RSS Club #009: Domains
This is an RSS-only post, thank you for subscribing :) I keep buying domains! When will I ever learn? Domain prices are increasing (again) because why wouldn’t they? Sub-domains are free! Host your side project on a sub-domain! Then if you get bored, who cares? I used to know this but somewhere along the way I lost the knowledge. My old projects like Shiro and Tales and print.css live long happy lives undisturbed by man. I’ve been busy moving newer side projects to sub-domains or archiving them on my self-hosted Git forge . These are the ones I remember: expires in six months. Attic is archived. expires in a year. Croissant is now on a sub-domain. might needs to be renewed indefinitely to avoid squatters (it has juice). Is the strategy to stop redirecting and leave it blank for a year? Pikaday is now on a sub-domain. is impossible to move without severing RSS subscriptions. I thought a legacy framework like React would have died out by now; how wrong I was! is a piece of art waiting on Google to reap before it can expire. has a story behind it but I think interest has waned. Recent events transpired to nothing. The courtroom drama is glacial. turned into my second notes blog but the domain still lives. Cotton Coder was to be my brand for web education. Glad I didn’t invest there — yikes that side of the industry evaporated quickly! is expiring in 19 days, used once for a joke. I’ve lost track of how many domains I’ve bought for a year and never used. “Buying” is the wrong terminology. “Renting” or “leasing” should be legally enforced. I have a dozen dead domains I bought rented for possible company names before I settled on Valley Fold ( ). For brand names it’s difficult not to buy all the variations. I don’t own the but I did snap up the — primary, — criminal they sell that separately, and for future use like website staging. Want to guess how many TLDs and variations of I own (or owned) over the years? I let most go. It’s silly and expensive squatting them. FYI both myself and my ownership of pre-date the D-Bus project . Maybe it’s hell maybe it’s not, that’s not my beef! In hindsight though I wouldn’t have chosen if I knew it would become my freelance business. It took a year of indecisiveness before Valley Fold Ltd was born. I was kicking around other names and domains but I’m happy where I settled. I paid a three-figure transfer fee for on a whim (ouch). I quite liked the sound of it… no one else agreed. Originally I wanted (note the different spelling) but more than one “Quiet” agency exists with the same idea. Another business name candidate was “Focus Visible” inspired by Clearleft . A reference to CSS if you’re not familiar. I did like the nod towards accessibility too. The problem with this name is: do I use or with a hyphen? The hyphen fits the CSS property but hyphenated domains are lame. I bought both. All the big TLDs in fact. I was surprised they were available (not anymore lol). “Focus Visible” also sounds like a team name from The Apprentice . Which is cringe. Needless to say I have more domains waiting to expire than I’m actively using. I set up a second registrar account with notifications disabled so that I don’t have to see them! My new goal is to reach 2027 without renting a new domain. We are not in a golden age of web development and frugality is necessary to survive! Thanks for reading! Follow me on Mastodon and Bluesky . Subscribe to my Blog and Notes or Combined feeds.