Domain transfers: 1and1 to GoDaddy

Frankly, I’ve got more domains than sense, but I have an abiding interest in evaluating online services. Domain registrars are among my favorite targets. I have registered probably dozens of domains for myself and others over the years…and keep transferring them between registrars to keep my overhead costs low.

I’ve already written a column about the information you need to collect before transferring a domain from one registrar to another. Here are the steps I went through to transfer two domains I had at 1and1.com to GoDaddy.

Day 1

The first step is to go to the registrar you want for the next year. You pump in your domain names and they’ll tell you the domains are already registered. There’s usually a link that reads “I’m the owner of these domains and I want to transfer them.” If not, there’ll be another link that reads “Transfers” where you can put in one or more domain names you want to transfer.

In this round of transfers, GoDaddy offered transfers at $6.99 with a one-year renewal on the domain, so I signed up to transfer two domains, a .info and a .com, currently registered at 1and1.com. The order confirmation comes through in a confirmation note almost immediately. I’d clicked like lighting to get the transfer registered, and repented at leisure. Two domains at $6.99 equals $13.98, right? Wrong.

..............................................................

QTY ITEM PRICE

--------------------------------------------------------------

1 .INFO Domain Name Transfer - 1 Year $7.19

1 .COM Domain Name Transfer - 1 Year $7.19

$7.19 each? Not $6.99? Darn GoDaddy. I forgot they slap on an “ICANN fee” surcharge of 20 cents. They make it sound like a tax. It’s not a tax. It’s GoDaddy being mealy-mouthed about passing on their cost of doing business to their customers. A few other registrars do the same, and it always ticks me off because it’s basically a dishonest way of making your prices look lower than your competition’s. But GoDaddy’s a bit of a cowboy operation that way. From their blustering CEO downwards, GoDaddy seems like an operation that’ll do whatever it takes to get customers—in good or bad taste, honest or deceptive--as long as they stay basically legal. But they offer a pretty good price and set of features, so I’ll stick with them for now.

Minutes later, I get another e-mail:

To complete your recently requested transfer, we must receive approval of the administrative contact currently associated with the domain name(s) below, which we have determined to be proxy1237839@1and1-private-registration.com. A request for approval has been sent to that address. If you believe the email address is not correct, you must visit your current registrar and have it updated.

I’d forgotten something else. My .COM domain was registered anonymously with 1and1. It’s a great free feature of theirs. I thought I had to change the Admin content, but minutes later, I get another e-mail from GoDaddy:

DOMAIN NAME TRANSFER - Initial Authorization for Registrar Transfer

Re: Transfer of .COM and .INFO

Dear Oneandone Private Registration,

GoDaddy.com, Inc. received a request on 3/3/2009 for us to become the new registrar of record.

You have received this message because you are listed as the Registered Name Holder or Administrative contact for this domain name in the WHOIS database. If you are not the Account Holder, or you are transferring the domain to a new owner, please forward this email to the appropriate Account Holder so that they may complete the transfer process.

1and1 apparently forwards to their anonymous account holders. Excellent…and less work for me. (Why did I choose GoDaddy over 1and1, I began to wonder).

The next step is for me to follow a link in this email to a transfer acknowledgement page run by GoDaddy. It contains a request for an AUTH code, which 1and1.com keeps secrete on the domain administration page for the domains I’m transferring. I log in there, get the code, pump it into the transfer acknowledgement page and my work is done. All I need to do now is wait…and wait…and wait…

Day 6

I get another Transfer Acknowledgement email from GoDaddy. Didn’t I do this already? Well … apparently not for my .INFO domain.

So “to complete your recently requested transfer, we must receive approval of the administrative contact currently associated with the domain name(s) below”, so I do that.

And wait…and wait…and wait…

DAY 12

Oh, frabjous day! I get my confirmation telling me that my domains are officially now at GoDaddy. Twelve days for a transfer’s about right. I always give it at least four weeks in case there’s some kind of problem. And there almost always is. Yet somehow, here is how the e-mail started:

=====================================================

DOMAIN NAME TRANSFER CONFIRMATION

=====================================================

Congratulations! The transfer request for the following domain name(s) has been completed

Could I possibly have got through a domain transfer with no problems? I’ve had lots of them in the past. I’ll blast past some crucial step and find out a week later that the whole process has failed. Then I’ll have to go back at get a credit at the new registrar, and then start the process all over again. It’s a nuisance I’m anxious to avoid.

