Tag: domain name

CX.MT

CX.MT

I’ve owned the domain MT.CX for 11 years now and as of today, I’m also the proud owner of CX.MT 🎉

I don’t know what I will do with it. In the past, I’ve used MT.CX for my blog, as a url shortener, for hosting random apps I built, etc. I might use the new one for similar purposes or maybe come up with something nice.

Maybe host an app at mt.cx/foo and write about the app at cx.mt/foo. I don’t know. I’ll come up with something. I’m just excited by the fact that I own both the versions of the domain.

CX.MT
MT.CX | CX.MT as illustrated by the artist MT

As soon as I purchased the domain, I wanted to see how many domains could be reversed this way, the name and the TLDs.

For the uninitiated, TLD is the top level domain. It is typically assigned to a country. But, you can also setup your own gTLDs. Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Mohnish, etc, each have their own.

So, I went through the official listing from ICANN here: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

As of today, the total stands at 1479. Since each TLD would be mapped against the remaining 1478 TLDs, we’d end up generating 2,185,962 such domains. Technically, some of them like blog.google & google.blog, com.microsoft & microsoft.com are already taken – including mt.cx & cx.mt 😁

Maybe I should form a club! 🤔 After all, there’re only about 2 million such combinations. Anyway, before I get carried away by my thoughts, thank you, Malta & Christmas Island for giving me access to this unique club!

Domain name purchase obsession

I love buying interesting domain names. I do that with the hope that one day, I end up using the domain name for one of my side projects or at least work on a side project after purchasing the domain name. Sometimes, I just think of an idea and come up with a good name for it and immediately buy a domain name for it (I blame domainr.com for making it so simple to lookup domain names). Due to various reasons, I don’t get to most of those projects. I end up hoarding the domain names. On one hand, I don’t let go of them and on the other, I feel guilty paying for the domain names and not even using them.

Realization

I realized that I was spending way too much money on domain name renewals on a yearly basis. It was a lot. I knew that I owned a lot of domain names, but, I didn’t really keep track of them. So, one fine day, 3 years ago, I opened up my domain registrar accounts and checked how many domains I owned. Across 3 different domain registrars, I owned a total of 62 domain names! Some were interesting, funny, creative, while some were stupid and some were just silly. Since, I owned a lot of domain names, I was marked as a VIP member by one of the domain registrars. I’d receive special discounts and offers that non-VIP members wouldn’t.

The Fix

The fix was simple really (unlike the realization). I could either sell all my domain names, which is a tedious process and requires a lot of patience or I could let them expire. The latter seemed more appealing to me and so, I let my domain names expire, one by one. Most of them are now registered to other owners. Also, I decided to only buy a domain name after I finish implementing the idea. I did that with my Money app and it worked really well for me. I still do hit domainr.com up, every now and then, but, I don’t buy domain names if I haven’t already worked on the idea. As a result of this approach, after 3 years, I, now, own only 8 domain names and I use them all.

Blog Changes

This year, I’ve decided to make a few changes to my blog and following are the changes –

SSL enabled site-wide

As you might’ve already noticed, my blog is now served over SSL. I’ve enabled SSL site wide here (mt.cx) & on my mohni.sh domain. You can too, if you’re using GitHub to host your blog. The whole setup is very simple, quick and free.

URL

My blog URL has also changed. I’ve decided to use https://mt.cx for my blog and https://mohni.sh for my profile page. I’ve used mt.cx as my custom url shortener for the past couple of years.

Update: I’ve updated my blog URL to use https://iam.mt

Continue reading “Blog Changes” →