Blogs & Domain Names
A brief history of Vaneeesa, blogs, and domain names:
- 18 April 2009 — VB-01, Girl Next Door performed
- 22 April 2009 — I created a blog on Blogger to document performances & related materials
- 23 July 2010 — Ze Moo convinced me to put my blog where my Free Culture mouth was and move to Open Source WordPress
- Date Unknown — vaneeesab.wordpress.com became irez.me (when, where, what were Vaneeesa.com & VanessaBlaylock.com??)
- Date Unknown — lots of new authors joined irez.me and wrote about Second Life and other Virtual Worlds
- 3 October 2012 — blog moved from WP.com to WPEngine
- Somewhere in the late 2010’s — my credit card for domain names lapsed
Oopsy!
About that last one. When your credit card for Domain Name autorenewal lapses you lose your domain name. And it would seem that there are bots out there that crawl for such things. Or, who knows, maybe your own Domain Name Registrar just keeps it. Whatever it is exactly, when you lapse, somebody takes your name in hopes of charging you thousands of dollars to get it back.
Where are they now?
Moving Forward
As you might have guessed, I won’t be spending thousands of dollars on squatted domain names anytime soon. The good news is that the original handful of TLDs (Top Level Domains) like .com, .org, .net, .me, and so on, plus the country codes, like .uk, .tw etc, have been joined by thousands of new domains like .ninja, .rocks, .sucks and many more. So there’s always a fresh vaneeesa.sucks or irez.sexy to be snatched up for less.
Actually, it turns out that “vaneeesa.sucks” is $330/year, and “irez.sexy” is $13,000/year. So, I won’t be getting those either. The URL of this blog, vaneeesa.xyz is $12/year, and irez.uk is $11/year – slightly more affordable for the avatar on a budget.
Interesting Question (IQ) I believe when it was released some years ago, the .sexy TLD was $40/year. When did it increase to $13,000!? And, if you had the old $40 one, would it stay at that rate? Or would you be given a price increase ultimatum? If they decide to raise the price of .xyz from $12/year to $1,000/year, do I have to move again?
Meanwhile:
- WPEngine has taken our content down (# of missing posts – unknown)
- 678 posts by me and the other iRez authors are still live at WP.com (22 April 2009 – 3 October 2012)
- I’m currently working with WPEngine to get out stuff back online
- I’ve got a new “irez.uk” domain name ready for all our hopefully reunited content
- Blogging is so fun!
Geez, Van. That’s a shame about iRez. It happened to my old Blogspot account as well. I closed the account and Google sold the name to some enterprising soul. I hope you find your way through the maze. I dropped by your coffee shop in SL a couple months ago, but lately I’m all in on Fallout 76 gaming. If you ever join, let me know and we can team up. Hugs and love always! Your pal, Yordie
Yordie! I’ve never visited Fallout 76. Maybe a field trip someday.
It’s a bit of a mess with the URLs and the databases and the different web hosting companies. But I think we can pull all the bits together and get it all up again. There’s 678 posts just at WP.com and IDK how many more at WPE. Wild guess, maybe 200 more, so about 900 posts total from a whole bunch of SL avatars and a handful from peeps from other worlds that I met through blogging challenges and such.
During the few years I was on SL hiatus my credit card lapsed at the Domain Registrar and that’s mostly the source of the troubles. Although I also know that there were link/file issues – when the content was migrated from WP.com to WPE a lot of things still pointed to files back at WP.com. So we needed both sites to be alive for everything to work. Messy!
Anyway, I’m trying to get everything back up and then organized as cleanly as possible all on one host/server. I’ll keep you posted!
Happy August, Yordie! Keep cool! 🙂
Update! I actually got in to our iRez site at WPEngine! Everything is there and more-or-less good, I think! Woo!
Turns out there’s only 40 new posts in addition to the original 678 posts that are still good back on WordPress.com, for a total of 718 posts. There are also 33 draft posts. Not sure if we should try to resurrect those or perhaps just give them a respectful burial in the Blake Sea.
Oh, and we also have 12,000 spam comments that I need to try to get rid of! 😛
Next step: getting the 40 new WPEngine posts reunited with the Original 678 posts over at WordPress.com
Trying to resurrect ancient history is surprisingly stressful! Perhaps I should get a straw hat and a nice recliner and go relax around the Blake Sea, or Vanessa’s Coffee Shop, for a while!
OMG, the plot thickens!
I have 2 old “mystery” websites over at WPEngine. I though 1 was iRez.me, and 1 was Vaneeesa.com
Turns out – BOTH are iRez.me!?!?
Huh???
The 1st that I wrote about above had the WordPress.com 678 + 40 = 718 posts
The 2nd, also iRez!? has more! The WordPress.com 678 + 287 = 965 posts
Also the 2nd one doesn’t have 12,000 spam comments, only real comments. Phew!
I guess now the plan is to make sure there’s nothing at iRez WPE v1 that we need, and then send it to the bottom of the Blake Sea.
And then to work toward Reunification — Like Germany, yay! Or Korea, yay! But not like Russia annexing Ukraine, boo! Or Taiwan, boo! — reunify the 287 “new” posts over at WPE iRez v2 with the original 678 posts at WP.com
So easy & fun!!! Yay! 😀