When I was in high school I thought it was really cool to collect email addresses. It started with “net@ddress”:http://www.netaddress.com, which, to my knowledge, was one of the first to offer free email. My dad discovered it and quickly signed my whole family up with free accounts.
Shortly thereafter Yahoo! and Hotmail both came out offering their free email services. In the early days most of the free services had the ability to forward to another account, and Yahoo! (I had four or five Yahoo! accounts at one time) gave you the option to download your email through POP3. I remember bragging about having my 15 or 20 different email addresses all forwarded to one of my Yahoo! accounts and routed into my Outlook Express. I shudder to think how I might’ve acted if Gmail had come out when I was that age.
At any rate, my new collection seems to be not email addresses, but websites. I’m not bragging about this collection (or am I?). I certainly haven’t meant to collect this many, but I’ve got about six websites right now.
* joeyday.com
* “joeyday.org”:http://www.joeyday.org
* “geocities.com/joeynday”:http://www.geocities.com/joeynday — used this before my domains
* “cs.utah.edu/~jday”:http://www.cs.utah.edu/~jday — a freebie from the School of Computing
* “eng.utah.edu/~jday”:http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jday — a freebie from the School of Engineering
* “joeyday.blogspot.com”:http://joeyday.blogspot.com — so I can post on other bloggers’ blogs
Now, that’s only counting personal sites. I own a few other domains that I don’t consider “mine” per se:
* “hrwiki.org”:http://www.hrwiki.org — the one, the only
* “fellowsites.org”:http://www.fellowsites.org — a non-profit hosting company
* “janeneday.com”:http://www.janeneday.com — my wife’s website
What got me thinking about all this? Well, I’m hoping to acquire at least one more domain sometime this month. I probably shouldn’t say much more about this right now, but I’m sure you’ll hear more as things develop.