NNWM/21: Dot Blog

Last Spring, WordPress informed me that they had secured the rights to oversee and operate the sale and registration of a new series of top-level domains, .blog. Anybody would be free to purchase a .blog domain through WordPress or any domain name registrar. The reason was simple: much like the way many states have to keep adding new area codes because they are running out of phone numbers, the World Wide Web is running low on decent .com names. So the International Commission of Internetty Things – a shadowy conglomerate tasked with keeping the WWW’s engine running smoothly – stepped in and added .blog to the list of available domains (a popularity contest led by the “big three”: .com, .net, and .org).

There is a small chance I might have my facts wrong here.

In any case, I was intrigued. Years ago, I tried to buy markmywords.com, but the owner was a greedy prick who refused to part ways with the name unless I paid him a ginormous sum of money, so I settled for markmywordssite.com instead. Which was fine, but a mouthful. I decided that markmywords.blog had a nice flow and is more illustrative of my site anyway, seeing that it’s a blog called Mark My Words and all. So I put my name down on a waiting list and applied for early access to the domain name, ensuring that it would be available to me. One day in August I got an email notification that it was on like Donkey Kong! and I could now buy my new domain three months before the general public. I reached for my credit card, pulled up the link…

…and was dismayed to see it would cost me over $200.

“You know what?” I said to myself, tucking the credit card into my wallet and slipping that in my back pocket. “There’s nothing wrong with markmywordssite.com. Love it. Great name.”

And then this morning, I received notice that all .blog domains were now available to the general public. So I punched in “mark my words,” found it was still available, and snatched it up for the low, low price of $22. Good things really do come to those who wait!

Rock on.

So now I’ve got a groovy new .blog domain that is all my own: markmywords.blog. It’s got a real nice ring to it, don’tcha think? The old domain will continue to direct visitors here for a while, but I imagine at some point it’ll eventually stop doing that.

Word Count Today: 1,521.
Total Word Count: 35,536.