dom posts

Pure or complete freedom is an impossible theoretical. There will always be constraints on a persons activities. Lack of constraints and control is essentially what freedom is. One is not free if one is constrained. And removing certain constraints for one person can allow them to constrain another.

I signed up for the Ohio Vax-A-Million vaccine lottery at ohiovaxamillion.com, even though the site and domain registration seemed a little suspicious. Continue reading post "#3417"

I bought a short domain name in part so I could have a short email address that was easy to share. Unfortunately, I'm finding it to sometimes confuse people or require more effort than expected to spell out. Continue reading post "#3314"

Seems like domain registrars strip off "www." from the beginning of domains when searching, even when trying it as a second level domain. Continue reading post "#3294"

I transferred this site's domain (tobymackenzie.com) from Dreamhost to Porkbun. Continue reading post "Domain transferred"

To make use of the short domain I bought recently (macn.me), I came up with the concept of a business card-like intro landing page. Continue reading post "Short domain intro card"

we are free up until we reach the edge of our cages

As if Amazon was celebrating my recent purchase of the domain <macn.me>, which reminded me of Mac and Me, they added the movie to Amazon Prime this month. Continue reading post "#2684"

I finally made it happen: I bought a short "vanity" domain. Two, in fact: <macn.me> and <tobm.me>. Continue reading post "Short-domains bought"

Last night, I decided to finally take the plunge and buy a short vanity domain I had been considering for several years (2b1.me), only to find it had been purchased just 48 hours beforehand, at the very registrar I was planning to use (Porkbun). Continue reading post "#2656"

I think I am going to let my .us domains expire due to the lack of whois privacy. Continue reading post "#2177"

Throwing a simple message on my site for net neutrality day: "Support net n…

I paid for email service for the first time. Fastmail is getting rid of their 'Guest' (ie free) accounts. Continue reading post "Paid email"

I've been looking for a short domain to potentially use for permashortlinks. For a domain to be usefully short, it must have both a short TLD and short SLD. Having three characters each would make for seven total characters (including the period) for the domain. Much more than that and it starts to lose its usefulness. There are no one character TLD's (though they'd be great for permashortlinks). Two character TLD's are reserved for country codes. I'm a bit reluctant to use a code for a country I don't live in, and the one I do disallows whois privacy. I'm a bit reluctant to decide that my address, phone number and email address will be "perma"nently available for all to see (assuming I keep the permanent promise of of permashortlinks). So three characters have been where I've been doing most of my looking.

There are a number of good lists of available TLD's. Indiewebcamp has a list of options with a brief blurb on their fitness and possible problems. It only has country code domains though. United Domains has a list with current TLD's and their prices plus soon to be available TLD's. It has a page for each with some information about the TLD and marketing-speak thoughts on uses. Name.com has a list with per-TLD pages as well that are often more brief. It's hard to parse these lists to find just the short ones though.

I found two plain-text lists of TLD's (IANA's and publicsuffix's), which got me to thinking that I could parse these to find just the ones with three characters. I wrote a script in PHP and modified it to handle any number of characters. It looks like:

I've been interested in Indieweb lately, and have been looking for a good domain for permashortlinks. The article goes into more detail, but advantages include:

• easier to read and type, especially from print
• fit better, especially in character limits of twitter, email line wraps, etc.

I have a domain that's six characters total (SLD + dot + TLD), but I'm not sure I like it: It has a '0' in place of an 'o' (might confuse people); is on a TLD that disallows whois privacy; and doesn't feel as representative of me as some others I've thought of. It's hard to find good short domains. One reason, of course, is that short domains are desirable and are taken more quickly when available. Another is that ICANN and predecessors traditionally seem to have been reluctant to allow short SLD's. One and two character SLD's are often reserved or "premium".

Idea

ICANN could make available single character TLD's for URL shortening purposes, and make available on them SLD's of one or more characters. This would make available, using normal ASCII domain rules:

CSS provides the "content" property for inserting content into documents, usually before or after elements. This can be bad if the content inserted is not strictly for presentational purposes, but when it is, it can be a very useful tool for changing a sites appearance with only CSS.

The property can be used to insert strings, images, even counters. Unfortunately, DOM elements cannot be inserted. Why would you want to insert DOM elements? Doesn't that go against the separation of content and presentation even further than the "content" property already allowed?

Ideally, in marking up a document, one should not need to consider presentation at all, only the proper elements to stick a given block of content into. The CSS would be created separately and form those elements into any appearance desired. There are a lot of reasons this can't currently be done, including sort order and hierarchy. Another is the limit of what is available to be styled in the HTML document.