Alan Levine recently put out a request for stories about domains as a part of the Ontario Extend project
What is your domain name and what is the story, meaning behind your choice of that as a name?
In part, my domain name comes from my interest in the notion of marginalia, the stuff that we write, but never gets written. As J. Hillis Miller explains:
As we read we compose, without thinking about it, a kind of running commentary or marginal jotting that adds more words to the words on the page. There is always already writing as the accompaniment to reading.
It was also inspired by a friend, Fiona Hardy, and her blog Read, Watch, Listen. My first incarnation was on Blogger, where I had to use Reading Writing Responding. Although I liked the active nature of this, it was just too long.
I also had a little help from some friends as a part of the Connected Courses MOOC:
@mrkrndvs come find me in the garage once you got it going. Am working on mine here marianafun.es Yeap. Awesome domain name 🙂 #ccourses
— ᴹᵃʳⁱᵃⁿᵃ ᶠᵘⁿᵉˢ (@mdvfunes) October 8, 2014
@mdvfunes I have such a common name 🙁 Domain is a challenge. Any suggested sites for finding a domain name etc #ccourses
— Aaron Davis (@mrkrndvs) October 8, 2014
@mrkrndvs @mdvfunes Cool domains can describe activity, interest; one student chose http://t.co/1DhyON3Zog. Love that domain.
— Gardner Campbell (@GardnerCampbell) October 8, 2014
@GardnerCampbell I told @mrkrndvs similar things. Geeks dream of domain names 🙂 my dream is http://t.co/frG2W7agWE ego alive and well!
— ᴹᵃʳⁱᵃⁿᵃ ᶠᵘⁿᵉˢ (@mdvfunes) October 9, 2014
@mdvfunes @mrkrndvs The domain name is the title on the spine of the book of you in the public library of life. #ccourses
— Gardner Campbell (@GardnerCampbell) October 9, 2014
@mrkrndvs @mdvfunes Give it time. Let it drop a while. See what bounces back. Give it time. #ccourses
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 9, 2014
@cogdog @mdvfunes Alan are u saying go w/ it, let it grow & develop? I think I might. Kind of suits my Sunday drives. My meanders. #ccourses
— Aaron Davis (@mrkrndvs) October 9, 2014
@mrkrndvs @mdvfunes I was in same spot in 2002. I shelved it let my mind wander elsewhere. cogDogBlog emerged FWIW. #ccourses go meander
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) October 9, 2014
@cogdog @mrkrndvs the dog is right! domain names are art! they need the unconscious to flow 🙂
— ᴹᵃʳⁱᵃⁿᵃ ᶠᵘⁿᵉˢ (@mdvfunes) October 9, 2014
What was your understanding, experience with domains before you got one? Where were you publishing online before having one of your own?
My move from Blogger was initially about finding a place of my own. I saw a domain as being an opportunity to renovate and stick up posters without the landlord coming through for inspection. The wider ramifications for having a domain had not even crossed my mind. Not only could I have a space of my own, but in fact have infinite spaces, each with their own purpose.
What was a compelling feature, reason, motivation for you to get and use a domain? When you started what did you think you would put there?
Initially my attention was my primary site. However, my interest in (sub) domains was piqued as I opened the door to the #IndieWeb and the idea of POSSE. I setup an instance of Known and started using it for posting images to Flickr. This is one of the ways I have found self-hosted different from WordPress.com or Blogger. Although you can add a domain to both platforms, when it is your own space, there is so much more you can do with it.
What kinds of sites have you set up one your domain since then? How are you using them? Please share URLs!
Beyond my main space, I have created a number of sites for various purposes. They have included:
- Aaron Davis – Built on Alan Levine’s Big Picture theme, I designed this space as a landing page for my presence on the web. My own version of an About.me page.
- Read Write Wikity – Built on Mike Caulfield’s Wikity theme/platform, this space was about developing knowledge over time. It is an extension on social bookmarking.
- #WhatIf – Interested in the possibilities and potential of Known, I started a short blog to record ‘What Ifs’. This is partly influenced by Amy Burvall’s #rawthoughts and Ian O’Byrne’s own short blog IMHO.
- Read Write Curate – A Known site developed in my exploration of POSSE.
More recently I have made some effort to condense some of these spaces into a secondary site, Read Write Collect. In part this stemmed from my interest inreclaiming the presence on the web. One of the limitations is that webmentions can only be attached to so many sites, so that is why I moved much of my content into two spaces.