I read the confirmation e-mail over one more time, just to set my mind at rest. It didn’t. Naturally, I’d forgotten one crucial final step, which GoDaddy reminded me about:

IMPORTANT!

IF THIS DOMAIN IS NOT CURRENTLY HOSTED, follow the instructions below to change your domain name servers to our parked servers. By doing so, you will avoid possible charges from your prior registrar and enable your domain's new features now that your transfer is complete.

Agh! When you transfer a domain from one registrar to another, it transfers the complete record…including the Nameservers that host the domain. I’d had the domain hosted at 1and1 for ten months and not really done much with it. The $60 a year in hosting fees had seemed pretty reasonable, but I’d not actually developed the site at all, so it actually amounted to flushing sixty bucks a year down the toilet. And with the six-month billing cycle coming up, I had cancel the hosting fast.

So I did. And by doing so, I averted a billing disaster.

The whole process, including two days it took to cancel hosting and get a pro-rated rebate on the hosting I’d already paid for was two weeks. My domains were now safely over at GoDaddy, where I turned on domain forwarding so that anyone tapping in the address would be brought straight to an existing web page on another server.

One of the domains comes straight here. Another goes to another blog I run. And it’s using free blog services like these that saves me sixty bucks a year (and countless hours of mucking around in HTML) in developing a Web site to go with each of my domains. So maybe I do have more sense than domains. But on the other hand, I do have quite a few domains.

Happy birthday, dear Unix

Lordy, lordy, look who's 40! Happy birthday, Unix -- you're looking great for your age. You certainly weren't the first operating system on any platform, but you managed to stride from the minicomputer era into the microcomputer era and the personal computer era, winning fans wherever you went. How many other operating systems can make the same boast?

With your birth as our starting point, then, let's look at the biggest desktop OS milestones of the past 40 years.

1969

Unix was brought to life on a spare DEC PDP-7 at AT&T Bell Labs. When AT&T decided to abandon the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) operating system on its minicomputers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie cobbled together an operating system so they could continue to play a space travel game that Thompson had developed. A colleague gave the system a jokey name based on Multics -- UNICS, the Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, which morphed into UNIX or Unix.

1976

Intergalactic Digital Research's maverick brain Gary Kildall creates CP/M, a simple microcomputer operating system for simple microcomputers. It would be the model for command-line DOS variations for two decades.

1977

The godfather of open source is born when the Computer Systems Research Group at UC Berkeley releases a variant on Unix called the Berkeley Software Distribution. BSD will ultimately spawn alternatives to some commercial microcomputer operating systems -- and form the core of at least one major commercial operating system, Mac OS X.

Tandy/Radio Shack introduces a line of affordable home computers, and debuts a family-friendly operating system called TRS-DOS with such Rated-M-for-Mature commands as KILL. Other companies' versions of DOS substitute the less menacing DEL command, for Delete.

For the rest of this story, head on over to Computerworld.com!

Outlook could not install the custom actions

The latest funtime error from Outlook 2007 that has crossed the crash/reboot help desk is this:

Outlook could not install the custom actions. The object could not be found

This tenacious little error message popped up for our long-suffering admin staff every time they tried to open a message or create a new one. As you can imagine, it got irritating very quickly.

It's because of a corrupt Forms cache, which needs to be deleted. The fix runs like this:

1. Close Outlook.
2. Under C:\Documents and Settings find the folder for the user who's experiencing the problem.
3. Make sure under the Tools, Folder Options menu that system files are not hidden.
4. Navigate to \Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\FORMS, and delete the file FRMCACHE.DAT.

Then clear out and restart Outlook. You'll get a quick flashing dialog telling you that the form is being regenerated, and everything should be fine.

Domain transfers: Step 1

You've got a Net domain. You are something-dot-com, or dot-net or dot-info or dot-something else. And you were pretty happy about it, too, until someone else bragged about what a great deal his domain name was. He registered his domain for half the price you paid, and he's got e-mail forwarding and a Web presence and a blog with his own domain name on it.

You've got...a domain name.

Don't worry. One of the best-kept secrets of the domain world is that you're not stuck with the registrar you picked last year. You can transfer any domain you've got successfully from one registrar to another...as long as you get all your ducks in a row beforehand.

