A long winded reader answer with a bit of my Internet history
Posted By RichC on June 20, 2020
A couple weeks ago I shared an old automotive link from MyDesultoryBlog.com on Twitter and one of my automotive buddies sent me a private message asking about the name of my blog (now nearly 7000 posts). The conversation had me contemplate the early decisions and thoughts .. or lack of thought .. when all of this web-stuff was just getting started.
For me the “archiving” (therefore myarchive.us) process started because I needed to save files for my printing customers after preparing typesetting and art all in one place. We could save the desktop publishing files safely so jobs could be re-plated and reprinted. We started using ,“small by today’s standards,” external hard drives, 5-1/4” and 3-1/2” floppy disks and eventually Zip Drives, SyQuest carts and the Apple SuperDrive. Like VHS tapes, I have boxes of them without a computer capable of reading the disks, let alone format of the files. Things were changing rapidly back in the late 1980s and early 90s.
As the Internet came to life, saving compress files online became possible. Using commercial services was cost prohibited and even leased server space was costly .. but in the mid-to-late 1990s competition started to drive the cost down and it looked like there might be a way to even market this “archiving” service and make my CPPNET.com client files available online … and digital PDF versions for their customers.
Over time our Consolidated Printing and Publishing Co started to do a little more than just archive the “printed” products on line, but could actually build and host our client’s website. We really should have been much more aggressive, but my conservative business nature of “profitability” clouded the risk-taking side of growing the business even if taking losses. Who knew the Amazon nonprofitable “bookstore” online model would be so successful? (on the other hand, A LOT of upstart DOT.com companies failed doing that?)
Back to the domain names: Obviously in the early days of the InterNET, the brilliance of using the Consolidated Printing and Publishing initials … CPP … with NET from Internet became our lame domain name – CPPNET.com. One would have thought that I would have been much brighter considering I was registering bushels of domains for people in the early days (and still do it). Thankfully the squatting practice paid off well on several of the domains I registered, held and sold. A few required legal assistance since we were bridging new ground with trademarks, etc. I still think the advice to price a domain at about what the legal cost for a company to fight was sound … thanks again to intellectual property and trademarking attorney Conrad Pitts.
Less descriptive domains were more difficult to challenges so the rush was on to grab the ones that looked popular ‘in the day’ … i- and e- this and my- that in front of a descriptive word were fairly popular. In 2003, the rise of a social network site call MySpace.com elevated the stature of My- whatever … hence setting up our servers which housed “my” customers “archive” files. It is still used for files today, although not the way it was in years past. When I started my blog on that server in 2005, it started as just another “subdomain” space on myarchive.us …first blog.myarchive.us and then richc.myarchive.us. (See web.archive.org Wayback Machine image above)
As the next decades began, it was looking like I was posting daily and that this blog thing might continue. Subdomains are fine, but this now needed its own name. I realized unlike most “topical” blogs of the day, my personal blog wasn’t exactly on only one topic … it was “desultory” … and so the MyDesultoryBlog.com name stuck. I registered it in 2011 and moved the WordPress CMS site own smaller server … while keeping most of the linked data scattered across several archived servers (a big headache … to solve someday).
Obviously, this was FAR more explanation that any reasonable person desires to know!
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