Say hello to the new owner of the domain name brouwer.ca!
Nowadays, one of the most useful things you can have on the internet is a domain of your very own. It can be your personal online identity. Of course, each domain can only be owned by one person at a time, so pretty much every premium domain name is gone... including personal names. For example, my arch nemisis/coolest guy I've never met has the domain mattbrouwer.com, and that's something I can never get now.
A few months ago I decided that I should have my own domain. Knowing that my name dot com is gone, I looked at other alternatives. There still is mattbrouwer.ca out there, but I got thinking that having an address that reads matt@mattbrouwer was kind of redundant. So, taking a longshot, I looked up the domains brouwer.com and brouwer.ca... both of which were registered, and had been for a long time (1997 for the .com and 2001 for the .ca). However, brouwer.ca was listed as coming up for expiry in about a week from when I was looking. I thought "wow, that would be cool if it was left to expire". Unfortunately, when the expiry date came, the whois listing showed that it had been renewed. That just started my journey of leaning how domains work.
Turns out that there's a grace period after expiry to give the previous owner a chance to renew, and to someone on the outside, it looks like it was renewed. Thinking it was gone and wanting to register at least something, I snagged the domain saxwithmatt.com in the meantime. However, on a whim about a week or 2 ago, I decided to check the status of brouwer.ca again. This time it was listed as "to be deleted" or something similar. So, I waited until expiry (hoping a domain reseller didn't get to it first) and was able to snatch it up. All for $15 per year.
Now I have my ideal email address. Of course, it just forwards to my current gmail account for now, so either address will work the same. It's just going to be so much easier (and cooler in a geeky kind of way) to be able to tell people what my email address now is.
Any Brouwers out there want an email address?
I say important things of importance
You should have done m@brouwer.ca for your e-mail address.
ReplyDeletePatrick said the exact same idea to me. It's interesting, and I didn't think of it initially. I could still do it, since Google Apps gives me 50 email addresses for free.
ReplyDeleteBut I kinda like having my name in there.
Who says you can't have both?
ReplyDeleteNo one. But I hate it when other people have a bunch of different email addresses, because I never know which one I should use. I'm trying to apply the same rule to myself.
ReplyDelete... says the guy who has 7 different active email addresses.