Before you start a transfer, log in at your current domain registrar, navigate to the domain management pages, and pay attention! Make sure you get through all the details in this checklist. If you've already started a transfer, don't panic. Just get cracking on these details quickly. You've got a few days to get it all straight.

(a) Check the start date. Make sure you’ve had the domain for at least 60 days. ICANN won’t let you transfer a domain that’s been at a registrar for any less.

(b) Check the expiration date. Make sure there’s at least two weeks left on the registration—preferably a lot more. Any less, and the domain may expire before the transfer is complete.

(c) Check the contact information. Make sure that you are listed as the domain’s Admin contact, and that the contact information is current.

(d) Check your e-mail. Make sure that you’re able to receive e-mails from your old registrar—you’ll be doing a lot of e-mail monitoring in the next few days. To ensure that your old registrar isn't being spam-filtered, make a minor change to your domain record—add your middle initial to your name, or change the format of your phone number. The domain registrar will automatically inform you of any change—if you get an e-mail from them, you know you’re okay.

(e) Get your Auth Code. An Auth Code is a special password required for transferring .com, .net, .info, .org, .biz, .name and .us domain names. Look for the term Auth Code anywhere in the domain administration site. Each registrar handles these codes differently. Some put them right there in the domain record (1and1,com, for example). Others, including GoDaddy, make you click on a link and send Auth Codes by e-mail. DirectNIC used to make you open a trouble ticket in its private support message area and give it to you there. Whatever your registrar demands, do it before you start the transfer process, and keep the Auth Code on hand. You’ll need it later.

(f) Cancel any extra services at your old registrar. If you got your domain as a package deal with a hosting package, you may end up getting billed for hosting services you no longer use. When transferring domains away from 1and1,com, for example, you need to visit cancel.1and1.com, sign in using your account number and password, and fill out a cancellation form. Then you need to respond to an auto-generated e-mail and log in again—or 1and1.com will continue to think you’re still a subscriber.

(g) Unlock your domain! Most registrars lock your domain by default. It's a sensible precaution against unscrupulous domain-nappers, but it does mean that not even the legit owner of the domain can do anything with it. Make sure the domain is unlocked and click on Save. You'll get an e-mail about this, and it may make you confirm your choice. Once you have...you're done with Phase One of the process.

Now keep all your details handy, and get ready to monitor your e-mail carefully. You’re ready for step two: Starting the transfer.

[to be continued]

On the Download: Biennesoft's YouTube Downloader 2.1.7

Whether you're interested in enjoying ukulele versions of your favorite Ramones songs or studying the wartime speeches of Roosevelt and Churchill, YouTube has got you covered. But if you want to enjoy those videos on your iPod or a laptop without Internet access, what are your options then?

Or if you're a teacher trying to string together some source material for a lesson or extract a classic speech from someone's hokey slideshow--what can you do?


I'll tell you what: You can download Biennesoft's YouTube Downloader 2.1.7. It's a simple program with two main functions: First, it downloads the Flash video files from YouTube and Yahoo Video and Daily Motion and a host of other video hosting sites. Then it converts that video into something you can play on your PC, Mac, iPod, cellphone, or PlayStation Pro.


YouTube Downloader looks deceptively basic, but it has hidden depth. A lot of thought went into making it easy to use--and Biennesoft doesn't even charge you money for all that work. You fire it up, go to YouTube or another video site, copy the URL of the video you like to the Clipboard, and when you switch over to YouTube Downloader--there's the URL, snatched straight out of the Clipboard.


Click the download button, and it gets the video onto your hard drive. Here's the good bit though; once the video is on your computer, you click the button again, and it converts the video from the FLV format into something you can use: iPhone, iPod, PSP, AVI, WMV, and Xvid. Or it can extract the soundtrack from a video and make an MP3 out of it. There's even a basic video editor that lets you crop out bits you don't like.


I've known people to jump through many hoops to perform the tasks that YouTube Downloader handles in two clicks. I've been one of those people. Thankfully, now I can devote all the time I used to spend in getting videos onto an offline player actually enjoying them.


List price: Free
Where to get it: http://download.cnet.com/YouTube-Downloader/3000-2071_4-10647340.html

On the Download: Defrag, De Whole Frag, and Nothing but Defrag

Hold onto your propeller hats, team, I'm about to rhapsodize over a defragmentation program.

