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Old Cooter and Comcast DNS Hijacking

Yesterday, I was playing around with domain names and stumbled on — Old Cooter Dot Com — as a possibility for a fun new music site.  Now, before we get into the nuts and bolts of that technical experience, let’s be clear that “cooter” is a North American brown shell river turtle with yellow head banding. Mr. Slowsky, anyone?  The first thing I do when I want to see if a domain is taken or not, is type the name into my web browser.  If the site comes up dead, then you take the next step toward registration. Old Cooter was, indeed, dead — but it was given an unwanted, and disturbing, new life by Comcast.

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tr.im Dies Ugly and Resurrects Horribly

The internet is a deadly and deceitful place.  We all try to get along with each other while chasing our greater dreams into the depths of the ether.  One thing you’ll need in your web journey is a “URL shortening” service that will condense a long URL into something easy to remember.  TinyURL was the king, bit.ly is the new prince and tr.im is now the ugly court jester that committed suicide and then decided it was all a joke and came back to life three days later. 

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Grabbing and Pointing that Domain

Grabbing a good domain name is getting harder and harder as the pool of good .COM domain names thins in the raucous ether of everyone with an internet connection wanting a personalized website.

Not every domain name requires a website.  In fact, grabbing a domain and then pointing it to an existing website can be an effective means to propagate the idea of your brand beyond a single thought.

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The Return of the David Boles Gang!

The Wayback Machine can bring both pleasure and pain as you reflect back on who you used to be and where you hoped to land in your virtual internet dreams.

One of the hard lessons learned of an early life on the internet is that domain names have great value beyond the ordinary now.

Over a decade ago I had a domain name — http://dbgang.com — for my original life on the internet that hooked into “The David Boles Gang!” web presence and, for some reason I still do not understand, I decided to let that URL lapse into non-renewal.

Someone else immediately gobbled up that domain and I was instantly filled with regret and longing for my dbgang.com world.  I wanted to get that URL back!

Continue reading → The Return of the David Boles Gang!