A Personal Domain History
=========================
Presented here is my own personal domain history. I have cobled it
together primarily because it seemed rather heartless to simply let
these names pass from my memory. So this is a sort of epitaph for my
initial venture into the wonderful world of domain ownership.
I would greatly like to be able to give a detailed account of the
history of noneotheabove.com, but I just can not. The history and events
surrounding its development (particularly during the first two years)
are thoroughly muddled and confused, and I do not have any of the old
layout files anymore. Some of the content from 2005 and 2006 still
survives (whether it will ever see the light of the internet again
remains to be determined), but the context in which most of it was
written has been lost and forgotten. The best I can provide is a brief
overview.
The site never had a central focus---probably its greatest weakness. It
was more of a plaything---a toy to idle away hours, trying to create the
absolutely perfect layout that would inspire me to even greater heights.
Its layout changed at least six times. Each change seeming to conclude
with emptiness and the promise that next time it would be better.
Its content was from all over the map: comics, rants, articles, photos.
Some were actually pretty good, some were generic, derivative and bland,
but most just bad, or worse, pointless. The only content that saw any
real consistency and utility, was the technical how-to's I had been
posting for my own benefit, and these were eventually moved to
mediusrete.org in December of 2007. When that occurred, all that was
left was a disjointed mishmash of stuff.
This state of affairs continued until late 2009 when I began playing
with tempered glass, resin, and spray paints. The results were
sufficiently pleasing to behold that it crossed my mind that selling
them might be a possibility, and that I could use noneotheabove.com as
the platform from which to operate. Thus the site underwent one last
rewrite; the layout was completely changed, goodly portions of the
content was hidden away behind hard to find links, and the glass art was
given prominence (alongside photos, and graphics). But even the prospect
of financial gain was insufficient to keep the site afloat, and for the
first half of 2010, my interest in it was entirely absent.
Then the renewal notice came.
The time had finally come to decide the fate of my first domain. I
debated about renewing it for one year; hanging on to it, just to see if
I could make something of it. But when the time to renew came, I just
could not be bothered. The registrar kept sending me renewal reminders,
and I kept deleting them. Even after the renewal date had come an gone,
the emails continued for a week or two, and I just kept hitting delete.
And then the emails stopped, and the domain was gone, and a small weight
was lifted from the back of a small corner of my mind.
brpirates.org
-------------
Registered: 4 February 2006
Expired: 4 February 2008
This was the home of the Brotherhood of Revolutionary Pirates; beyond
that, I do not really remember much of the site. I do remember that it
was a single page, hosted on the free space provided by my ISP, and I
had to use DNS masking to get the domain to point to the content. I also
remember that it had a manifesto associated with it (a copy of which
still survives---somewhere), and that the pirate ship was a former
Soviet aircraft carrier.
It and the following two domains were purchased at a time when I had
this naive dream of building my own small internet empire based upon
satire and absurdity. I will give you the opportunity to guess the
ending---it makes the story so much more dramatic.
gucuda.org
----------
Registered: 4 February 2006
Expired: 4 February 2008
This site was the home of a new religion (inspired by the Flying
Spaghetti Monster---I wanted in on the action). The domain itself was an
abbreviation for the verbose title of my would-be church: the Grand
Unified Church of Universal Divine Absurdianism. As with brpirates.org,
this site was but a single page, hosted on my ISP's servers, with DNS
masking to its best to make it look like a real site (as opposed to a
cardboard imitator).
There is nothing left of this site, save for the logo I had devised.
(Actually, the logos for all of my sites are still around; I think I
enjoyed creating the logos for the sites more than the sites
themselves---which would go a long way to explaining my inability to
become a serious webmaster.)
illf-alif.org
-------------
Registered: 4 February 2006
Expired: 4 February 2008
This site was where I hosted joint anarchist/lethargist revolutionary
movement. Illf was an abreviation for the International Lethargy
Liberation Front; alif was an abreviation for something along the lines
of the Anarchist Liberation and Independence Front. Again the content
was hosted with my ISP, and again DNS masking did what it could, and
again the site died.
As far as I can remember, brpirates.org, gucuda.org, and illf-alif.org
were never actually updated. There was the initial posting of content;
the verification that links and DNS masking worked, and---well, that is
about it. They were never touched again, and their deaths went entirely
unnoticed (I am a terrible domain parent).
oneoverzero.org
---------------
Registered: 3 July 2006
Expired: 3 July 2008
I had intended this to be the home of a fictional politician named +1/0.
