 I'm here with Dominic Mukesh who will be talking to us about domains of all kinds but also managing his own domain and then gifting domains which is interesting but I got a preview of this presentation it promises to be an awesome overview of what it means to have a space of your own online over time so Dominic we know further ado let me let you take this over I will remove myself and enter the presentation and hopefully I'll be jumping in throughout the course of the 15 minutes to chat with you about it so thanks for joining us well thank you Jim good morning good morning everybody or indeed any time of day you may be hearing this at so I want to talk a little bit about what I learned from the 20 years of giving domains as Christmas presents and also of course using domains for other purposes as well so I want to talk a little bit about my story and but I wanted to sort of share the lessons what you what I think you need to know things you need to avoid things you can do with all of this maybe some of the dilemmas you're facing and then also what's new in this space what's new letting us create websites based on domains so this is my story my first website I built in html handwriting html 1998 and it was hosted on a university website server just so many people's websites were back then and it of course started with that famous still the the looks and but in 20 in 2000 I bought my first domain bohemica.com to share teaching materials for check as a foreign language I've developed about 2005 I bought finally bought my personal domain I don't know what took me so long and I started buying domains just kind of a way of creatively expressing myself in a strange way perhaps and so I own the domain stretchpresscrack.com stretchpresscrack is a famous check sentence without any vowels and so I own that.com domain for that and now it's 2020 and I have about 30 domains to my to my name across various projects personally of things that I've bought for friends so so domain's kind of a part of of my life currently metaphor hacker.net is the one we're perhaps the most active we're as a blogger about metaphors but why is it that I'm owning so many domains is that well it's really good to have for email so you don't want to have those ad gmail ad yahoo perhaps and that's going to make it it makes it like looking much more professional have more control for example gmail go go anytime take away my ad gmail address if they decide so but I always own my domain so that's that's really good of course websites you want to have websites again that you can that you can host on a domain that you own your identity but I have also found domains being great gifts for friends I've bought them for friends who needed a website and have bought them for children for for new parents for their children as a gift sort of a christening gift and but I also as I said I sort of used them to express myself creative location I have I have kind of this notion of oh I wonder what it would be like to own a domain something something.com so I bought a few just on a whim on a whim like that so so those are some of the reasons and one of the things that I've realized when people sort of think about the web is they don't understand some of the key concepts about how the web works and that makes it difficult for them to conceptualize how domains work and what they do and so the first concept that I always like to tell people everything every web page everything you see on the web in your browser is a file that lives on a computer somewhere and the browser is just a piece of software that opens the file and shows it to and every computer that that file is on on the internet has a unique number it's called the IP address and the IP address however can change of that computer but what cannot change is a domain that you own and that domain is kind of a verbal shortcut so it's something that you understand as a human but also it's something that you can change on the background in your DNS server it can change which number it points to so you can move your your sites your files across all the also different servers and I do it all the time but the domain stays the same so people who want to come to your website don't have to remember a new number as if you're so changing your phone number so that's kind of where that comes from and but I'm finding that people still don't understand even the basics of how domains work you know what what the relationship is of that domain to a server so this is a slide I did back in 1998 when I first was doing training to people about computers back in Prague it's a check but it's kind of obvious you know how the domains work here's that this is the TLD or the top level domain or country domain and and then all the the names and the wwhcp and so on people still quite still don't understand that all that well even 22 22 years later but nevertheless that is something you know that is something that people people should understand so I want to still mention a few a few things about about that so here are some examples from a session that I've run so but Jim yes please no it's interesting I'm sorry I mean I promised you I didn't interrupt so a couple of things you know I started kind of getting my own domain and managing stuff as a as what they called in the US a blog father I got a domain name for my son and I started building a WordPress site around that and so that idea of the personal story you're telling is super compelling and on top of that I like the idea that you associate the domain name with a phone number because a lot of what my early kind of trying to get the idea like you to get people to think about this as a sense of their identity online I use the metaphor of the home so this is your house and the address that number address is actually a kind of shortcut or a metaphor for the actual physical server that you're on and so it's interesting to see how long you've been doing a similar thing of trying to educate and give people a certain amount of literacy around what exactly it is when we're talking about domains and hosting so super cool I am loving this yeah well thanks and you know it's a magical phone number though right because you own it and you decide who you know where it goes to unlike the phone number that that your company you know that your phone company owns and so it's a much you know you could have sort of moved that around for a long for you know and it's kind of like this virtual address that's it's great sort of magic of the of the virtual right so that you can move the house but this is the domain is like your perpetual forwarding address you know and it really hit me in 2006 when a colleague Alan Levine was leaving the Maricopa Community College yet I still follow him at cogdogblog.com and so he was like I'm taking all my work but it's still following with me and you can always follow me so it's not like when he had that tilde space or a university address all that stuff now either needed to be moved which you'll talk about how difficult that is but just lost and that idea of managing the work you've done is super super cool so I'll stop interrupting well no please please go on