Using a custom domain name

Picking a domain name is a fascinating trip around a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, and once you're outside the main old-style TLDs it's cloudy with a chance of rain.

I was immediately drawn to the .science TLD. A quick google on that showed that it is run by one company, and a fine article discussing that TLD -- https://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/science-shady-tld-use I'm sure things may have changed since 2015, but if anyone is blocking that TLD they are probably still doing so.

Next most attractive is .io, which apparently is a favorite of technical companies for some reason. It's the TLD belonging to the "Indian Ocean" geographic area (like .us is for the USA). Another fine article talked about that domain specifically:

https://hackernoon.com/stop-using-io-domain-names-for-production-traffic-b6aa17eeac20

Their concern was that NIC.io (the company that runs the DNS server for the .io TLD) isn't very good, had technical issues at times, and was not well equipped to deal with them.

And finally, I looked at ".co". That has the attraction of being like ".com", but also the drawback of being like ".com". People who type things into address fields (like into their email client or web browser URL block) are notoriously bad at understanding the difference between different TLDs, even when they are nothing alike. I used to own phoenix.com as a domain name. I got a LOT of email misaddressed to people who had ISP service around Phoenix, AZ -- where one of the ISPs was phoenix.NET. One person I tried to help was quite irate that I was intercepting her email to her grandkids, even though it was her fault when she sent it to phoenix.com instead of phoenix.net. And then my mail server was overloaded when some idiot registered himself with a high-volume mailing list using "his" phoenix.com address instead of phoenix.net.

Of the list, I would lean towards .co even with the known ignorance issue, simply because it is becoming a common alternative for .com. But none of the options leaps out as "of course we should be that", to me.

Maybe we need to get ICANN to allow us to be our own TLD, and we can be www.cirn? That would confuse everyone.

By the way, the "www" on an address is NOT a "subdomain" as Github refers to it. It's a HOST name on the domain name "example.com", in their example. And their "apex" domain is just a "domain name".

On Wed, 2018-06-13 at 12:04 -0700, Chris Leaman wrote:

After a bit of discussion from people during the bootcamp/workshop this week, it may be a good idea to use a custom domain for the landing page. I've had a quick look at available domain names. It looks like the typical domains are already taken for cirn, but there are a whole bunch of alternative names available. I think cirn.io would be the most legitimate, but would be interested to see what others would think.

Not available
  * cirn.com
  * cirn.org
  * cirn.net
Available
  * cirn.io
  * cirn.ai
  * cirn.co
  * cirn.observer
  * cirn.group
  * cirn.network
  * cirn.community
  * cirn.camera
  * cirn.earth
  * cirn.science
The documentation for using a custom domain on github pages looks straight forward, so shouldn't be difficult to implement.

@Coastal-Imaging-Research-Network/managers

— You are receiving this because you are on a team that was mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

Coastal-Imaging-Research-Network / coastal-imaging-research-network.github.io

Using a custom domain name #8