He had his genesis in the spam section of a forum that I used to
frequent; the goal was to increase my post count. Others would post +1,
but I saw that as rather bland, so I settled upon +1/0, and the concept
grew from there.
The domain was never put to use though, for I noticed hours after
registering it, that it lacked the + element, which was an integral part
of the name, and so I went back the next day and registered another
domain name.
plusoneoverzero.com
-------------------
Registered: 4 July 2006
Expired: 4 July 2008
This was the correction to the above-mentioned oversight, but it did not
fare any better. I had the beginnings of content for the site, but it
was hosted on noneotheabove.com and was only a page long. I wanted to do
more with it: make something fantastical, satirical, and witty. I never
made the time though.
And so the site never came to be, and the domain was never put to use.
It was another $22.00 mistake.
ammondale.com
-------------
Registered: 6 December 2007
Expired: 6 December 2009
I registered ammondale.com for a similar reason as the +1/0 domains, but
rather than be for an imaginary, impossible politician, it was to be for
the messiah of Ammodalism (my second attempt at a religion, one that had
been created upon the same forum that +1/0 had his start on), Ammondale
the Psychotic Chicken.
But after registering the domain, Ammondale never spoke to me again. The
site was never created, and the domain was fallow for its entire
existence. Instead I could hear his quiet mocking in the back of my
mind, delighting at having convinced me to waste $22.00. And so I
abandoned my imaginary messiah and freely and fully embraced the Flying
Spaghetti Monster.
cx2i3.org
---------
Registered: 17 December 2007
Expired: 17 December 2009
I registered this domain during one of my many redesign efforts of
noneotheabove.com. I decided to remove the rants, and provide them their
own home; one from which I could pursue more politically charged topics
than seemed appropriate to post on noneotheabove.com site.
This domain actually managed to see use, starting as a DNS mask for a
blogger site. But I grew tired of the blog format very quickly, and
wanted to have proper DNS hosting, thus I moved the site to an actual
host, ditching most of the content that had been created (which was not
much), and starting from scratch.
But the interest did not last. The blogger post never got posted, and
the rants from noneotheabove.com never appeared. Instead, the site
served mostly as a quasi link repository, with the sole exception being
two conversations I had with scripts from 'chat-with-god' sites (the
transcripts are on this node). By mid 2009, I had all but forgotten
about this site, and its death went by unmarked.
mediusrete.org
--------------
Registered: 17 December 2007
Renewed: 17 December 2009
Cancelled: 6 August 2010
This was registered at the same time as cx2i3.org, and was the place to
which all of the technical content from noneotheabove.com was
transfered. It was probably my most successful and useful site. It was
updated relatively frequently, and the site design remained fairly
stable, changing only twice. It had a proper host, and managed to
maintain my interest. People even came and visited the site (most
looking for instructions related to setting up a Telus DSL connection).
Then in early June 2010, it became inaccessible. This state of affairs
continued for about a week, at which point I was presented with a
generic page saying that the site had been suspended.
Seeing as this was a free host, I was not overly incensed, just a bit
annoyed. So while I set about trying to determine why my site had been
suspended, I went to another free host, set up an account, and got the
site up and running again. It was about 24 hours later that this second
account was suspended. At this point in time I started to suspect that
the host did not like something on my site, and so I began to consider
what I could do.
I did not want to redact potions of my site, the idea left a bad taste
in my mouth. So I started looking for a new host (paying close attention
to who actually owns the host---a lot of hosts are owned by the same
companies that had suspended my accounts to begin with). It was a long
and tedious search, and in the end, it proved fruitless. Not because
there was not a suitable host, but because I started to seriously
question whether I really wanted to maintain the domain.
Other alternatives began to wander about my mind: using the free space I
had with my ISP; using the gopher space I had with sdf.org. Clearly I
settled for the latter. I liked how sparse and simple gopher made
everything; it was what I had been looking for since 2005 (if only I had
known...).
So I ported the content I wanted to gopher (there is still a little bit
to port from the other sites, but not a whole lot), and made the final
decision to cancel the domain name about four months before it was due
to expire, and I can say I do not regret the decision.
