by Owning domain names is one of the few, joyous, pleasures of life. You have an idea. You try to congeal that notion into a memorable .com domain — and you always try to then give those ideas a good home. Today, I am both sad and delighted to share some news with you about my WordPrescience.com domain.
If you just clicked on that WordPrescience.com link, you discovered that domain takes you right back here to the WordPunk.com domain main index page. You don’t see that lovely greenish image of me teaching theatre at Rutgers University.
Here’s what happened. In November 2006, I was wanted to start a new blog that would exclusively deal with writing. I had two ideas. “WordPunk” and “WordPrescience” — and I was thrilled to see both .com iterations of those domains were available for registration and I grabbed them.
“WordPunk” meant something fresh and subterranean while “WordPrescience” was something beyond the ordinary word on a page. With “WordPrescience” in the mix of the mind, words would take on an ethereal, everlasting, glow that would give them greater depth of definition.
WordPunk.com was a shorter domain name, always a good thing, while WordPrescience.com was the more heavenly, thoughtful, mandate, but a clunkier name to type as a URL — though never as clunky as “ScientificAesthetic.com.”
I decided to put WordPunk.com on TypePad and pay my way over there for a bit and WordPrescience.com was put on Mac.com — using iLife ’08 and iWeb — as part of my book on Mac OS X.
After a year on TypePad, I moved WordPunk.com to my own, private, Movable Type solution and then, eventually, here to WordPress.com.
WordPrescience.com did not do as well. I quickly discovered iWeb was a difficult way to manage a website and the counter-intuitive nature of hosting a domain on Mac.com and requiring a “www” domain name — “www.WordPrescience.com” while the naked domain led you to a dead page — was unhappily unworkable and so I completely ignored WordPrescience.com instead of moving the blog to another hosting solution.
With recent changes on Me.com website hosting, I discovered WordPrescience.com was no longer loading even in its neglected state, and I decided it was time to give in to age and tide and just point WordPrescience.com to WordPunk.com and let the subterranean conquer the ethereal heavens.
Today, after four, delightful, years of owning my “Word” domains, WordPunk.com has 274 published articles and over 1,000 published comments — not bad for a weekly blog! — while WordPrescience.com never erupted past its original three static pages with zero comments.
WordPunk.com won the execution.
WordPrescience died on the iWeb vine.
Nice to know that it’s going to have a nice new purpose, David! 🙂
That’s right, Gordon! There’s no such thing as a wasted domain!
This sure was an inside look at what happens behind the scenes. I think I like wordprescience better than worpunk to be frank. The punk is a little beneath you.
That’s a fair comment, Anne. I think the reason ‘Punk won over ‘Prescience in the end because of the initial hosting situation and the fact that ‘Punk is a shorter URL and easier to remember.