8th Layer Archive

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October 01, 2001

artisticbluewolf.com

I've always wanted my own domain name. I've never really been set on any particular name - I've just wanted it to be mine. I'm not sure if I want a domain or I'm embarassed to not have one. After all, I've set up so much for customers, yet I have nothing of my own to show for all this knowledge I've gained.

Well...soon my dream will come true. It wasn't easy. Without a credit card, it's hard as hell these days to register a domain name. The first time I registered a domain name, it was years ago. You only had to deal with Network Solutions and it was very simple. Just fill in the blanks and put valid DNS servers and you were registered. The bill came in the mail about 3 weeks later and you had a couple of months to send in the money. I was fortunate enough to be working for a very small ISP at the time and was able to use those DNS servers to park the domain. But...I was unfortunate enough to only be making $9/hr as a Systems Administrator and could not afford the $70 to complete the registration process. The domain was lost before I could actually do anything with it.

Now I have managed to scrape up the money for a domain name again. I feel guilty for spending the money - there are so many other (practical) things I could be spending it on. Yet, there's that nagging feeling of not having one and being a technogeek. There's idjits that can barely navigate the Internet who have domain names. I guess they have good credit cards.

So onto the domain oddysey. There are now certain registrars that are allowed to register domain names. Yes, there are plenty of services that you can use to do this, but they eventually go through these people - so why use a middleman? I checked the list. Almost every one required a credit card to register a domain name. Except for one. They had some vague instructions to print out the form and mail it to them with a money order. Only there was no form. To get the form, you had to fill in your credit card number and hit the "next" button...

So... I printed the shopping cart page and wrote a little letter. In the letter I put all the pertinent information. Yes, I know all the info needed for a domain registration. I've typed it a million times for a million other people. This time I typed it for me. It should only take a few days for the snail mail to get to the registrar. Then a few days for them to act on it. Then a few days for me to be informed about it. And then another week or so until my host (which is yet a different company) acts on the reqest and puts the proper entries into their DNS servers.

Yes, it will take a while. But it will be done. And I can stop being embarrassed by a mile long URL for a homepage. And I can put up my own guestbook - without advertising and linkbacks. And I can use the site stats that are included with the webspace. And I can move my blog onto my own server... and get rid of the blogspot ads.

I'm not really sure why this is important to me. I'm not a web designer. And I know plenty of programmers that can barely put together a simple (color-coordinated) page. Yes, I've seen them be able to put a million things on a page. Yup. All on a single page. With 25 animated gifs, scrolling java banners, and a mixture of colors that look like Walt Disney threw up.

So why should I care? I guess it's because my ISP (with great connection service) has a policy that you can only use *their* cgi scripts. Oh, but they don't have any cgi scripts at this time. You see, it's a "security risk." Aaaaaarrrrgh! They give me a measley 5 MB of space and won't even give me a stock counter and guestbook??? Perhaps they need to hire some of those out-of-work geeks that know cgi and perl scripts? Perhaps if they hired *just one* they could make custom scripts for each user and provide copy and paste standard code so that we could have a simple guestbook and counter. I'm not looking for database functionality here. Just a little counter and guestbook. Even geocities has managed to do that. And they don't see it as such a great security risk...

It's not so much a rant about what I'm not getting as it is a scream of frustration at the companies that don't hire enough people to do the job properly. Perhaps along with that script-kid they should also hire an admin that would be responsible for security? Ha! There's two jobs that were eliminated by providing less. And the trend continues...

Posted by BlueWolf on October 1, 2001 10:34 AM