Choosing my domain name: AArmstrong.org

AA-logo

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!)

One thought on “Choosing my domain name: AArmstrong.org”

  1. The SSL thing is a bit odd, I noticed it the other day… you are basically wasting CPU cycles on your host encrypting your blog for every single visitor. I hope you have a decent hosting plan for that. Also, I’m betting that you aren’t getting well crawled by the search engines. Google doesn’t seem to have much more than your homepage. I guess a Google Sitemap would fix that for Google itself, but I’m curious how many crawlers bother to deal with SSL-encrypted sites…

Comments are closed.