25 years of .com (1 Viewer)

[roni]

[...]create a "safe harbor" or "greenspace" on the Internet for children [...]

I like that attitude, even though it's unrealistic.
I'd rather have a state controlling it's domain-contents according to THESE rules, than - like others - what's politically critical to them.

 

[mjp]

Any control is a slippery slope, which is why a lot of people in America continue to push back against any segmenting or tiering of internet services. And that's not even a freedom issue.

 

[mjp]

Anyone have any need or desire for charlesbukowski.net or charlesbukowski.org?

I'm not selling them, you can have them for free (or more accurately, for the price of a transfer to your registrar).

If no one wants them I'm going to let them expire.

 

[jordan]

is it much work to maintain them? or did you just decide to say "fuckit.com" and move on?

 

[mjp]

It's no work to maintain them, they both just sit there pointing to bukowski.net.

But they don't really do me any good pointing to the site, and I'm trying to reduce the number of domains that I have to manage (and renew every year). So I'm letting some drop.

did you just decide to say "fuckit.com" and move on?

I wish. That was a good pay day. ;)

 

[mjp]

Has it really been five years since this thread started? .com turns 30.

 

[mjp]

charlesbukowski.com expires next year. HarperCollins owns it [...] snatching that away from them would be a lovely thing.

Seems unlikely that charlesbukowski.com will ever be accidentally allowed to lapse now, as they have some fancy brand management service keeping tabs on it.

Well, I have too many god damned domain names anyway.

 

[roni]

even in a small village like Germany and even back in 1998 the domain bukowski.de had been taken, which upset me at the time.
(even the goddamn roni.de had been taken already by then, which REALLY pissed me and still does!)

 

[mjp]

Yeah, 1998 was a little late to get any domain you wanted. Those .de domains being unavailable isn't surprising. Germans really took to the web more than anyone else (except Americans). The first hosting company I worked for, I'll bet a third of our customers were German. Even now .de is one of the most used TLDs.

 

[esart]

(even the goddamn roni.de had been taken already by then, which REALLY pissed me and still does!)

I was never able to register my name ether with a .com, which is why I have had esart since 1999. I was a late-comer.

But I recently sold my given name (the name I was born with) to someone and made a few bucks. I figured I was never going to use it, so why not take the cash? I have plenty of other domains that point to esart anyway. At one time I even had "ebaypaintings.com." I remember getting a letter from eBay lawyers trying to scare me into dropping the domain at some point too, but they didn't scare me - because mjp told me it was just a bunch of bullshit scare tactics and that they had to do that to protect their brand.

 

[mjp's attorney]

Allow me to clarify and state for the record that Mr. Phillips has never given legal advice in any capacity and he does not now, or has he ever, suggested that any person living or dead should thwart, avoid, sidestep or scoff at copyright, trademark or any other laws pertaining to, or not pertaining to, Internet domain names.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

What a strange world we live in. If someone smarter was in the right position, who knows how this would have changed things (not talking about the USPS specifically).

The Post Office Almost Delivered Your First E-Mail

 

[mjp]

Great old Wired article from 1994 about trying to explain to McDonald's why they needed to register the domain name mcdonalds.com.

The writer of the article was very persistent in trying to make them understand why it was important, but they didn't get it (not surprising really, at that time).

So the guy who wrote the article registered it for himself.

 

[LickTheStar]

That article reminded me of one of the longest lived sites I know of: clonehigh.com

It's one of my favorite animated shows and the other day I went to the site and was SHOCKED to find it was still up. The show aired back in 2003-04 on MTV and then some station in Canada picked it up, but even that was a decade ago.

It... it looks so wee on my screen now!

 

[mjp]

All I see there is a "domain for sale" page...

A lot of the early domains are still active. But most of them eventually changed hands, so they don't still have the same contents that they originally had.

If you got into your time machine and went back to 1992 or 93, you could register a single letter domain (assuming you had an Internet connection, which wasn't easy to get at the time, and assuming you could figure out how to register a domain, which also wasn't easy). There are only six single letter .com, .net or .org domains still registered, one of them is x.com, which used to be online banking, and eventually turned into PayPal.

If you owned a single letter domain today, you could sell it for enough money to buy an island somewhere and build a private resort and discotheque. You know, so you and your friends could boogie with your toes in the sand and swim around naked in the Caribbean sea.

I know this is boring shit to just about everyone in the world, but I find it very interesting. Oddly enough, it isn't really written about very much. We're losing a lot of early Internet history. This guy does a podcast that covers a lot of it, but he only goes back to the first web browsers, and a lot of things happened before that...

 

[Johannes]

"Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?"

:rolleyes:

 

[mjp]

That's a great line.

That, and the fact that 2.5 people were handling all of the world's domain registrations at the time. Manually.

 

[LickTheStar]

Whoops, I failed and missed a dash: http://www.clone-high.com

Which also explains why the WhoIs didn't make any sense at all when I looked it up.

Also: I never once considered single-letter domains. Hm.

 

[mjp]

Anyone have any need or desire for charlesbukowski.net or charlesbukowski.org?

I'm not selling them, you can have them for free (or more accurately, for the price of a transfer to your registrar).

Whoever picked up charlesbukowski.org has been busy.

 

[roni]

He kept your iconic grey-in-grey-design.

 

[zobraks]

(S)he's a long way from home:

 

[Black Swan]

includes the 3 volumes of Back to the Machine Gun!

 

[Johannes]

Whoever did this, a lot of work must have gone into this(?) ... so many props. There are actually poems on there that I'd never read before.

 

[mjp]

A lot of work for sure.

I've tried doing OCR on the manuscripts, but most of them aren't high enough resolution to get good results. So you end up practically retyping everything anyway. I didn't see any mistakes in the dozen or so poems I looked at on the site, so if they're all that good, they were probably manually retyped. Which is a lot of typing (as some of you know).

Whoever did that has to be a member here. If not, they should be.

 

[carlito]

I retyped in an open office file the poems from the book Sifting... based on the database (173 pages): if anyone want the file, I'll send it. I hoped that would help Abel to publish an unmartinized version of the book, but he never answered my mp about that.

 

[roni]

Thanks, carlito, for the work and offer.
It would be very nice of you to share.

 

[zobraks]

So, it was 30 years of .com a couple of days ago.

No big deal, I'm posting this just to screw the (dancing) chicken.

 

[mjp]

Whoever put all that work into charlesbukowski.org let the domain expire and the site is gone. Maybe it will surface on a new domain name.

I copied the site back in March, so I have what was there then.

 

[jrdn]

Would you be able to share that? Unless you already posted them within the archive found on here.

either way, thank you ??

 

[Hannah]

Would you be able to share that?

No...it's hundreds of pages. Sorry.