What helped you or would have helped you more when you started using your domain? What do you still struggle with?
What has helped me is having continual support from Reclaim Hosting. Not only do they help in resolving most of my technical issues, but they also have a wealth of resources too. If there is something that I still need to work on it is archiving some of my older sites as static HTML, as well as sharing resources across my sites.
What kind of future plans to you have for your domain?
I am sure there will be cases for spinning up a new domain to test a new application and/or theme. For example, I am interested in PressForward as a means of organising research if I ever went further with my studies. Overall though, I am pretty happy with how things are at the moment.
What would you say to other educators about the value, reason why to have a domain of your own? What will it take them to get going with their own domain?
It is easy to create a WordPress.com or Edublogs site and add in your own URL. This will often alleviate concerns around updates and security. However, the effort required in maintaining your own space seems a small price to pay for the power and possibility it can provide.
It feels like every time I tell my story I add something different. I am sure that there are parts I have left out or failed to elaborate. If this is the case, feel free to leave a question or a webmention. The conversation only starts here.
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Read Write Interview – Telling the Story of My Domain by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Last week I posted some “interview” questions for educators who have their own self-hosted domain; here are a few first responses.
My idea for doing this is to give some wisdom of others who have gone down this road to our participants in the Ontario Extend project supported by eCampus Ontario.
These participants working towards their collection of module badges, and more generally looking to network with other Ontario educators, are blogging their work. And we are aggregating posts in our own blog hub. Many are getting their blogging chops going with free, hosted blogs, but we have available for, those ready for it, the chance to have two years of hosting their own domain, all provided by eCampus Ontario.
Still the question is, beyond the what, but why? So in the response bin:
Sandy Brown Jensen (mindonfire.us) is an artist, storyteller, long time community college teacher in Oregon, and ds106 participant. In her domain interview, Sandy gives a why
as well as a poetic rationale
Thanks Sandy! Through connections, Sandy and I have become friends, and we have visited each other’s homes.
From Scotland, primary school educator John Johnston (johnjohnston.info) titles his response A Kingdom of One’s Own.
I got to know John too through DS106, and his clever inventions, experiments, and playfulness with media has been my fortune to know. On a trip a few years ago to Scotland, I got to sit in John’s kitchen and geek out in person.
Like many, John did start out on free services (blogger) but eventually hot his own domain. His urge to consider domains rings to his nature as a real Experimenter
Colin Madland (madland.ca) educator and technologist in British Columbia also answered the call for responses.
I guess these are all people I know, as I got to meet and work with Colin in 2014 when I had a fellowship at Thompson Rivers University.
Colin has two domains and a collection of sites with in. His reasoning for having a domain includes:
Aaron Davis (https://readwriterespond.com), k-12 educator in Melbourne Australia, is someone who I’ve crossed paths with many places online. I got to meet him in person last November when I visited Melbourne.
Aaron is very much a technical experimenter and is very interested in affordances of this thing called the IndieWeb. He was very much influenced by a network of educators, and made a leap from Blogger to his own domain:
And also, I added my own response, as I believe in doing the very thing I ask others to do.
Pretty much you can see that people who have responded so far are ones from my learning network, and that alone says a lot about cultivating a thing. And there is irony, that every one who responded is someone who these online connections led to in person meeting, and friendship as well.
Chris Aldrich (https://boffosocko.com/) has a domain name I love, one with a story involving Muppets, one that makes you curious.
And now we get into the category of People I Know Online and Have Yet to Meet.
Thanks for your interview responses, Clark.
Chris is an active advocate and practitioner of the Indie Web movement, like just that selecting this chunk of text in his post, offers not only a means to annotate it with Hyothes.is but also a url to deep link to the selection:
I can totally nod in agreement with the metaphor of Commonplace Book:
And I must just end up wholesale quoting Clark’s post:
That last part is not strictly related to domain, but there is a connection.
I’d love to hear more! If you are participating in Ontario Extend and your blog is connected to our hub just post with a tag of
whydomain
and the magic of tags will add it to our collection. If you are from elsewhere, please tweet to @ontarioextend with a #whydomain hash tag (see responses).I’d sure love to hear more stories, especially from people I don’t know.
And for closing, I reference a post Aaron linked to, from API Evangelist Kin Lane (kinlane.com) about Many Perspectives On Internet Domains
Featured image: Many-Perspectives-on-Internet-Domains-Kin-Lane.jpg by Aaron Davis used as his blogged response to the interview questions
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