Vanity web address
I probably haven't posted enough here to warrant it yet, but since i have a blog that I'm posting to occasionally, I finally broke down and purchased a vanity web address: troygaul.com. (Hmm, maybe I shouldn't have put a link to that page here yet since I haven't built a real page for it yet...)
I originally had wanted something more general, like gaul.com, but all of the interesting variants of that were taken. For a while in the past I owned gaul.cc, but at some point that lapsed and now someone else owns it. It seems like using first and last name for a web address is pretty common these days, however, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon.
One of the other reasons I bothered to do this is that I've recently been working on a new "toy project". This project, a Mac OS X front end application for the Cisco VPN service that we use at work, has been a lot of fun and I'll blog more about it in the near future. Anyway, the manner in which it fits into the vanity website issue is twofold:
First, when making a new application for Mac OS X it is necessary to provide a "bundle identifier". This is a string that is supposed to uniquely identify a product, and is used for things like the preferences file name. The way Apple recommends people assure this uniqueness is to use a reverse domain name. In my case, that would be com.troygaul.ProductName (this is an approach that was made popular by Sun's Java, which suggests it for package names). If everyone does this and uses names registered for a website, then it works pretty well. It was fairly unlikely that even if I didn't officially register troygaul.com that my identifer would not have conflicted, but I still thought it would be prudent to do so.
Second, I wanted to be able to post builds of my project for my coworkers to download (the project itself doesn't make use of any company-specific code or anything, so I thought it would be okay to put it on a publically available website rather than only posting it internally), and I wanted to be able to send them a URL that I would continue to maintain in the future, and that would "look nice" (by some definition).
So, all of that resulted in it just being the right time to make this change. It has also given me yet another project to work on, as I need to produce some HTML pages for my main page and for the VPN project. It also gives me a place to put up some other web pages I've been meaning to produce (like a list of the electronics we have that we'd be willing to sell, since every now an again someone asks us about that).
Hey, it might even encourage me to post to my blog more often, and that can't be a bad thing, right?
I originally had wanted something more general, like gaul.com, but all of the interesting variants of that were taken. For a while in the past I owned gaul.cc, but at some point that lapsed and now someone else owns it. It seems like using first and last name for a web address is pretty common these days, however, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon.
One of the other reasons I bothered to do this is that I've recently been working on a new "toy project". This project, a Mac OS X front end application for the Cisco VPN service that we use at work, has been a lot of fun and I'll blog more about it in the near future. Anyway, the manner in which it fits into the vanity website issue is twofold:
First, when making a new application for Mac OS X it is necessary to provide a "bundle identifier". This is a string that is supposed to uniquely identify a product, and is used for things like the preferences file name. The way Apple recommends people assure this uniqueness is to use a reverse domain name. In my case, that would be com.troygaul.ProductName (this is an approach that was made popular by Sun's Java, which suggests it for package names). If everyone does this and uses names registered for a website, then it works pretty well. It was fairly unlikely that even if I didn't officially register troygaul.com that my identifer would not have conflicted, but I still thought it would be prudent to do so.
Second, I wanted to be able to post builds of my project for my coworkers to download (the project itself doesn't make use of any company-specific code or anything, so I thought it would be okay to put it on a publically available website rather than only posting it internally), and I wanted to be able to send them a URL that I would continue to maintain in the future, and that would "look nice" (by some definition).
So, all of that resulted in it just being the right time to make this change. It has also given me yet another project to work on, as I need to produce some HTML pages for my main page and for the VPN project. It also gives me a place to put up some other web pages I've been meaning to produce (like a list of the electronics we have that we'd be willing to sell, since every now an again someone asks us about that).
Hey, it might even encourage me to post to my blog more often, and that can't be a bad thing, right?
