Quips Notes - 15.03.05

This actually sounds like the start of one of those from-the-hip jokes that are told over beers: A guy goes to refer his website, signs up to make that happen, yada, yada, yada, badda-bing. Except that it's not one of those jokes. I'm the guy. And, I did go to the CIRA site to find out how to register a new URL for my site that could be used as a referal address. The current web addy for my movie reviews website, Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips (http://www.geocities.com/iamstephenbourne/moviequips.html), is a long one, and likely tough to remember. However, I didn't really want to change it, considering that I've spent the past couple of years passing it along and posting it to various search engines. I don't want to lose those links, or have to go back and update them, if possible. I've got enough of a job ahead of me in updating the ones from about three years ago that cite pages at The Nail Online that don't exist anymore (sigh). So, I figured registering a shorter address and simply making that new URL a redirect to my site would be the best short term solution. Besides, I like the idea of staying with geocities, having been with them for about ten years.

CIRA (www.cira.ca) is the Canadian, government-run department for registering internet domain names. However, if you go to their site, you'll soon discover that they don't actually deal directly with you at all. You need to hunt through CIRA's list of authorized associate agents - mostly ordinary online hosting companies offering to register your domain for a fee as a sideline - and then contact them to do what you went to the CIRA site to do in the first place. Once again, my tax dollars hard at work...

At any rate, I did that. Figuring that going local would make common sense for my wants. Going so far as to set up a separate email address, when I discovered that the chosen company didn't like yahoo or hotmail email addresses. I registered my shorter domain name, with .ca instead of .com, and then prepared to pay the fee before their deadline. Well, payment didn't happen. It didn't happen immediately, because the 'secure page' for credit cards came up blank. And, it didn't happen through snail mail, as it turned out. It wasn't much of a monthly fee, but something else came up, and the fee didn't get paid. Stuff happens, y'know? However, the punchline is, I guess this local company owner wasn't too impressed with my non-payment. Seeing as the email address that I supplied has been inundated with over three hundred spams in the course of less than a week, I'm guessing he was a tad miffed. Upgrades, software, sex, drugs, music. You name it, I've probably gotten a spam email from somebody trying to sell it to me. Telling me that it's just as well that I didn't pay this local owner anything, if he's so hard up for cash that he'll sell my email address to spammers out of spite. Or, perhaps it wouldn't have mattered if I had paid on time. I might have been spammed like this anyways. It's sad, really. However, live and learn, right?

I'll still go ahead with registering a shorter domain name for my site - through a more reputable company, if I can find one - but, it'll likely take a little longer than I'd planned. More stuff has come up over the past week or so that needs sooner attention than that. Primarily finding additional sites where I can submit my movie reviews to as a regular contributor. It's tougher doing that, considering the glut of movie sites out there that appear to have been abandoned for one reason or another. But, finding at least one more good site is far more important to my plans than whatever ease of marketability that having a shorter URL might give me. We'll see.

Thanks for checking in.