What’s In A Name

About a year ago, I decid­ed I’d put a new face on my crusty old web site and start blog­ging. You’ve heard the sto­ry about how I start­ed on Blogger.com and then moved to host­ing my own Word­Press blog (okay, so Jason John­son & Dreamhost do most of the heavy lift­ing as far as that goes). Well, back when I was sign­ing up at Blog­ger, I need­ed a name for the site. It felt an awful lot like nam­ing a band, for some strange rea­son. Some peo­ple just use their own name, oth­ers come up with stuff that I have no idea what it means. Oth­er’s use some com­bi­na­tion or play on their names, which I real­ly like.

How­ev­er, I want­ed some­thing that sort expressed my engi­neer­ing side as well as the idea that this would still be a per­son­al site. Some­where, I decid­ed on the term super­struc­ture, which of course is the part of a build­ing or bridge above the foun­da­tions. How­ev­er, just the word seemed bor­ing and not quite tech/geek enough. Some­how, in my mind, adding a bit of ran­dom punc­tu­a­tion was just enough of a twist to make it dif­fer­ent. So the word super_structure was born. Lot’s of web pages, image files, and e‑mail address have under­scores instead of spaces to pre­vent that whole   or %20 thing. I thought that by sep­a­rat­ing the words, the word just had a dif­fer­ent emphasis.

Lat­er, I real­ized that while you can have an under­score char­ac­ter in the direc­to­ry or file name, you can’t have one in the domain name. I could­n’t ever use super_structure.com (or .org, .net, etc) because it was­n’t an allowed name. So, I just stuck with jasoncoleman.net while con­tin­u­ing to use super_structure as the title.

There was cri­tiquing, to put it nicely.

I final­ly decid­ed to try and make a change today. You’ll notice that the under­score has been replaced by an en dash char­ac­ter (ful­ly sanc­tioned for domain usage). I have also reg­is­tered super-structure.org Yeah, I know, would­n’t it be nice if they were both .net or .org, but just like dates to prom, the good ones are always tak­en when you get around to asking.

So, you’ll notice the uni­verse, at least as in regard to this Jason Cole­man, has now moved from super_structure to super-struc­ture, and what’s more, you can now just type super-structure.org into your web brows­er to get here. The re-direct is on me.

Note: Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as of writ­ing this in the wee hours of Sun­day morn­ing, super-structure.org was still just being parked by GoDad­dy. Hope­ful­ly, that will be cor­rect­ed soon. It’s all good.