Andrew’s Site

I put some thought into my domain name - although my site name is, well, to put it bluntly; unimaginative Here’s the sordid information just in case it’s useful to anyone…

The basic problem is; my name’s pretty common. In fact, a pianist in America shares my name, and Google brings up several additional people (oddly; Google.com puts me closer to the top…).

Notably, the domain names with my full name are all taken if mainly unused. One thing I did search out was that armstrong.co.uk was taken by a company - who changed names. They said they were keeping it for the foreseeable future however, which is a bummer.

Somehow, I doubt all the John’s, Peter’s, Alex’s, and Christopher’s get it any better off then me, since no doubt out of several billion people you’re not alone with your name

Armstrong is a little less common then, say, Grey or Smith or something, but everyone knows who landed on the moon and in the UK, Armstrong is a Scottish-based name, so is not uncommon. Not the best, but not the worst name combination.

So, what then? I didn’t want some random word - since I don’t have any aliases except for “Finaldeath” and “Jasperre” from my gaming (and both are pretty unsuitable for a personal website), and no nicknames apart from Andy, of course. I actually have an old site, Finaldeath.co.uk which I’ll hang onto for random stuff, and since it hosts a few files people use.

Therefore, I thought about other options; hyphens with my full name was a possibility, but made the domain name by itself a staggering 16 characters long (and usually taken!). I therefore chose a shorter version; aarmstrong, using the first letter of my first name and last name (Andrew Armstrong obviously). This works best because surnames work well on emails; having “andrew” prefix the email address meant using my surname was a must - having “andrew @ andrew.org” wouldn’t have really looked as nice, and is a bit confusing (leading people to use “contact@…” or “webmaster@…” or some similar “title” sometimes!). It works okay if it’s your full name - but as I said, it was terribly long! So, aarmstrong it is!

I checked with some friends, all thought it was okay (and try saying it out loud too - saying it over the phone randomly could be important at some point ); so now, the top-level domain choice. .co.uk seems okay since I am a UK resident - but I’m not strictly a company, and it is a personal site (although at some point I might grab it to redirect here if needed). So, it seems .org was the fit - since it is for non-commercial and personal use as a domain, and if I ever changed countries, I wouldn’t be looked upon as coming from a different country. Country specific versions of .org names (such as .org.uk) would be good if I never plan to travel, but I’m not old enough to say I’ll be settled in England forever just yet!

Sure, a bit random this post, but maybe someone who is looking for domains to buy will consider it useful

And at some point I’ll detail why I went for SSL, since that deserves a post of it’s own for randomness’s sake. I’ll also do a quick one on my logo, for what it is, and another on Wordpress themes and website layouts too, despite me barely changing the design of Barthelme, I might one day get cracking to redesign the site

(This was brought to you by me being board by revision!)