so so I just want to give an example of you can have an html file on your drive so if you won't have it as a you know a met take the metaphor and sort of physically embedded you can literally create an html file put it anywhere on your computer that call it dot html double the quantity will open your browser and that's just that's how all the web actually works and and the web servers what people call by web servers it's just literally a computer sitting somewhere you know under under Sundar Pichai's desk at Google there's there's a big computer where all of this is of course it's now massively virtualized and complicated but essentially it always boils down to a hard drive somewhere with a file on it and and all of this is literally when you go to my server com slash index html it's it's literally just pointing to a server that has a a path going somewhere you know sometimes it could be in a database for example on amazon you're probably just pointing to an entry in a database but that database is a file that's it somewhere on a computer or millions and millions of computers often the url has also junk around it that just literally helps amazon track you where it came from things like that so sometimes that's also worth knowing about and how these things work but again the the key thing to understand is that is that everything that comes before the first slash that is the server and that actually you can point to that with a number but that number can change whereas the domain as long as you own and pay for it you own it and so you can point it to those different numbers that's kind of how it works but but obviously you know there's this there's this quite a bit more to it but it's a bit of bit of magic so so how do you get one of these domains well you buy them where people call registrars and and that's makes it very simple you can buy a dot anything domain the dot something is called a tld or top level domain and that's and that is unfortunately a bit more difficult because that those are managed by different institutions and they have different rules different prices different for example different amounts of time you can buy them for so dot com you can buy for 10 years so other domains you can only buy for two years dot net i think is is one of those and then of course what's very popular these days is the country based tld so for every country has been assigned a top level domain like dot it for italy or dot cz for check republic or dot uk for for the united kingdom and it they can actually combine with names very so you've often seen you see domains like dot tv and that that's belongs to the country to fall which actually has only 11,000 people it's tiny island of the pacific but it's one of the main sources of revenue for for the government by farming out the domains because they're very popular in dot tv people somalia is popular in nowadays or ly for you know i have uh domains from from libya and i have a website called checklee dot com but but one of the reasons uh one of the difficulties with these domains is they're quite expensive and capricious so i was thinking about getting checked out ly but it's just too expensive it's it's it's not massively expensive but it costs maybe a hundred hundred dollars instead of ten dollars a year so i i really didn't end up being worth it italy is very popular colorful columbia dot com is not there so so those are those are some of the things that i think is is worth knowing about you know explore a bit look around see what other people are doing how they're expressing their their identity through domains and i always find that fascinating what people are doing there but there are some lessons that is that i've learned over 20 years and one of the lessons is that 10 year is literally nothing that's going to go by like this and it's like one of those sort of folk wisdoms but we bought a domain back in 2005 for a project called for a project that that was children as researchers dot com and i said well let's buy the domain for 10 years and that's you know that's forever and that's 15 years ago that domain is gone because the project of course is gone the funding is gone so so when sometimes when you buy domains for projects it's worth thinking in longer terms than 10 years and you can still find it via the internet archive dot com but there is a bit of a commitment when you buy a domain because it's not something just exists independently of you that requires payment it's also worth separating domain and hosting so when you buy a website hosting the host will very helpfully often offer to buy a domain free domain so they'll take care of all that hassle of buying it but remember if you want to make with the host you also have to move the domain with them and that actually that's that's the next point it's a transferring a domain can be a bit of a pain the register system for dns for domains i said the domain name system is a bit of a collage that's kind of a magical that it works at all but be be aware of the transferring domains register that's not simple and the other thing you can lose a domain and the one thing you don't want to do is lose a domain or even let it expire because i have people there are people are squatting on domain names the minute that something expires somebody will buy it up even if they don't need it so i've had some avalanche domains expire because i thought well i'm going to need it now but maybe it's an obscure name who would ever need it but it turns out somebody has bought it and they have it they've had it for 10 years because it's worth it to them they get a discount on it and they would like to sell it back to me and i don't want to buy it back so so that can happen to you don't let your your domain expire but also as you're doing all of these things always think about moving what is going to happen in five years what how do i move my identity my things with me so so choose your register wisely you know be be aware of all of these things that that may be happening don't let me discourage you from buying a domain do buy a domain but be aware of of all of these things and and you know i have to learn them over 20 years so hopefully i'm sort of giving you a quick heads up on on things to be aware of it's a great point i think the biggest pain point we have with people who are registering and using hosting is understanding the life cycle of a domain and you did an excellent job of pointing out there's so many different registrars all the country registrars deal with things like privacy how long it's in redemption when will it be deleted differently so depending on the domain extension you know the way in which you can get that domain back how long it will take to expire some are really useful for example a good indicator is the u.s has no privacy you can't have a private that u.s domain whereas you know italy it's built in canada it's built in so a lot of times the domain the regulations around a domain extension tells you a lot about the country or the organization that controls it's super interesting of course and any sort of committing sometimes when you do two different things you know it's it's the life cycle