On a sleepless, API code-filled night

Will you won’t you join the dance? Normal programming resumes the 7th.

After spending the entirety of yesterday night going over the eBay Developer’s Kit, poring over the indecipherable examples and complicated code, I realized one thing, one precious tiny thing:

API Developers are very stingy with code.

Either that or there is the general assumption that everyone knows API. Most other developing languages have a selection of readily-available samples and codes to work from. The eBay developer’s area had two for Javascript. One of them didn’t work. In half-crazed despair I thought of heading over to Rentacoder.com and have myself one made for me. But then I thought to myself- it others can get it done for a good amount of money, then I should be able to do it for free.

And what was I up to, I hear you ask. Let’s just put it that I have deviated largely from my practice of ad-free websites and projects, and that I ventured into the thorny and treacherous road of online business developments. Let’s just say that in the past week I purchased four domains, two year’s worth of hosting, and am contemplating an upgrade of sorts. Let’s also just say that the business model involves a lot of preparation and not a lot of maintenance. Maybe some day down the future I’ll let you all know. Or, you can try hunting for it around on my website. There’s a link to it somewhere.

How to snatch a good domain without emptying your wallet

Note: This is neither an advertisement or a paid post. I just want to provide the resources you might need in selecting a good domain.

Let’s face it: getting a good domain name is practically impossible. When it comes to .com domain names, if you’ve thought of it and you want it, chances are it’s bought by some sleuthlike squatter-shark of a site asking you to pay half your mortgage or sell your grandmother if you want to buy it. You could be patient and wait for a domain to backorder and then pay $369 for it, but chances are it’s a bit too much to ask for, especially if you’re a college student like me and $369 could pay for a month’s rent or a lot of bottles of Coke. So what is one to do?

Where the deception begins
Being somewhat naive and full of wishful thinking, I backordered my domain at GoDaddy in the hopes of it snatching my desired domain on the day it was to drop from pendingDelete, July 19th. I was told that domains drop from pendingDelete anytime from 1 to 2pm, EST, and so I waited, hesitantly refreshing my browser, hoping for a positive sign in the form of an email from GoDaddy. No such luck. I find out around 6pm that the snatch was unsuccessful, and while Pool.com and Enom both did not have live auctions for the domain I wanted, I immediately saw that Snapnames.com had started a pre-order auction.

A pre-order auction is one that requires interested parties to bid on an auction before the closing date, rather than on an existing live auction. This is so that the ones selling the domain can make sure that those who are bidding on it are serious buyers, rather than those who just come across it and want to buy it. As a result, my domain was already beyond salvation, for I could not even bid. And at $60 for a minimum bid, I had very little chance of getting far. It turns out, sadly enough, that my domain was snatched and parked, squatted upon and it will sit as such until next year.

Where hope arises
Being rather impatient and in the mood and desire to continue on my project, I decided that I would go about looking for alternative names, available and unpicked, to buy. There were several choices I could make, given the following criteria:

1) I wanted a .com domain name, no matter what.
2) I wanted the word ‘design’ in it.
3) The total length had to be less than 15.
4) No numbers, no hyphens, no nonsensical acronyms or abbreviations.

My choices were:
1) Try looking for another domain that would delete in the near future and make another bid.

Chances of this working were slim, but I had already paid $18.99 for the GoDaddy backorder and I wasn’t going to put it to waste. JustDropped offers a service to check recently expired domains for the above criteria, but it yielded no results. Whois.net offered a comprenhensive list of domain names available, but sorting through it was tedious and time consuming, and once again yielded mediocre results. This wasn’t going to work.

2) Find readily-available domain names

This seemed like a daunting task, but I was determined to find something. Enom’s domain name suggestion was useful here, whereby searching for a domain name also brings up a host of other suggestions based on dictionary terms that actually make sense. The recently dugg BustaName provided great results, though they were severely disappointing when it came to realizing that some of their ‘available’ domains were actually in redemptionPeriod or pendingDelete. That, combined with Dotomator, provided suffix and prefix combinations that seemed promising. NameBoy was revelatory, but disappointing.

3) Find out what the domains I wanted were worth

A lot of domain name appraisals cost a fair amount of money, and the free ones are largely self-evaluation-based. I’m not a big fan of appraising my own domains, because it seems relatively irregular and biased. NameBoy offers a free appraisal based on several unchanging criteria like internet market value and occurence, which makes it useful to compare several domains.

Updates

I’ve been under much duress lately dealing with domains (including letting a great expired domain out of my hands) and the like, but the results have been remarkably splendid, and I will write more when I have the time. In short, I have moved to GoDaddy with a three-year hosting agreement for just $82, and I will be shortly opening a web design firm targeted just for students. Look forward to it all, and sorry in advance for any bumps along the way.

Pacman Feed

I know Mozilla and IE have somehow agreed upon using the now-ubiquitous RSS 2.0 Feed icon, no small feat in itself. But my question is always: why does it have to be that way? Hence I have a few suggestions of my own, inspired by the fact that Pacman is perhaps the best representation of ‘feeding’:

and just in case you were unsure:

Feel free to use them on your own website, but please don’t ingurgitate my bandwidth. And while you’re at it, I’m curious as to where you put it, so do let me know.

What scares me about Web 3.0

Web 2.0 is such an over-used term that it seems almost laughable to brand a website as such. More and more websites are succumbing to it, though, as PayPal makes the inescapable transition and even the World Wide Web Consortium validator slides over. The design is nicer, cleaner, and, depending on where you look, sharper or rounder. It is undeniably 2.0.

But one can’t help but wonder what 3.0 may bring, if it ever should arrive. Like 2.0, it won’t be a revolution, but rather a slow yet evident change brought about by the unquestionable dying of certain trends and the rapid adoption and emergence of others. People will realize sooner or later that they have either the choice of jumping on the bandwagon (and risking the possibility of failure) or missing it altogether. What it will be is anyone’s best guess.

While some may claim 3.0 will be all about the semantic web, where computers read into content and decypher it just as well as we can, I surmise it’s something a little more simpler. The Internet of the yesteryear consisted of select people supplying the web with content, and the rest using it as reference or a means of communication. Web 2.0 emerged, and people are now responsible for providing the web with the exciting and dynamic content that enables all the good things like social networking. The Web as we shall soon see it, I presume, will be one where the web defines our very existence in it.

We already see some examples of it: Pandora is a music service that, based on your previous music choices, will help you find the music that you might enjoy, based on several criteria native to each song they play, such as song structures, folk influences, acousting instrumentation and key tonality. StumbleUpon video uses another algorithm to decide what sorts of video content you would enjoy based on prior viewing and whether or not you enjoyed them. Streamy, which opens to the public soon, employs the exact same principle.

It scares me to think that a website can understand what I like better than I can, not only because it means I waste time visiting each and every page that I come across just because it seems like something I might enjoy. It scares me to think that my musical choices can be calculated by some mathematical algorithm that selects the next song, which, it so happens, I enjoy as well. It feels as though my life can be characterized and controlled, left in the hands of a program that does not even require human intervention, just silently keeping tabs on the things I do, read, and see.

They say the Ring of Steel in London is freaky. I think the future of the web is even more freaky.