No! Wait! Don't click away from the page! I know that recommending a defragger is like recommending a dental floss. It's not exciting. It's not even interesting. It's tool for a chore, for goodness sake. But stick with me, here. I'm serious about this. If Smart Defragger 1.11 were a dental floss, it would keep your teeth shiny and your breath sweet and it wouldn't leave stringy bits between your molars. It's really that good.

So why bother talking about hard disk chores like defragging at all? Well, it's amazing how fast Windows and its applications frag up your hard disk. And you'd be surprised much faster a computer can run when you optimize a badly fragmented disk. And it's not only about speed: In the lab I was managing six years ago, heavily fragmented disks caused programs to crash and lose work for dozens of frustrated students. Defragging cured the problem right away.

That's why I have a two-step plan when anyone complains about how slow or flaky their system is running. First, fire up MSCONFIG and weed out all the dross that loads when you start up Windows. (Yes, Adobe Reader tray icon, Microsoft Office loader, and Real scheduler...I'm talking about you.)

Then defrag the disk.

The trouble is that Microsoft's Windows Defrag program is like the Victory brand goods in George Orwell's novel 1984: The only show in town, and pretty darn awful. The trouble is that nobody wants to pay extra to get decent third-party defragmenter, no matter how elegant and efficient it is.

So let's see whether I can persuade anyone to try out Smart Defrag 1.11. Put away your wallets. It's a free download, with no strings attached. If you want to toss a donation at IOware in gratitude, they'll take it. And they deserve it.

Smart Defrag is really darn good. It takes up almost no RAM, so it's good for old creaky systems as well as spanky new ones. It analyzes and defrags at a zippy pace on any Windows platform from 98 up. It can be scheduled to perform routine defragmentation at specific times of the day (say, lunchtime). And it can performa a deep optimize that organizes your hard disk's contents so that the most frequently used files are at the front of the line, ready to load fast.

It's also ridiculously simple to set up: Run it once. Set an automatic defrag time. Forget about it.

That's all, folks. Simple, free, and without fuss. And it won't let your system slow down over time or crash for no apparent reason. So do yourself a favor and get it.

And don't forget to floss.

Don't Buy My Domain! An Epilogue

The story so far: I put up an old domain for auction. Fourteen months later, it sold. A month after that, I got paid.

It’s an odd thing, but you never forget a domain that you once owned. I have registered dozens over the past few years. Some I developed. Some I registered for other people, and helped them to develop. And others, I let slip through my fingers.

As a case in point, a decade ago I was called upon to register a domain for a how-to article for PC World. At the domain registrar (Register.com, if I remember correctly), I typed the first thing that came to mind--my own name--and found the domain was available. I registered it, but I never intended to waste good money and time actually developing it. It expired a year later, and it's had one careful owner ever since. (I assume he has the same name as me.) I still check back on that site from time to time to see how it suits him. Frankly, it fits him better than it ever fit me.

So over the 16 months that have passed since an entrepreneur in Pune, India, bought a domain from me at auction, I have checked back periodically to see what's going on. I have an intellectual curiosity, of course, but I also have a mild tinge of paranoia—I originally registered that domain along with one other for a side business of mine, and I’m wondering if I sold a plum domain name to a rival who’ll take away my business.

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. Every time I have visited the site, the same sight met my eyes: an Under Construction sign. I’m not a great businessman myself (I flogged my only cyber-asset for the price of a dinner and a night in a three-star airport hotel), but I somehow expected my buyer to have grand plans. I almost hoped for a worthy rival who would spur me on to great heights in my side-business. But it was not to be. In fact, last week when I pumped the URL into my browser Address bar, nothing happened. There was no Under Construction site. There was nothing.

I nipped over to my favorite state-of-the-domain site, BetterWHOIS.com, where anyone can check up on the status of any domain. There it was in black and white: The domain I sold 16 months ago had expired on January 19th. It was in a status called RedemptionPeriod.

