Just about everybody at some point in their life has either registered a domain name or currently owns a domain, even if they’ve done nothing with it. So I started thinking about all the domains I’ve bought over the years, which although isn’t many, there’s a story behind why I registered each one. So here’s the history of some of the domain names I currently own as well as some of the names I registered once upon a time.
www.aktiondan.com – 2007 – This is my most recent .com domain registration which at the moment is nothing more than a landing page which points visitors to www.danmarx.org. I guess I’ve always been kinda bummed that I couldn’t get my name in a .com, and the guy who did register www.danmarx.com hasn’t done anything with the name in almost a decade and has the domain registered for at least decade more. So www.aktiondan.com was my way of picking up a .com that was still unique to me. I may do something with it later on, but for now it’ll be placeholder, until I come up with that single really great idea.
www.floppy2cd.com – 2003 – I woke up one morning and decided that the entire world had hundreds of floppy discs that were collecting dust on a shelf and that if given the chance would love to have converted to CD for easy access and preservation. This idea stemmed from the small pack of 3.5″ 1.44mb floppies I had on my shelf collecting dust that contained old journal entries, school projects, lab reports, that I thought would it be great if I had all these on one CD instead of wasting away and never getting used. Using all that sophisticate mathematics I learned in college I had determined that I could fit over 450 floppies onto one compact disc. Who had that many floppies lying around? I have no idea, but if someone did, I was going to copy them all to a CD for them. I would have a shipping service come pick them, I would pop them in my massive array of floppies drives and one by one (or ten by ten) start transferring all of Joe Shmoes old love letters onto a single CD which would then be mailed back to him in a single envelope and all for a very reasonable fee. Well the idea never made it out off the runway (my fancy-pants spreadsheet basically said the concept needed to convert an unrealistic amount of floppies in an unrealistically short amount of time to even make anything) and pretty much crashed and burned the same week it was born but not before I snatched up what I thought was a clever domain name and made some really lame logo.
www.aktionrc.om – 2003 – A few years ago I got back into RC cars via a little popular car called the Micro RS4. I got so hooked on this little 1/18th scale car that my desire to make it faster and faster just wouldn’t quit. After trying out just about every motor and battery I could find, I knew the end all big-block conversion would be to stuff a whopping 540-sized motor into this car and then surely, no one could top it. Several prototypes later and the Micro Hybrid 540 Conversion Kit was born. During that time I had met up with another fanatic named Chris who helped fine-tune the design and a couple of months later Aktion RC was formed. I registered the name and we’ve been selling 540 conversion kits ever since. If you’re into RC then you should check out this site, we’ve got some pretty cool videos of this tiny car hitting over 51mph as well as a small history of all the different kits we created over the years. This was at least one of my domain names that didn’t completely flop.
www.hostmypics.com – 2002 – Picture hosting back in the day was extremely limited. Nobody let you direct-link to pictures for placing in forums, blogs and web sites, and bandwidth was so limited that half the time the hosting provider had cut off the offending bandwidth abuser and placed some lame marketing image its place. I decided it was time to change the way hosting providers treated customers images. I figured I could offer up picture hosting that uncapped all the rules of traditional picture hosting by allowing embedded images with no watermarks, giving everyone a whole bunch of bandwidth and only charging them $5 a year. There were only about four other sites doing this same thing, and they all charged way too much and didn’t offer all the untethered use of images like I was going to do. And then shortly after the idea fell into the toilet. Without going into the details, I just decided I didn’t want to do it, to have to deal with everything that would have been involved to maintain such an endeavor, seemed like a huge hassle. But again, not before registering the domain and actually making a full-fledged working web site that never actually went live. These days picture hosting is much better (Flickr, Picassa), and the most popular providers offer all the things I wanted to, but they even one-up my original idea – it’s free.
www.danmarx.org – 2000 – So this is my main site that pretty much hosts everything I’ve ever written about on the net and contains all sorts of odds and ends from R/C stuff to DIY speakers, to my Ocean Blue Guitar tab site which contains not quite all the tabs of one of my all-time favorite bands The Ocean Blue. You can read about my old High School band Terminal Bliss and even download a few .mp3’s off our album that we’d released in 1993. So even if all the other domains end up going by the wayside, this one should be around for a while.
www.audioinnovation.com – 1999 – This was the first ever domain name I registered and to this day I still kick myself for letting it go. I know it seems stupid now, but at the time when registration was actually $37/year and me being a starving student, decided I needed to pay rent one month instead of renewing my domain. The site had already ranked fairly high on Google when searching for DIY subwoofers as well and I (not knowing anything about how Page Rank worked) didn’t think anything about moving the domain to my newly registered site at www.danmarx.org/audioinnovation, which as far as Google was concerned, didn’t even exist. It didn’t take long for someone to snatch up my expired domain and of course do nothing other than use it to advertise real estate. What’s that got to do with audio? Well apparently nothing since the domain was later sold to a domain reseller who has been holding it hostage ever since. They’re offering it up to anyone willing to fork over $3,338. Boy that $37 sure seems like chump change now. Ah well, it’s all in the past, but I did regain my Page Rank status, if you type Audio Innovation into Google and hit I’m Feeling Lucky, you’ll be taken straight to my site. Take that you lame domain reselling place.
And that’s about it, everywhere I’ve ever been, or not been, on the net. There are a bunch more names I’ve considered registering at one time or another as random ideas have popped into my head, but so far this is it.
