred an extra $20 “trustee” agreement making it a bit more costly than my others. But hey, vanity.

I admit in the 2000s I did not give too much thought to the people that ran tech companies I bought services from. But sometime around 2011 I caught wind of the less than respectful elephant hunting lifestyle of GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons not to mention becoming aware of their sleazy super bowl commercials.

From looking at my account records, I can see I started migrating my domain registrations from GoDaddy to Hover in January 2012. All of them except cogdog.it – because of those regulations of .it domains I have left it hanging at GoDaddy (for like $40/year).

I ended up spending 2012 in a full time job, so never did much with building out a wordpress site or anything on cogdog.it.

In fact, I ended up just using it as a redirect (as it exists now) to my portfolio site. The only thing I had an actual use was a few shortened domains from go.cogdog.it (using YOURLS running from my reclaim hosting account), and maybe that was the only reason I hung on to it.

All of this is a long way to say I am letting the domain go. It’s silly to worry about leaving dead links considering the depth of the worldwide pile of linkrot. Like who’s going to notice of the Secret Revolution vanishes, a domain I got for maybe 2 presentations in 2011? Or am I ever going to need a Western DS106 site again?

The usefulness is maybe not the point. I can manage fifteen clams a year to keep a domain hoisted, even if maybe only 12 bots and a bunch of web crawlers notice. The point is, this is my work, my craft, and even if it is old, it’s my wafer thin slide of history. And I get to decide.

But I can let go of the GoDaddy one, I can live with those few broken links and not support them any more.

That’s one domain, kicked to the curb.

Featured Image: My own photo 2012/366/1 Christmas Trash, Oh Christmas Trash… shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license with a GoDaddy logo found on CleanPNG draped over one box. Because I can.

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