Mourning the Loss of My Domain Name

It’s been over a year since I’ve posted anything. In the summer of 2010, I went a period of time without home access to the Internet and made little to no effort to get online. Big mistake! As a result of my blatant lack of respect for keeping up to date on my electronic communications I missed the opportunity to renew ownership of my blog domain name. Ouch!

When I first realized that this happened, I thought I could easily buy back my previous domain name from the current owner. I tried to find out who owned the domain name, but the ownership listing is anonymous. I got the message. This person was in the business of picking up domain names from lax owners and selling them back for an inflated price. It makes total sense that this person would not want to be listed. If you’re doing something to take advantage of others, why would you want people to know your name?

On the parked webpage that used to be my blog is a Go Daddy ad, ready and willing to facilitate this buy-back process. After reading up on this procedure I chose not to go through with it. I would have to pay what I considered an outrageous fee just to make an offer for the domain name plus whatever price the current owner would want as payment. On top of that, there was no guarantee that I could even get back the domain name. Either way, Go Daddy gets paid. Boo! There’s no way I’m supporting them, because I made a stupid mistake. I really didn’t want the expression “paying for one’s mistakes” to be such a literal reality for me. At this point, I felt extremely upset and frustrated, but did not think all hope was lost.

I thought I could wait it out for a year and buy back the domain name, but when the time came, the name was still taken. Ugh! After consulting with a buddy of mine that deals with domain name purchasing, I agreed that the best thing to do was to simply add a dash to the domain name and move on. My anger and frustration changed to sadness, with a hint of optimism. There was no one to blame except for me in this whole situation, so there was no need to be mad. I truly felt sad that I had to make the domain name change, plus I was annoyed that I had to go about the web adding a dash to all the URL links back to conditional cognition. I learned that hard way that the business of domain names is a dog eat dog world.

So, here I am, once again reentering the blogoshpere. I’m excited to reconnect with those fabulous blogs and bloggers (found on my blogroll) that I’ve enjoyed reading in the past and look forward to reconnecting with them. I will continue to stick to conditional cognition’s core beliefs and hopefully create wonderful posts like those considered to be conditional cognition’s best reads by many readers of this blog.

Be smart and hold onto your domain names!