iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky

After reading about rev="canonical" and all the hoopla about domain shorteners, I've decided to see how short of a domain I could get for my blog to avoid having people needing to use things like tinyurl etc... to reduce the lengths of URLs. The goal was to get a 2 letter domain with a 2 letter extension, an easy solution seemed to be the .me extension (Montenegro), but alas I could not find a single registrar that would allow a 2 letter domain registration (ia or ai, my initials). It seems most registrars or resellers use generic libraries that no matter what disallow registration of domains <3 characters in length. The reason for this being that most (but not all) registries typically reserve 1 and 2 letter domains. So even when the domains are available, you cannot register them. Fortunately, after some whining on twitter, someone from iWantMyName did some targeted marketing at me . Their site allows you to search through about 5 pages of domain extensions, and for about 1/2 dozen domain extensions they do allow 2 letter registration.

The end result, I am now a happy owner of ia.gd (.gd being the extension for Grenada), it was not particularly cheap $49 as compared to GoDaddy where a common extension can be had for $7-$9 depending on a promotion at the time. However, GoDaddy's domain search system blocks 2 letter domains en-mass, even if they are allowed, so GoDaddy's #fail is iWantMyName #win.