The end of life for a domain is a complicated procedure. Like all things to do with the domain name space, it’s regulated by ICANN—the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. After a domain name expires, the registrar (in this case, GoDaddy) has 45 days to notify the owner that their domain name is going to be dropped from the registry. This seldom happens by accident—most registrars default to an automatic renewal setting. But if the domain name is dropped, ICANN guidelines call for a 30-day grace period during which the owner can reclaim it. After this grace period, there’s another holding period, after which the name is dropped from the registry and anyone can claim it.

I’ve had dealings with GoDaddy for years, and they can sometimes be a bit slow about things. It took them more than a month to pass the payment over to me, for example. So I have no idea how long it’ll take them to release the expired domain. Conventional wisdom says the term is 30 days plus a 5 day holding period, but they’re already more than two weeks past that. Another piece of conventional wisdom is that the registrars don’t let anyone know when they’re releasing domains because there are sharks circling in the pool that expired domains drop into.

The domain drop pool is full of drop-catchers—professional domain speculators looking for saleable domains. You could hire one to snap up an about-to-drop domain if you were desperate to get it. In fact, GoDaddy will gladly charge you $80 for the service. I considered hiring them on for about three seconds. But that service is too pricey and too speculative for my tastes. Besides, it has a faint whiff of conflict of interest to me.

So I’m going to wait for the domain drop to happen and take my chances. But just to be on the safe side, I will continue NOT to tell you the name of the domain I’ve been blogging about all this time. I don’t want to fight with any of you over this thing. We’ve got too much history together.

But as usual, I'll keep you posted with any developments.

Buy My Domain, Episode 3

The story so far: I had a domain for almost two years, didn’t use it, and decided to try and sell it. The auction failed, so I kept it listed at GoDaddy’s aftermarket sales site, and waited. And waited. And waited.


The time: Last year
The scene: My e-mail inbox.


Dear Matt Lake,


You have received an offer for Item Number 1XX2O27 in the amount of $250.00. Log in to your account to view the offer.


It took me a couple of seconds to understand what this email was all about. I nearly trash-canned it. Then I cast my mind back 14 months and remembered: I’d put an old domain up for sale. And now, someone was trying to buy it from me. Well, there was a turn-up for the books.


I scrambled to look through my notes and noticed that the bid was considerably lower than GoDaddy’s estimate ($622 or higher). But it was higher than Afternic’s estimate of $200. And it was more than three times more than the $79.95 I’d sunk into the project.


So on one hand, I wasn’t an online entrepreneur of the order of Filo and Yang, Jeff Bezos, or Steve Case. But on the other hand, I’d made out better than if I’d stuck the cash in a money-market, or just spent it on outsized latte drinks at Clusterbucks. So I decided to take the money.


I had 72 hours to respond, so I hied myself over to GoDaddy’s Domain Name Aftermarket and started in on the process. Little did I know, it would take a month of waiting around and responding to various emails, and frankly, it was a bit irritating.


Day 1
I accepted the bid. Within the hour, I got the delightful message “Congratulations! The domain name Item Number 1XX2O27 has sold! Please do not accept any transfer requests of this domain at this time!”


I am told to wait and let GoDaddy handle the transaction. They’ll act as an escrow agent to ensure everything goes smoothly. This sounds good to me, so I wait.


Day 3
GoDaddy is pleased to inform me that they have received the proceeds for the sale of my domain. I am to log on and contact the buyer to begin the domain transfer process.


To do this, I must first unlock the domain to allow the domain transfer to proceed. Then I must collect the buyer’s account information to enter into a form somewhere on the site. This I do.


Day 5
GoDaddy sends email to tell me that I have initiated a change of registrant for my domain. I already knew this--I was there after all--but at least they're acknowledging the fact. Two days late, true, but they're acknowledging it.

Day 12
GoDaddy sends me another email with slightly different phrasing to tell me that I have initiated a change of registrant on my domain. If I meant to do this, I don’t need to do anything more. Yep, I did it alright. Nine days ago.


Day 18
GoDaddy tells me that the change of registrant went through. A second email dated one second after the first one tells me I have cancelled my account for the domain. I do a double-take on this one, and then realize that it’s a good thing. So I wait for the next dispatch--and my money.


Day 19
GoDaddy sends me a courtesy note to tell me that the whole transaction will be completed on a date ten days in the future.


Day 24
GoDaddy sends me the exact same courtesy note to tell me that the whole transaction will be completed on a date five days in the future.


Day 29
GoDaddy tells me that the transaction is completed. That’s great.


