Most of The Four Of You know what cybersquatting is, I think.
The other day I got the 90-day warning from GoDaddy that my domains, including good ol’ fredsmythe.com, are coming up for renewal. I’ve been tossing around some ideas for minor changes to the site anyhow (I really need to implement CSS, I want the archives on their own page instead of on that minimally-useful dropdown above, and does anyone with some artistic ability and a charitable spirit feel like making me a neato logo to stick in the upper left corner? Contact me if you do.), and in doing so I was thinking maybe I would register chezfred.com and direct that here too, just for the hell of it.
Well, this afternoon, during a slow time here at work, I decided on a whim to see if it was available. Imagine my surprise to find that chezfred.com had been squatted by some outfit out of Great Britain. I was amused to find that some Brit thought I was gonna pay a mint for a domain name for two reasons: 1) I don’t HAVE a mint, and 2) I’m nowhere near popular enough that the domain name is worth anything to me anyhow. The only reason I called it Chez Fred in the first place is because the restaurant menu theme was all I could think of at the time when I set it all up; I could yank all of that theme and just call it plain-ol’ fredsmythe.com and nobody would notice. So I giggled, satisfied that some squatter asshole had wasted their $8 or whatever their domain registrar soaked ’em for.
Then, out of curiosity, I decided to see just how widespread the Chez Fred name is, so I Googled it. This was the first hit. Oops.
That said, there are far worse things to share a name with than a British fish and chip shop, especially one that mentions on their menu: “If you’d like some more chips on your plate, please feel free to ask – there’s no extra charge…”
My kind of people.