General Domain Information

As my friends and family know, I can be a workaholic. I love what I do, and if I am not working on my laptop, I am generally on my Blackberry pretty much non-stop, especially during the week. I try to lay off on the weekends, but when I have a big project, I can usually be found working. This weekend is a working weekend, as you will see below in my Saturday updates:

• I’ve been reading about the domain theft and hijacking situation on Domain Name Wire and Patrick’s Blog. As a friendly reminder, there are a few companies that offer extensive protection against domain theft like Name.com featuring a security key fob. I wrote an article about domain security last July, and you may want to check it out to see what some companies offer.

• After a couple of months worth of work, Lowell.com has been re-vamped and re-launched with the help of Mike McAlister of Six One Five Design. Businesses will now be able to sign up, create listings, and pay on their own, much like I have successfully implemented on a couple of other websites. There are still a number of links that aren’t working and things that need to be fixed, but it’s almost there. If you have a few minutes and check out the site, please let me know if you see any bugs (I know the site is running slowly right now).

• I want to send a BIG THANK YOU to Tony Kanakaris of eCyberMedia.com and SocialDomainers.com for making a $500 contribution to the Ronald McDonald House for our 5 Boro Bike Tour. Not only is this the largest contribution to date, it also put us over our $2,500 goal. The Ronald McDonald House does some great things for children with cancer and their families, and they can use all of the funding people can contribute. I think Karen and I may raise our goal since some friends and family haven’t contributed what they pledged in private.

• If you are celebrating, I want to wish you and your family a happy Easter. I hope you are able to enjoy the holiday with family and friends.

Yes… another April Fools’ Day post, but this one has a twist. The “You’re” to whom I am referring in the title is actually me, and the things below are some of the foolish things I’ve done recently (that I can remember). This isn’t the typical attempt at humor post that most others are trying, although Rick’s new venture is hularious (.com).

• I bought a targeted keyword geodomain name on Snapnames over a year ago and never changed the DNS. I just realized this last week.

• I kept complaining about how TropicalBirds.com was not making much money, but then I worked with Craig at WhyPark, and it’s now making 1.5-2x what it made per day on Adsense. We’re not talking big money at all, but it’s bigger money. More on this to come, but after around one month of the same site with different monetization strategy/feed, I am realizing that I left a couple of nights in New York City on the table in earnings every month for the last year plus.

• I stopped invoicing   my hotel advertiser on Lowell.com in January because I was hoping the new site would launch in mid February or early March at the latest, and I was concerned that they would be upset paying for a banner on a newly launched website that wasn’t the exact same as the current/old site. Well, as all development projects go, my design requests grew, and we’re now in April, and the old site is still up, so I lost out on two months of payment… again, not a whole lot of money, but a couple of nice dinners.

• I spent a lot of time building my own mini sites, and when all is said and done, I shouldn’t have been so cheap and left the work to the professionals. Even if the results were equal to mine, it wouldn’t have been a waste of my time.

I am sure I’ve done more foolish things than those listed above, but I can’t really think of others off the top of my head right now.

What foolish things have you done that you’d like to share?

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Please help me raise funds for the Ronald McDonald House

In 2008, I was browsing through some names owned by Buy Domains and I saw a domain name that was related to the Holocaust. It wasn’t exactly an obvious Holocaust domain name, but when the term was Googled, the relationship was more than clear. I informed Pete Lamson (GM of Buy Domains at the time) about the domain name, and the company dropped it.

It was unfortunate that they dropped it, but I am sure they wanted nothing to do with this domain name once they realized its meaning. The unfortunate aspect was that it went to auction at Snapnames, and it had a number of bidders. After a few days, I came out on top and owned the domain name.

For a while, I just killed the DNS since I didn’t want to send the traffic to a Holocaust awareness website without their permission. I forgot about the domain name until a couple of days ago when I got a renewal notice. I did a bit of research on other domain names, and I saw that the Simon  Wiesenthal  Center owns Holocaust.com.

I reached out the the Whois contact and she mentioned that someone was kind enough to donate Holocaust.com to their Center. I then offered to give them the domain name I own for free, and they are happy to take it. I am very happy that this domain name will get a permanent home with an organization like the Wiesenthal Center.

If you have domain names that are hurtful or hateful, consider donating them to a non-profit group. Whether you ask for a tax write-off or not, I am sure they will appreciate your generosity.