Now…where’s the money?


Day 34
GoDaddy PayPals me the money.


So there we have it. Nearly sixteen months after I started this process, a polite entrepreneur in Pune, India, paid me $250 for my domain. It wasn’t a coup like the sale of business.com to RH Donnelly in 2007 (that netted more than $300 million), but it was good enough for me.


The question was: Was it good enough for my buyer? What did he want to do with the domain now that he acquired it?


This all happened more than a year ago, so I’ve been tracking the domain ever since. So I know exactly what he did with it. And I’ll share that information with you. A little more promptly than GoDaddy shared the revenue for the sale all those moons ago.



[TO BE CONTINUED]


My balance sheet:


Expenditures: $29 in registration fees; $39.95 in appraisal fees; $10 in membership fees; $12.50 in Godaddy sales commission; various state, federal, and business taxes.


Total expenditures: $91.45 total plus tax

Total revenues: $250


Net gain: $118 minus tax


Total hours expended…who knows? But I’m sure that divided up, I earned roughly minimum wage out of the deal.

Buy My Domain, Episode 2

The story so far: I had a domain for almost two years, but didn’t use it. Instead of letting it expire, I decided to try and sell it. A couple of days of research later, I had an idea of what to do and what to charge. Now read on.

The time: A couple of years ago
The scene: GoDaddy's domain resale site, The Domain Name Aftermarket (now auctions.godaddy.com).

Two days into the auction, I realized that my domain wasn’t going to the center of a bidding war. GoDaddy's certified appraisal system had valued my 11-digit dot-com domain at $622 to $1,617. The market was valuing it at nothing.

I figured I'd try to add to its curb appeal a little to see if I could get close to the appraised price. Step one: Put up a nice little welcoming Web page. Instead of displaying generic "for sale" or "parked" signs, I put up a sample live page demonstrating what the domain could be used for--and, of course, slapped a little "for sale" link leading to the domain auction.


Brilliant though this ploy was, it failed to elicit a single bid at auction. But it did improve the look of the lot, so it seemed like a good thing to do. And so did goosing up the listing a little, though this wasn't as easy. The Domain Name Aftermarket allowed 255 characters to describe an auction lot. Even to someone trained in the noble art of making text fit into highly designed magazine pages, that's quite a restriction.

Then I had a brainstorm: Why not get more hard evidence of my domain’s value? Why not get a second evaluation? At the time, TDNAM was a new kid on the block. Afternic was the grand master of domain name resale—they’d been around for a decade longer than Godaddy’s site. So I threw good money after bad and paid $20 at Afternic for a second appraisal. And it hurt. Afternic reckoned that the current market value of my domain was $200. Ouch! That was less than a third of what GoDaddy had estimated. Afternic reckoned that the domain's potential market value was $1,100—with significant development, of course—and that was about $600 less than the top end of TDNAM's evaluation.


But I’m an honest seller and wanted to look like one, so I cited Afternic's appraisal URL in my auction listing. I thought this made me look like a man with nothing to hide, one who showed due diligence, and one who wasn’t out for a quick buck. Exactly the kind of person I'd like to buy from.

Because it cost me as much as a hardback book, I actually read the advice Afternic sent along with its appraisal. It was generic but it reinforced what I’d already worked out for myself:


· Include the fact that you've had your name appraised. It lets potential buyers know that a third party has assisted in estimating the value.
· Feel free to use all or part of your appraisal notes.
· Always have your domain names pointed somewhere. When someone types in your domain name, have it point to your auction page, your domains-for-sale site, or even a one-page site with your contact information.

Check on the first and third items. I even made a nod to the second item in the one-page site I’d put up. So I'd now followed the best advice of the old lags in the market, and I upped the curb appeal on my little corner of the domain real estate market. I'd done just about everything I could to raise its profile short of taking out an ad in Computerworld.

And all this work increased the number of bids at the auction from zero to zero.


So I shelved the project, but kept my options open. I kept my membership in GoDaddy’s aftermarket site, renewed my domain for another year, and left the domain for sale at Godaddy.


Someday, I reasoned, someone would want to buy that domain.


I was right. But that day wasn’t coming anytime soon.


