Had a bit of a contest with a friend to see who owns the most domains. Then I had one of my creative brainstorms. I’ll write up my domain registration bio! Yeah, I know, big whoop but the domains people register can provide an interesting look into their history. So here’s mine with available expired domains taken out (you know, in case I ever want to resurrect them provided they’re still available).
superspud.com
This was my first domain. Registered in March 1999. It was, naturally, a way to promote my comics (and website design portfolio). But I was really, really nervous about people stealing my designs and making money from them. I know, silly, but I’ve learned that you get nowhere by hiding.
I wanted to register it April 1st but couldn’t bear the chance of losing it. A Google search brought up many products named “Super Spud” so I jumped on it.
Spud.com was taken so I decided to make Spud into “Yet Another Flying Superhero”.
This site is sort of in limbo at the moment as I find time to recreate it into a really simple and minimal website acting as my online comic book “shelf”. Ok, I just don’t want to let superspud.com go.
spudcomics.com
I registered this some time later “just in case” but didn’t renew.
carovilli.ca
Carovilli is the name of my mother’s home town in Italy. Just 2km away is my father’s town named Castiglione di Carovilli.
I created this site as a portfolio piece back in 1997ish then decided it would be more professional to register a domain sometime at the turn of the century. The site is pretty much static despite my efforts of getting my parents to blog.
An unexpected surprise: we were contacted by someone who turned out to be a cousin on my father’s side whom we didn’t know about! Through him, we learned of a long, forgotten settlement and important history of Carovilli and Castiglione in Oklahoma from the 1800s. Long story short: people travelled to Krebs to work in the mines to send money back home. Some of which went to build the church in Castiglione.
Fast forward to modern times: my father organized a trip to Castiglione with a lot more of the descendants who, following the footsteps of their ancestors, donated money for repairs to the church!
I’ll revisit this site in the winter for a revamp to make it dynamic.
danielerossi.ca
PodCamp Toronto 2007 was the first podcamp I went to. It was there where I learned the value in registering your name as a domain. .com was taken so I snapped up a .ca as it still fit my personal brand. I didn’t have any specific plans with it so I simply redirected it to superspud.com. Then it evolved into something like an online business card listing my various social media profiles then I added a blog and my illustration portfolio.
twitterspud.com
I first heard of Twitter at PodCamp Toronto and inevitably wanted to try it with my comics. TwitterSpud was a site aggregating (manually) Spud’s Twitter account with his ex-girlfriend’s account forming a story you read via the discussion between the two. It became too much work to try and keep the tweets in real-time and updating 2 accounts (along with my own). Oy!
iusedtorecordmyself.com
This was an idea I had for a podcast where people would send in audio from the tapes of themselves they used to make back in the day. I didn’t pursue it because I was concerned about copyrights (people singing pop songs, etc.).
stutteringiscool.com
Hearing the hosts on StutterTalk stutter openly and freely made quite the impact on me resulting in my desire to meet other stutterers in Toronto. That proved very challenging so I thought of a podcast. I had already made the brave attempt to talk about my stuttering on SpudCast and not editing out my stuttering about a month before I discovered StutterTalk so I felt it was something worth building upon.
thelaughingpodcast.com
A podcast I produced consisting simply of people calling in and laughing. I got the idea from listening to a podcast where one of those hosts got into a really long laughing fit. I was having a particularly bad day at the time and suddenly started laughing, too.
Each episode was probably 30 seconds long but after 7 episodes, I quickly found that I just couldn’t devote the time for it. Stutteringiscool.com had grown into something beyond my wildest expectations so I made the decision to concentrate on that instead (and lots of other projects as well).
Meanwhile, same fate fell upon SpudCast. It’ll be using that more as an audio description and director’s commentary version of my comics on superspud.com (really, I should use YouTube but I just don’t have the time nor friends who can shoot and edit video for me).
stutternight.org & stutternight.com
I thought of social nights for stutterers but felt that meetup.com was just too expensive. So I launched my own site using Feedburner for the mailing list. Now that someone in town had started up a meetup.com site for stutterers, there’s no longer a need for this domain.
stutteringappreciationday.org & stutteringappreciationday.com
I got this idea during a chat with Hiten Vyas on my show when he mentioned that he was about to enter his 20th year of stuttering. I chose Friday the 13th based on a blog post Hiten wrote explaining why we stutterers should look at that date as a positive.
Every year, I’ll choose a Friday the 13th and declare it Stuttering Appreciation day. And on that day, I invite stutterers to add a comment describing the positive aspects about stuttering.
ti-ger.org
I was inspired by a tiger analogy for stuttering on episode 19 of Stuttering.Me. At the time, I was having trouble drawing up a tiger character for months and listening to this brought the motivation to try again (plus, I like tigers). Once completed, I crowdsourced for the name on Twitter with my stuttering peeps where the analogy had also become an instant hit.
When I first noticed ‘ti-ger’ used in posts on stuttering.me, I immediately had a brainstorm of promoting this analogy as a mascot for stutterers worldwide.
In the spirit of those annoying blog chain letters, I’m listing 3 people who I’d like to hear/read stories behind their domains. Hopefully they, too, will list a few of their domain stories on their blogs; @marlene, @paul_henman and @ezrabutler. Like the other games, tag others and so on.