Sweeping Out My Domains

This month in digital cleanup is taking a broom to a pile of domains that have accumulated a not so tidy pile. I can’t full explain why i needed a cogdog.casa domain some ____ years ago? I had some rationale.

In today’s fast-paced world, it is important to note that I will delve into showcasing and unprecedented landscape of domain cleanup (I am tossing in all the LLM buzzphrases just to play with you), ignore this sentence, please).

But seeing the notice of upcoming automated domain renewals coming in, I started thinking, why do I need these? I see the very first one I bought back in 1997 dommy.com coming up on 29 years old was up for renewal, plus 3 more this month. Much as I loathe breaking links, let’s not kid myself, when was the last time anyone was linking to my web clients form the late 1990s? I decided I’d rather maintain my own archive, make sure my own links are alive, leave the rest to be combed through in the Internet Archive.

So I am letting four of them lapse this month, and can see letting more go this year. The main ones I will keep of course is the cogdogblog.com fleet (a bunch of subdomains) and another pile of them will be clustered to my personal vanity domain cog.dog I do have a few old project sites I have kept going but I have turned off the domain auto renew so I can move the old barges.

Digital Cleanup: Letting Go of Old Domain Barges

The array of steps I have been doing this week include:

• A few WordPress sites (subdomains too) clones to live in one of my main keeper domains. Easy to do with the Reclaim Hosting Installatron manager.
• Some WordPress sites not ever needing updates I am archving as static HTML sites using my venerable Mac OSX Tool Site Sucker (see Archiving Old WordPress Sites as Static HTML)
  • There is a bit of directory play, since the file structure includes meta media like CSS, remote javascript, Google fonts, so all the site files sit one directory in. I have been setting up an htaccess rule to redirect requests into the sub directory.
• Self-contained sites (HTML, PHP, CSS, etc) just moved of set to be pointed to within one of my subdomains.
• Before the domains expire, I am setting up HTTP redirects to new locations, just in the long shot they get crawled by web search.
• I have been happy with the Wayback Link Fixer plugin that is doing a great job of replacing broken links in my posts to point to copies in the Internet Archive.
  • I found useful the extra links you get for looking at a domain’s snapshots in the internet archive, the usual result is the timeline view say for cogdogblog.com the other links across the top I have never looked at, and you can see the URL is easy to construct or set up in a spreadsheet.
  • The summary view indicates how many snapshots by mime type, the summary for cogdogblog.com https://web.archive.org/details/https://cogdogblog.com/ indicates it has snagged some 48000 URLs in my blog and over 51000 images. Yikes.
  • And you can dice and slice specifically what URLs on my domain have been archived via https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://cogdogblog.com/*
• And to keep my own links used updated on this blog, making use of the Better Find and Replace WordPress plugin to edit links in the database to point to new locations.

As I work through this, there are snags and things will be broken, still I am convinced no one will know. I am doing this for me.

Here comes The Broom.

dommy.com (1997)

• What/Why: I was in my early years of web development at the Maricopa Community Colleges. One faculty member I worked with on a project recommended me to her husband who needed a web site for his organization. I used it as a place to refer anyone who asked for help with a web site, nearly all the clients I barely remember. I also wanted to have it for an email address I could use,
• The Name: Indeed the dog theme was there early- “Dommy” was the nickname of my Dalmatian Dominoe. Years later someone emailed to let me know that that “dommy: in her realm of “dominatrix” meant “dominant mommy” Shrug
• The Site: A hodgepodge of 1990s web layout (yes tables!) some crude PHP and Javascript. But it meant mostly moving the site was just moving files.
• Buried Down Deep: There is a ton of stuff tucked away, the only means to discover os poking around the directory structure.
  • alan’s wacky weird web: This was my “home page” on the web servers I ran 1993-2006 at the Maricopa Community Colleges, just moved to me own domain when I left the system, knowing it would not be maintained.
  • Alan’s bike to Work Page: Notes and details of the years I was a bicycle commuter.
  • A History of Dad: Tribute to my father created after he passed away in 2001
  • I Hate Running: Web site made for a few years of running half and sort of full marathons; originally run in WordPress, later archived to static HTML
  • We pee on spammers: Oh how naively just annoying email spam was back then
  • Alan’s NoJava Shop: Back in my glory days of web development with Macromedia Director, this was my stand against all the hype of Java
• Internet Archive:
  • By date: Saved 366 times between December 5, 1998 and March 27, 2026.
  • URLs: 3,842 URLs have been captured 
  • Summary: 14,932 web page captures; 5,765 image captures

cogdog.casa (2015)

