Mastodon October 2009 – Josh Hrach

More ‘DRoA’ Fun

I suppose there is one downside to owning several domain names: People like the Domain Registry of America spam you!  And, this isn’t the first time. At least this time, they had their actual name on the envelope.

As a courtesy to everyone that may read this, here are a few things to note about these renewals.

Don’t be fooled by them! It’s simply a practice known as domain slamming. They send you a notice, reminding you that your domain name should be renewed soon, but by signing up with them, you’ll likely pay more than you did for your domain name! If you’re not cautious, you may think it is a legitimate bill and pay it. Do not do that!

The best thing to do when you get a notice like this is to contact your web host or domain registrar personally. Anything regarding your domain name will be coming from them, NOT from the Domain Registrar of America!

Hopefully, these simple reminders will help you to avoid possible problems in the future!

In Memoriam: Geocities (1995-2009)

Remember when the biggest question on the internet was “Frames or No Frames“?

Well, years ago, when one wanted to run a website, there were few places you could go. Geocities, though, was one of them. They were like the friendly neighbor that was willing to let you use their lawn for free parking in exchange for advertisements on your car to their own garage sale.

Well, as many different sites and blogs have mentioned, Geocities is shutting down today. If you haven’t done so, try to back up your data immediately. Otherwise, it will all be gone!

Ever since the notice that Geocities would be shut down back in April, I’ve been thinking about all of the wonderful times I had with them. Ok, I didn’t have that many memories. Actually, I had very few. But still, Geocities was important back in the day.

For anyone that may not be familiar with Geocities, here’s a little history for you. If you wanted to host a website, say, ten years ago, you either had the few free services, like Geocities, or you had to pay quite a bit for your hosting. Today, we see a plethora of web hosts, which undoubtedly had a hand in killing Geocities.

I know, for my part, I had just one site on Geocities: The New Jedi Order. It was an attempt at running a clan back in 2001. My friend and I were big fans of the game Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, and so we thought we’d make a cool site to try and organize games with others. Well, that cool site only had two colors: black and neon green. Trust me, it does hurt the eyes.

While I’ve done much better with web design since then, I still will miss seeing my site on Geocities.  It’s so hard to believe that they’ll be gone so soon…

Geocities is survived by Angelfire, Tripod, and many web hosting companies.

Did you have a site on Geocities? Have any Geocities memories? Did you actually understand what the first question of this post was about? Please comment!

Thanks @IntoMobile (and dad)!

This summer has been interesting, to say the least.  I’ve already talked about the free MacBook Pro I won, courtesy of SourceForge.  My dad has been enjoying that quite a bit. He’s put his customization into it already, which I expected right away. Due to him winning a free one, we also made a little deal: We’d split the cost of another MacBook Pro. It seemed like a win-win deal, especially considering that he had one for free.

Well, before I won that, I had won a $200 gift card to the Apple Store.  That was thanks to a little giveaway that IntoMobile was running. Because of that gift card, I began seriously considering buying something at Apple. At first, it was just a passing thought. Then, I began to ponder the idea of getting a MacBook Pro and an iPhone (especially as the IntoMobile giveaway was due to the release of the iPhone 3GS).

Well, those thoughts have all come to pass.  I now have my nice new MacBook Pro and, with it, an iPhone. Hopefully, the two will go hand-in-hand for me as I work on making both of them worth the purchase.

So, thanks to IntoMobile for the $200 gift card! And thanks to my dad for going along with the idea. I think he’s enjoying his iPhone, too.

Now to get used to running iTunes… and owning an iPod (of sorts)…