You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn’t changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.

Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom’s attic.

Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in ‘01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.

The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name’s cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one’s self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it’s time to clean some house and shorten some lists.

Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.

So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I’m setting an iCal alarm as we speak.