• What/Why: I am fuzzy why I set up this domain, mainly in the fun times of all the top new TLD and a place just to hang some various small use and experimental sites. No reason why they can hang elsewhere in my other domains
• The Name: Coming off of my UDG Agora project time I was feeling the Spanish spirit.
• The Site: The top of the domain was meant just to stand there, not to be a site in itself. Made of just simple HTML, CSS, and the nifty jQuery Backstretch for filling the background with an image.
• Buried Down Deep: Not much. I had a demo site of suggestions I used when starting my work with OEGlobal in 2020, let that one drift away. The main ones I migrated were
  • Puerto Rico Connection podcast, a WordPress site formerly at prconnection.cogdog.casa moved to prconnection.cog.dog. If I can ever convince Antonio Vantaggiato to join me in the studio, I am game to top the last episode published by robots
  • CogDog Showtime a WordPress multisite formerly at show.cogdog.casa exported with Site Sucker to HTML at https://showtime.cog.dog/. This was a fleet of 12 web presentations for stuff done 2015-2022, many of them done with my SPLOTpoint theme but. few others with my WordPress Calling Card themes. This was an interesting experiment to do an entire multisite with Site Sucker; it only got 5 because not all of them were linked from the main starting site. Lesson learned for doing this is to get links to all subsites on the main entry one.
• Internet Archive: – note not relevant for main domain since it had no external links.
  • The Puerto Rico Connection
    • By date: Saved 40 times between January 25, 2019 and April 9, 2025.
    • URLs: 308 URLs have been captured 
    • Summary: 143 web page captures; 247 image captures
  • CogDog Showtime
    • By date: Saved 58 times between March 21, 2017 and February 19, 2026.
    • URLs: 1612 URLs have been captured 
    • Summaryhttps://web.archive.org/details/https://show.cogdog.casa: 701 web page captures; 763 image captures

barkingdog.me (2010)

• What/Why: In some fit of WordPress development and an idea that I should have a site just for my favorite photographs, I coined the name Barking Dog Studios as if it was some entity. Really it was an accidental discovery I found that when uploading photos to the WordPress media library, if it was full of EXIF photo metadata, all of that was preserved. So I hacked a theme where to make a post I just had to upload the image to the post- my custom code would pull its title, description, all the camera meta data to “write” the full post. See New WP Theme / Under the Hood Features for Barking Dog Studios – I thought it was very damn clever.
• The Name: Well just continuing the dog theme, why not a photo studio with a dog that barks?
• The Site: Original WordPress (see post on the first version) site, but I saw no major need for adding new content, so I used Site Sucker to make it all static HTML
• Buried Down Deep: Lots of ways to organize photo by tags, like all my favorite ones of cacti, ones with bokeh. But there was all the camera metadata, so you can find all photos taken with my Digital Rebel T1i, ones taken at focal length f/2.8, ones taken at ISO 1000.
• Internet Archive:
  • By date: Saved 354 times between November 14, 2010 and March 11, 2026.
  • URLs: 5,723  URLs have been captured 
  • Summary: 11,598 web page captures; 3,861 image captures

pechaflicker.net (2014)

• What/Why: Maybe the best thing I cobbled together using the Flickr API (which works in 2026 as it did when I built this) as a fun way to let people practice improv with random photos from flickr or “a mashup of pechakucha and powerpoint karaoke” This was often a hit in audience participation when I did invited talks or workshops, and I still think its fun. I can trace it from a series of tagged blog posts of its development that first appeared way back in 2011. I started on my own subdomain, but later felt like it deserved its own domain in 2014 and had been redirecting it to the new domain. As its a collection of PHP files and media, I simply turned off the old redirection and flipped it back. Come home to where you started pechaflickr.
• The Name: My own portmantuing of pechakucha + flickr
• The Site: It’s PHP, and makes use of Dan Coulter’s phpflickr library for talking to the API and the nifty Vegas javascript by Jay Salvat to make the full screen slideshow.
• Buried Down Deep:
  • A teacher who emailed me named Heather got a mode of pechaflickr named for her idea
  • A feature to create improv by tag for photos from the flickr commons.
  • The most hidden and fun part is the result of a bet I made with Roland Tanglao in 2018, he bet the flickr API would die and he is still wrong 8+ years later.
• Internet Archive:
  • By date: 234 times between April 27, 2014 and March 5, 2026.
  • URLs: 139 URLs have been captured 
  • Summary: 333 web page captures; 51 image captures (no surpise this is low, all the media comes from flickr)

To Be Swept Soon

I’ve got a few more domains that expire later in the year that I will likely let go – cogdog.info was mostly a portfolio for me and my web work (and also used for email, but that service is gone from Reclaim Hosting). I am thinking of redoing that site as WordPress.

And I can also zap a really old one I made specifically for a 2010 presentation The Secret Revolution https://secretrevolution.us/

I have turned off auto renew for arganee.world and a huge WordPress multisite there from Networked Narratives days. I am still pondering how to make it all static HTML, I see no compelling reason for it to be WordPress as its mostly my own nostalgia for some major work I did.

Likewise I am ready to bring under the existing domains The UDG Agora project and Mural UDG again these are WordPress Multisites for projects that once were supported by the Justice Institute for British Columbia who did not want to keep old project sites alive. Luckily they were willing to transfer to me, so I have been shouldering domain renewals and separate web hosting for quite stretch, just to keep the URLs alive.

If all cleanup goes as I see, I might down from like 11 to 2 domains by end of the year.

Sweeeeeeeep!

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Featured Image: 2014/365/42 Dust My Broom flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license