A friend of mine registered a website late last year and, after describing to me how easy and cheap it was to do these days, I decided to do the same. It was an impulse decision typical of the way I do things sometimes and I wasn’t really thinking ahead. So I had to make the first choice, what domain name to go for?
Choice one – my name. Unfortunately some Australian has already taken ‘johnconners.com’, even though there isn’t (currently) an actual site there. He’s just taken the name so nobody else can use it – the git. So that was out. My problem was that I hadn’t thought through what I wanted to put on the site, so I just decided on something relating to my name. After a bit of consideration I went with ‘jbconners.com’ (as you know).
I didn’t put anything on it for a few months (other than a picture of my v-shaped back) and I pretty much forgot about it.
Some time later I started to discover weblogs out there and I found them quite interesting. Lots of people from all over the world writing about their lives, their thoughts and their views. After some thought I decided to start one of my own and began by writing about where I lived and took it from there. It’s fun and I feel my writing has improved (believe it or not I’ve been using this as an opportunity to work on my narrative skills – still a long way to go). But I’m still stuck with the name ‘jbconners.com’, which isn’t really very catchy to say the least. I’ve toyed with the idea of registering a new domain name, moving my content over there and mapping the current name to the new one.
But I’ve decided that it doesn’t really matter what the domain name is. What I need is a better site name. I still like the tag line ‘The adventures of a Scottish software developer living in Yorkshire’ so I’m not going to change that. But a site name that goes with it… Oh, and it can’t be ‘John’s Adventures’ (which I considered) as that wouldn’t make sense with the tag line, i.e.. ‘John’s Adventures – The adventures of a Scottish software developer living in Yorkshire’.
Any ideas? Post comments below if you’ve got any sensible suggestions (and any stupid ones would be cool too). I warn you that my current favourite is ‘John Knows Best’. The winner gets the choice of either a genuine Scottish pound note (surely a collectors item), a signed A4-sized photo of yours truly, or nothing at all (which would no doubt be most people’s choice).
Were you being arrested when that picture was taken? And if you truly were sorry, you’d not have put it there in the first place. How about “John’s Spots” – works all ways; dilemmas, danger, places and of course acne. I think it’s a winner.
I am sorry, it’s just that the pic illustrates what inspired me to put something useful on the site. And being the only suggestion so far, “John’s Spots” is the clear leader.
How ’bout “Tales of the Unexciting” 😉
OMG, I think we have a winner!
That V shape back, it is, of course, a lowercase v.
Nicely done Neil.
Hey John, you claim your HTML is W3C 4.01 Transitional compliant but it doesn’t validate – check out http://validator.w3.org. To be honest, I’m a bit worried about this.
Fear not. I’m well aware that some of the pages don’t validate (hence the lack of a compliance logo). The problem is that my content management software’s HTML generation for putting images in is non-compliant. I may even get around to sorting it out some day. Look on the bright side, 99.9% of browsers to this site are MSIE and it works sweet as a nut on anything as far back as Netscape 4 (I test it on most browsers and it seems fine). And is the content that boring that you run the validator over it? Ay karumba.
Ha! This site is now W3C 4.01 compliant!
Regarding a name change: All that are needed are a couple of well-placed quotation marks – here are 2 examples: The “adventures” of a Scottish software developer living in Yorkshire The adventures of a Scottish software “developer” living in Yorkshire. Still doesnt beat Tales of the unexciting though.
[quote]The adventures of a Scottish software “developer” living in Yorkshire.[/quote] Now that is harsh. 🙂
Harsh but fair. How about: The adventures of a Scottish software developer “living” in Yorkshire.
John I love your site and commentary.
My suggestion for your site is:
Yorkshire Adventures soft and hard!