New domain hack idea
Today, I happened to visit The Daily Monster. It’s a very cool site, I highly recommend you guys to visit it.
This post is not about Stefan and his monsters however, but about some domain hack ideas that I’ve just come up with today. In case you’re not familiar with the term, Wikipedia has a clear definition for domain hack:
A domain hack (sometimes known as a domain name hack) is an unconventional domain name that combines domain levels, especially the top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full “name” or title of the domain. Well-known examples include blo.gs, del.icio.us, and cr.yp.to.
So upon visiting The Daily Monster, I was quite surprise to see it didn’t have its own domain name. I was expecting something like thedailymoster.com or dailymonster.com or dailymonsters.com or so, but it turned out that the url was a Typepad subdomain, not a standalone. I totally believe that content is King, but a good domain name in this case would be the crown. I was telling myself “Maybe the domains had been purchased by other guys” and I was right - none of them are available.
Then, I thought based on this “one design a day” concept I’d do a similar site on my own. “Daily face”, how is that? A drawing of a face each day. I used to sketch a lot, sometimes with pencil, sometimes with the computer mouse, like this one:
The domain name I came up with was of course “dailyface.com”. Needless to say, the domain was not available. So I tried some domain hacks. The result I got in the end was dai.lyface.com. The domain name is lyface.com, and “dai” is a subdomain.
Now comes the interesting part. If you don’t notice, the domain name starts with “ly”. Which means, I can add a lot of cool subdomains. To name just a few:
- week.lyface.com
- month.lyface.com
- year.lyface.com
- ug.lyface.com
- sil.lyface.com
- friend.lyface.com
- f.lyface.com
- li.lyface.com
- on.lyface.com
- bel.lyface.com (LOL’ed at this)
- free.lyface.com
- etc. and etc.
You can see, with one domain name I can come up with many different sudomains to hold different contents. I can use “week.lyface.com” to showcase best drawing each week; same goes with monthly and yearly. You can tell similarly with ug.lyface.com, sil.lyface.com, friend.lyface.com etc. In short, any word ending with “ly” can be used to create a meaningful subdomain. Guess what, we have 8742 such words!
Image credit: ecstatistic
You get what I mean now? If you manage to get a domain starting with “ly”, the sky is your limit. The potential is huge. I don’t know if they are available or not, but here is a list of such domains I’ve just come up with: lymovies, lysports, lysports, lygames, lymusic, lysongs, lystuffs, lyeverything, lytips, lyinspirations, lythemes, lydesigns, lyhacks, lytricks, lyphotos, lypics, lystories, lyfun, lylullabies, lychance, lymeet, lynews etc.
Exactly the same concept can be applied to “ed”. Here we go: tir.edcoder.com, bor.edcoder.com, inb.edcoder.com, r.edcoder.com, hat.edcoder.com…
This is especially effective if you want to build up a network of your site, revolving a central concept.
What do you think? Am I reinventing the wheel?
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Stefan G. Bucher
25 Dec, 2009
Thank you for the friendly shout-out, phoenix.heart. I appreciate it. Here’s the thing: I actually own dailymonster.com, and if you go there, it’ll lead you to my site. And TypePad will let you map that domain name on your entire blog. But by the time I figured that out, I was many, many, many pages into the project. Changing the setup would’ve retroactively changed all the URLs and voided all the great links to my site. So I’m stuck. And believe me… it bugs me. If there’s a way around this, I’d love to learn! Can you or one of your readers help?
phoenix.heart
25 Dec, 2009
Hi Stefan! By “mapping” do you mean a URL redirect (only dailymonster.com is redirected to the TypePad site), or a mirror (means everything on TypePad has a mirrored content on dailymonster.com, such as http://344design.typepad.com/344_loves_you/2009/12/the-daily-monster-papers-6.html to http://dailymonster/the-daily-monster-papers-6.html)? You may want to ask TypePad for the latter. Then, to avoid Google penalty for duplicated contents, you can do follow Google guide here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
Stefan G. Bucher
25 Dec, 2009
Ah! They apparently DO support domain mirroring. Very interesting! And who knew I had to do a procedure with Google, too. Thank you for teaching me all this, phoenix.heart!
phoenix.heart
25 Dec, 2009
You’re welcome Stefan. Thanks for the monsters
Stefan G. Bucher
11 Jan, 2010
Finally got it done after a long dance with the first domain host, and a switch to another, but now it works as you suggested. http://dailymonster.com Thank you!
phoenix.heart
11 Jan, 2010
You’re welcome Stefan. Great to hear it’s now working!
By the way, I have another blog inspired by you at http://dai.lyfaces.com - see you there!
dave
24 Sep, 2010
domain hacks are supposed to spell a word without ending in the typical .com .net .org ..etc.. so dai.lyfaces.com is kind of a lazy way out of it. You need to pay for the .es and make it dai.lyfac.es.
Goochelaar
17 Nov, 2011
I wasnt familiar with domain hack, no i am , always good to learn something haha thanks!