The gradually less amazing xkcd.com has been “redesigned” in order to commemorate the shutting down of Yahoo’s free webhosting, GeoCities. It’s so perfectly ugly, even the HTML tags in the raw source are all capitalized! Genius. As for GeoCities, so long, farewell, and good riddance.
Just a great piece of independent electronic music I find rather addictive, enjoy. More at drpeterjones.com.
I’m sure most of you internet people have heard of the various URL shortening sites out there in the wild. They’re used to make a long and scary URL (which stands for Uniform Resource Locator) into one much more timid and digestible. Blah blah blah. The point is, you may have noticed that all the good ones (tinyurl.com is ugly and commercial and gross, bit.ly is an exception) have a domain that is only two letters long, like tr.im. Now how do they do it?
Most big hosting companies and domain registrars will not only tell you a domain any less than three letters is invalid, but they probably won’t support whichever obscure ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain, e.g. .ca for Canada) you feel like owning. There’s no real reason for this, other than that most companies are stupid and don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Especially when it comes to technological stuff like this; the CEO of GoDaddy probably doesn’t have more than a vague idea about how the internet really works. Oh well, more power to the people.
And by “the people” I mean the people at iwantmyname.com. Not only is their service great, with a nice clean interface and a whole six pages of TLDs to choose from, but they accept ANY valid domain, including those with only two characters at the second level.
It’s a great service, and I’ve used them to buy all two of my two letter domains. I even started a little URL shortening service of my own, called zi.gs, just for fun. I took it down a while ago after it became boring and tiresome to provide support for.
Anyways, there you have it. Easy two character domains, supporting lots and lots of TLDs.