[TO BE CONTINUED]


My price tag so far:

$29 in registration fees; $39.95 in appraisal fees; $10 in membership fees

$79.95 total

Buy My Domain, Episode 1

A few years back, I registered two domain names for a side business and wound up using only one of them. Instead of letting the other name go, I decided to try and sell it. This is the tale of how I priced it up, sold it, and saw what the buyer did with his investment. It’s a convoluted tale, and it’s going to take several blogs to tell. But stick around: There are dollar signs and a bit of a chuckle at the end of it.

To begin at the beginning: I registered a domain for $15 at Directnic.com, transferred it the following year to Godaddy.com for $7, and sat on it for six months. Then I asked myself the question: Where can you sell domain names? A couple of years ago when this story began, the obvious choices were Afternic and Godaddy’s Domain Name Aftermarket (which is now called GoDaddy Auctions). They're still the obvious choices.

A quick look at these venerable domain aftermarket sites taught me two things:

1. People do buy second hand domains
2. People who sell them ask ridiculous prices for them, and seldom get them.

Something about TDNAM.com appealed to me: It had buyers. They were actually paying a couple of hundred bucks apiece for such names such as coffeefair.com, endsuffering.com, and my personal favorite, kungfujesus.com. My domain wasn’t quite as catchy, but it was short and businesslike and well-suited to a real moneymaking market. So I thought it stood a chance of making a modest profit.

To make sure I didn’t price myself out of the market, I needed to set a fair price, and that was the problem: What's a fair pirce? Luckily, most domain name aftermarket venues charge a small fee to analyze a domain name and figure out what the market will bear for such a name. I paid five bucks to get an automated appraisal from TDNAM.com, which shared some good news: This site (a GoDaddy property, remember) reckoned from a superficial analysis that the domain could fetch somewhere between $722.00 and $2,094 on the open market.

But how realistic is that figure? TDNAM.com didn't really explain their calculations--and the range was huge--so those figures could have been plucked out of thin air. However, TDNAM did offer a higher-end "seal of approval" appraisal for $14.95. This certified appraisal gives you the right to flag any domain you sell in their marketplace so that prospective buyers can see the appraised value.

The news wasn't as good this time around. The appraised value of my precious cargo was now $622 to $1,617--a C-note off the low end and almost a grand off the high end.

But at least it gave me a access to their appraisal methods--and these are valuable to anyone who wants to speculate in the domain name market. In a nutshell, these are the important factors:

Short domain names sell well; names with numbers, letters, and hyphens do not.

Words that are in vogue help jack up the price of a domain; generic names less so.

A dot-com domain will sell better than any other extension, such as .net, .org, or .biz.

And that's about it. The rest is in the details.

So there I was with a domain in my portfolio appraised between $622 and $1,617, ready to bring it to market. The question: When the gavel dropped, would it fetch anything near the appraised value?

[TO BE CONTINUED]

My price tag so far:
$22 in registration fees; $19.95 in appraisal fees
$41.95 total

Sites mentioned in this article:

Directnic.com
Godaddy.com

Tdnam.com-now Auctions.godaddy.com
Afternic.com

I want my MPC--but I'm not going to get it

In my capacity as a consumer journalist, I've researched and written many articles about technical support. The subject fascinates me. I've gone undercover as a writer to test technical support service--a kind of secret shopper of the tech support world. I've even gone undercover a support professional--and continue to act as a support professional for a number of clients.

For many years, I had no qualms about recommending Gateway very highly for its support. Their computers were fine and fairly priced, nothing too special, but nothing bad either. But all other things being equal, I used to recommend Gateway to more or less all my clients without reservation because Gateway support was so stellar.

This started to go south in the fall of 2007, when Gateway divested its corporate support division to an ID-based company called MPC Computers. Opening a trouble-ticket or getting driver downloads, which had been as simple as entering a serial number at gateway.com, turned into a multilayered morass of spawned browser windows. The support transition seemed to go badly for everyone. Dealing with MPC was as frustrating for its own front-line support staff as it was for the callers.

Shortly afterwards, underlying trouble began to surface. In May 2008, MPC received a notice from the American Stock Exchange stating that they were "not in compliance with Section 1003(a) (i) of the AMEX Company Guide, in that the company's stockholder equity had fallen below $2 million dollars." By late October 2008, MPC ceased to be traded publicly. By November 7, 2008, the company declared bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, many of my sources have griped about getting minimal or nonexistent help for in-warranty Gateway woes. It's been frustrating on one level and sad on another to see how far the mighty have fallen.

