Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Most of today I spent in the Mediterranean hotel. Together with about twenty other administrators from most Cyprus ISPs, I attended DNS/DNSSEC course given by RIPE NCC.

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I came across this post at Blogging Pro. It is about this other guy - Darren Rowse - who is looking for a good (and available) domain name for his new project.

Instead of spending hours upon hours (or was it after doing so?), Darren started a contest for the best domain name suggestion. The prize is $100 USD. He claims that only after 8 hours, with majority of his readership being a sleep (time zone issue), he received a whole bunch of suggestions that will be difficult to choose from.

It struck me as a very efficient way of finding a domain name. If you’ve ever looked for one, you know what I mean. For those of you who haven’t - it involves numerous itterations across the dictionary, thesaurus, and some sort of “check domain availability” tool. Often there is also a good mix of scripts that generate suggestions. The procedure can go on for hours, days, and even weeks. That is, of course, unless you don’t get enlightened, which also happens, albeit rarely.

Many people enjoy looking for domain names. Just for the sport of it. Give them a subject and they’ll occupy themselves for a good half of their corporate time. Throw in a few bucks and you’ve got yourself the best place ticket for a bloody battle.

In this particular example, the prize is $100 USD. It’s a nice number, though people would certainly participate for less. If you are still doubtful, try it. And consider for a moment, what is a $100 USD. In terms of your time.

I am trying to stop using the “www.” part when typing in URLs. The web has gone a long way and most of the websites don’t need to start with WWW. Just the domain is fine.

But I have been typing “www.” into the address bar for so long that I don’t do it on purpose anymore. My fingers just remember it and use it every time I switch to address bar. I type it even faster than I can realize that I’m typing it. I got better at realizing in the last few days though. Now I catch myself when I’m done only with a couple of first “w”.

It becomes really annoying. Imagine your hands doing something you’ve forbidden them to do. Won’t that freak you out?

When I will finally get rid of the “www.” in my address bar, I’ll start to get rid of “http://”. I know that protocol is much more useful than those stupid domain parts, but when browsing the web, HTTP is the default protocol and even if you don’t specify it, the browser knows ho to handle that.

I should probably check my referrer logs more often. A lot of interesting stuff goes on in there. Most fun are, of course, Google search phrases that bring people to my blog. But today something even more interesting was discovered. I made it into Wikipedia - the world’s largest free encyclopedia. I know that anyone can edit pages there and add a link to their own website, but trust me - I didn’t.

Someone has linked to my 220,000+ domain ideas from Domain hack page (scroll the page down to ‘External links’).