taking stock of domains

dev, project, website

Over the Christmas & New Year break, I spent a bit of time reviewing and cleaning up my side projects. Fiddling with the DNS for my new projects forced me to inventory the domains I have registered. An update to my projects is long overdue, so this post can scratch that itch.

Domains I’ve registered:

  • AliceHines.com was created for a good friend from school back in 2005? and is actively used! Alice recently reached out to have the domain transferred to her nameservers. I support friends learning how DNS works so, au revoir AliceHines.com.

  • annboban.com was Ann’s former moniker and we let this expire last year. The domain’s new owner is clearly a kindred spirit of Ann :-P Now I’m really curious what annboban means in Chinese!

  • AnnLouiseSullivan.com, Ann’s current website, but she let the SquareSpace account expire :-( Likely because that has costs associated with it… @Ann how about we have this url redirect to your Facebook / LinkedIn account?

  • Bilal-Bot.com is a digital version of the Islamic azaan; named after the first person responsible with announcing the call to prayer, Bilal ibn Rabah. Building chat bots for BBM takes more effort than it should… I got the bot working, but lost interest in improving it. I still think this is a neat/tidy/succinct project for the future, but it is a project better suited for a more religious colleague / friend.

  • HomeFoodMap.com is Phuong’s pet project. She sees a market for home cooked food in Vietnam and Indonesia and wants to connect hungry people with home cooked food :-) It will be an instance of LocationMachine.io and is definitely still in development!

  • KathrynHamill.com might be the 3rd website I ever made and it is humming along just fine. It is a bit stale though, @AuntKathryn how about we set this up to redirect to your Facebook / Instagram / Tumblr where you could keep the content up-to-date more easily.

  • LetsIdea.com is the 1st domain I purchased back in 2004? I thought it could be a marketplace for people with ideas / entrepreneurs to connect with venture capitalist. Clearly, I haven’t done anything with it since 2004… just wait!

  • LiabilityMagnet.com is the “company” I created for my litigious ventures :-P NO! I’m not doing anything illegal or actually using it… yet :-P

  • LocationMachine.io, LocationMachine.com is my new side project with the goal of making it easy for people to post good photos to GPS locations. Hopefully, it can become a tool for entrepreneurs (like Phuong) to setup an MVP of location based apps.

  • NotHttps.com was intended to serve not SSL traffic – useful when you connect to guest wifi networks. I wanted to use it today (for my home wifi) and discovered that I let it expire :-( Fortunately, some Canadian guy bought it and is using it for the exact same purpose. Saves me from bankrolling the registration :-)

  • RuangBawah.com is Indonesian for ~ underground room. The goal was to be kinda like a Snapchat of GPS locations for events/parties. I’ve let this expire, but I think the use case is still interesting! I salvaged the map code (written in 2016) to start LocationMachine. It could definitely be an instance of LocationMachine going forward… but of course I’d need to find a bunch of people who want to post interesting events! Perhaps Pak Adi would want to use jadwal.com for this purpose :-/

  • SaveRinjani.org was created to help raise money / awareness of the mess at Lombok’s Mt Rinjani Mohan and I hiked it in 2015 and we were disgusted with the amount of trash that visitors leave on the mountain. There definitely hasn’t been a single donation… give up?

  • SillyLogger.com is my online moniker. This was the AIM screenname for a bot I created with the intention of logging activity on AIM. It never did that job very well, but for me it has mentally morphed into a lighthearted lumberjack :-) It is widely available as a username for most apps/sites so I decided to stick with it.

  • SuperAwesomeTommy.com was my first personal website. The name came up while EanGolden.com and I were brainstorming domains for a DJ’ing project. I should probably just let the name go, not worth $10/year… but it is quite fun.

  • WeAreWorkingOn.com was a tool I created to automate the weekly updates that are needed in a remote working environment. It lets Google accounts share a paragraph & screenshots to everyone with the same @domain. Neo.com did use it while I was working there, but it would be a security nightmare for an organization other than those hosting it. I’ll keep the domain name, it’s probably worth more than the app.

  • WhatsMyNumber.net, WhatsMyPhoneNumber.com, WhatsMyPhoneNumber.net are in the same vein as the frequently Googled “what’s my ip?”, “what’s my user agent?”, “What’s my dns”. SIM cards have gotten cheap enough to buy during holidays, but easy to forget their number. The goal of this app was to provide a number that people could SMS and recieve their phone number as the reply. I got the app running as intended, but quickly ran into a major issue – getting a US number from Twilio was easy, but receiving international SMS was tricky / expensive for the sender. Getting a local numbers for lots of countries is expensive / impractical. Sooooo that is going to be parked for a while.

That’s a longer list than I expected, and it’s still not complete! But, writing it up forced me to renew, revive, and reflect on my past projects. Hopefully, that process will help improve my current & future projects. Cheers & Happy New Year!