If there's an upside to this--and it's a very minor one--it's that MPC Computer will be liquidating its assets in a 3-day public auction in Nampa, ID, starting next Wednesay at 10am. The auction will also be webcast, so if you want to snap up bargains or just watch the aftermath of a train wreck , check out www.mpccorp.com for details.

Batch Conversions R Us

If there's one thing that makes the blood boil around my place of work, it's having everything you need...but in the wrong file format. I get more irate calls about having a video that "worked fine on my Mac, but it's not working on this Windows machine" or someone fretting that "I have two hundred spreadsheets from Microsoft Works and Office 2007 can't open them."

Many complaints circle around the .docx format from Office 2007 not working in Office 2003, but that's surprisingly easy to handle. The real pain is distributing MOVs to Windows users who don't want to install Quicktime, or handling batches of antiquated data in abstruse file formats. (Ami Pro docs anyone? Works database files?)

I have two relatively cheap programs in my quiver that have proved invaluable.

For hard data files, Dataviz's Conversions Plus has been a staple of my software toolkit for more than a decade. It can translate all manner of obscure file formats into something you'll recognize, and power through gigabytes of old files in minutes. It's plain, it's simple, and it works. End of story. Except that it's about fifty bucks to license the download.

For video files, I have been using AVS Video Converter for about a month. MOVs, AVIs, MPEGs, WMVs...it handles them all. Of course, re-encoding video takes an age, and you need to know your output settings to prevent something you want on DVD coming out formatted for an iPhone, but AVS seems to have the task in hand. It's about sixty bucks to license the download.

My only gripe is that Dataviz's program doesn't yet have Office 2007 formats in its quiver. I hold out hopes...

Office compatible? Kinda

Last June, I reviewed three software suites touted as compatible with Microsoft Office for Popular Science. I said then, and I still say, that if all you need is the ability to word process, make spreadsheets and presentations, then using Google Docs, Zoho, or OpenOffice beats giving Microsoft your money.

I stand by that, but last weekend, I found all three of these applications deficient in one word processing task I do all the time in Microsoft Word.

That task is search-and-replace on paragraph returns. I've had to repurpose so many documents that have paragraph returns at the end of each line that I can twitch the solution in Microsoft Word.

It's a three-step process: Replace the two paragraph returns with a string of characters that you know won't exist anywhere in the document (I use four @ signs). Remove all the other paragraph returns and replace them with a space. Then reinstate the true paragraph returns.

For good measure, you then remove all instances of two spaces, just in case you inadvertantly introduced them. Unless there's any hyphenation in the original document, you should end up with a perfectly formatted document at the end.

Of course, you need to know one more trick: Microsoft Word's secret code for a hard paragraph return. It's ^p (shift-6 gives you the circonflex symbol, followed by a lowercase p).

It's a great trick to use in Word. But as of 28 Feb 2009, it didn't work in Google Docs, Open Office, or Zoho.

Okay, Sun, Google, and Zoho, I know this is an incredible obscure feature, but couldja add it, huh? Huh? Huh? It'll make at least one user happy.

It's not a reason to upgrade, but...

Vista came pre-installed on a notebook I'm evaluating, and I'm not used to the keyboard. This led to an error that turned out surprisingly pleasant.

While using my favorite old Windows trick--Alt-Tabbing between open windows--I used the wrong key by accident. And my mistake was witnessed.

I held down the Window key and hit Tab. All my open windows formed a neat little line, stacked diagonally across the screen, and with each new hit of the Tab key, a new one marched to the front. It's eye-candy (which I usually shun as a waste of system resources), but the person staring over my shoulder was really taken with the effect. And now, I find myself doing it all the time.

Why? Because of the philosophy of William Morris, the famous Victorian commercial artist. He said "Have nothing in your home you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." And frankly, Window-Tabbing is both.

The antidote for dumb mistakes

Everyone has experience an uh-oh moment. You do something mindbogglingly stupid. You know you've done it. You wish you could undo it right away.

...and you can, kind of. In practically every situation you find yourself in Windows and Windows software, and in most Mac apps too, remember: Control Z.

Hold down the Ctrl key. Press the Z key. Presto!

The last thing you did is undone.