Friday 23 May 2003

Pic of the day: They say weeds are the first to come and the last to go away ... But weediness is in the eye of the beholder, say I.

So you want to be a Chaos Node?

One of these days, my online journal is 5 years old. I have skipped a few entries during vacation, especially for the first years. But apart from that, I have been writing daily for five years. I cannot really prove that, though: Until November 1 1998 I did not have archives. I just called my files "sunday.html", "monday.html" and so on. (After all, I was just writing an open letter to my friends.) Only when I found out that there were other online journals in the world, did I also learn that you are supposed to have an archive. That was after about half a year of journaling.

At first, my journal was on sol.no (Scandinavia OnLine), later the name changed (for no good reason that I know of) to online.no, and all people who had me bookmarked or had noted my e-mail were left behind. I am happy to say that online.no seems to be still going strong. But my archives, or at least most of them, were moved to crosswinds.net. After much trouble, I finally gave up and moved them to dreamwater.net. This May I had to move to dreamwater.org, once again rendering all those bookmarks worthless.

If I had known all this, I might have got myself a domain name, like chaosnode.com or some such. Then again, perhaps not. Al Schroeder of http://www.novanotes.com has that, and now he has problems paying for it, and considers shutting down his entire journal (which is even older than mine). You can donate money to him if you want to avoid that.

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Interestingly, http://www.chaosnode.com/ is now registered, but not really used. "Coming soon ... maybe". Yeah, and maybe not. Sure, the domain would be a natural if you wanted to dedicate a site to the old classic computer game, Master of Magic. (Although you would probably want masterofmagic.com instead, which is still open.) That's where I got the inspiration from, at least. Chaos Node is also a concept within network technology, not that I am into that. So there may be a good reason to reserve the name. Still, if you do a google search for Chaos Node, I have the top positions and have held them for a long time now.

I am slightly amused by the idea that someone may want to ride my coattails to fame by grabbing the obvious domain name. After 5 years, I still only have like 150 page hits per day (not including the dreamwater archive, but it is probably not overwhelming there either). Sometimes less. That's not the number of visitors, but page hits. Judging from inbound e-mail, the number of actual visitors is rather low, or they hesitate to admit that they have been here. I don't have any detailed statistics; I am not a classic hit slut with trackers and stuff. As long as there are a few people who find it interesting for some reason, I'm likely to go on.

Oh, and the obvious Norwegian domain name, chaos.no, is also reserved. But then again, I am hardly the only one making chaos here in this country ... More about that, I am sure, in the future (if any).