of the domain varies quite interestingly and and it's also it's also the privacy i don't have a slide about that but it's important to know if you buy a .com domain and you don't buy what's called the dna domain privacy with it and some registrars included by default some sort of charge you extra your name has to be registered including your address and phone number and yeah somewhere and then and then i for many years before i was too cheap to buy the domain privacy i was getting ended up being a lot of spam and because it's available to anybody who will send you offers pretending uh that there's somebody else and so there's a lot of phishing going on around people who own domain so you definitely want to keep it private yeah be aware of it and ignore all the offers that go around with it yeah we get that all the time people reaching out to us where now everybody who has a domain with us um privacy comes with it because just the phishing scares were too much yeah yeah it is and and so so many registrars now offer it for free but but some of the big ones some of the the historic ones don't have it and so there's some bit of handy jargon and i don't want to sort of over uh over scare people you know dns is perhaps the thing people should be aware because that often shows up as a field on your computer that stands for the domain name system domain name system and often on your computer there's going to be a a number that's going to that's going to point a dns server so for your computer to be able to actually find any domain it needs to have a name of a domain server domain name server and there are there are hundreds of probably uh hundreds of thousands around them on the internet and they're all interconnected for you to each other but you need to have be connected to one or or two to have one as a backup and so and your your provider will give you one usually but there's also you can sort of get some better servers google's offering one cloudflare others uh others as well uh and that so that's that's a useful term to know ip address is the ip address is the phone number for any server that's sort of that number that any any server on the internet has to have an x record it's very useful if you're if you're using your domain for email that's actually that's the part of a domain each domain has some the ip address associated with it it also but it can also have an mx record which is the bid that sells you does you want to send the emails and that's very handy if you want to move your emails around and then there's as you're sort of playing around with domains it's worth finding out about what a names mean and and c names it's essentially the way in which you can point to uh point to websites usually you want to do this sort of a the a name is the one that i i would prefer to use but the w w could be a c name that's just like a sort of a a name that points like an alias to a name but it's a lot more complicated but that that's well worth knowing so those are just some of the those things that i sort of as i buy my domains and manage my domains that kind of those are the terms that come up very often and i sort of find it useful knowing a bit more about how they work so finally it's my last word on this is what is new in this space so when i started it was all you know it wasn't brand new but it was only about so 10 years into people owning their their own domains and and there's a lot of this was unknown new companies were emerging and i hosted my first sites in this as html that i went to drew pool custom based but right now i think that the gold standard is wordpress for hosting on the actual server so so when you're when you're pointing to when you when you're pointing your site uh what your domain to somewhere you point it to a server that has hosting those pages and wordpress i would say is perhaps the best content management system for blogging and everything you can it's open source you can host your own or you can use another company who will host it for you but there's a lot of competition so so even though i would say if you're not sure go in wordpress it's really good to move away from move to move around with so i quite like like it about that there's a lot of competition there's a whole sort of you know sort of lots of innovation in this space that i quite like and one of the bits that i have now started using i use notion as my notes taking software it's a note taking software and project management software but they allow you to actually map any part of your any part of your notes space as into a website and so i'm using something called using a company called cloudflare that's managing a lot of a lot of a lot of the infrastructure of the internet these days and offering many free things you can actually map your notion your notes your public notes onto onto a domain so actually i have been doing that for some for some sort of more trans transitional word that i've been doing and i'm really enjoying enjoying that and finally what's new in my life and this is a completely unsolicited plug for reclaim hosting because i have been with many many hosts over the years and always they're changing them based on how much work i want to put in but i have moved almost all of my hosting to reclaim hosting a few months ago just before christmas and i have found it to be a great experience really incredible really incredible deal so i've saved a lot of money and i've i'm saying that because i'm very impressed but also the one thing i like about reclaim hosting is that is that they use a system called cpanel as most hosts do but they offer many of the best and most interesting open source platforms for hosting our website and that i think is is is is sort of just worth for the price of admission because you can experiment with these things that i talked about so that's kind of the last word for me and that you know i have a final slide with just a few of the domains that i own if you want you know i have my lots of dotnet domains but some dotcom domains as well so so that that's that's me that's one of that's that's sort of the huge network of identities that i've strewn over the internet over the years but that's that's sort of my final word i have like a domain hoarding problem i think i have 60 something domains right now and it costs money right i mean it's it's it's like it's a financial commitment as well i spend i actually track it i spent 700 bucks a year on domains yeah and so like i just bought one for an arcade i want to build in italy called bavacade.it so i also been playing with extensions now because there's an explosion but i find it fun like the thing about domains too and all the work you're talking about which i think is marvelous is i have found it fun to build these spaces and track this space and i want to do a post eventually about all the domains in my life and each of them signify a project or an idea or a thinking so to me domains are also about tracking the development of my intellectual personal life in really powerful ways so domic this was an absolute pleasure so thank you so much for joining us today well thank you everybody and have a great conference awesome