friday, march 30, 2001
domain-ated

i have lost my friggin mind. i now own domynoes.com,.net and .org plus alden.nu and all 4 have a presence on the web. yesterday i also got twc a domain and while i was at it i decided to pick up a domain for whyspered moments. mind you, i have 4 domains already -- 3 of which have nothing or next to nothing on them, and wm really does not need its own domain. talk about impulse buying. it is so cheap to register domains at godaddy, and it is pretty inexpensive to host where everything is hosted with the exception of d.com, but over a year that can get pretty expensive. and when you add my husband's and the girls' domains plus one resell account that i have kept associated with domynoes.com and yet one more domain for a friend, the cost gets downright scary. all told its 10 domains that i help manage and/or pay for in some way, and i get repayment on a total of 2. under these circumstances, wm certainly did not need its own place. heck, with as much as is there, i should ask the .org hostee (the one and only) to move and close it up for now. but i won't. she's already had enough going on in her life without me moving her off her new little space. and it does put SOMETHING there. the rest of what should be there will take awhile to get up. just too busy otherwise and what is going up in the .org needs some serious thought.

the point of all this is that it seems i have well and truly become a domain addict. i used to hear of people owning 5 or 6 or even 7 domains and i just couldn't understand it. (now, if only all of you with so many domains would just come and join my webring! come on, i know you're out there! ummmm. cough cough -- back to our regularly scheduled whysper). later i decided it made sense if you prefer the no advertising and more control options of paying for your hosting and were running out of space on your server. 99% of servers limit the amount of space, bandwidth and everything else you can use. i am fortunate enough to be on 2 wonderful servers that don't do that. but recently i have come to the conclusion that we're all sick. we suffer from an addiction and only our wallets prevents us from getting yet more domains. as web designers we have the added bonus of seeing our names in virtual lights and get to do more decorating than one domain often lets us (especially when you have limited space and tend to want to have one theme for the domain).

and we tend to give ourselves reasons that make sense but are really and truly justifications. for my .net and .org, i just wanted to be the only domynoe on the net. saxy gave me the name and i just haven't wanted to share it. of course, to manage that i'd have to buy up domynoes under all the other extensions as well (.tv, .nu, .web, etc). but that is cost prohibitive, so i just picked up the "common" extensions. alden i picked up for my game world as an extension of visions and on the very off chance i get published someday. alden.com, .org and .net don't sound right, so i went with a more expensive .nu. whysper was pure impulse buying. i didn't even bother to justify it until i had it. so now i own it for a year, no major expense and no major loss. and i have it if i ever get to the point where i can put it up. which of course just feeds the addiction. and you do know, of course, having it just sit there is going to set off that little nagging voice that just has to point out that owning a domain that has no web presence is, well, pointless. i'm telling you -- i really have got to find some support for this addiction. financial and a 10-step program.

"my name is domynoe and i am domain-ated."