E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

Pile o'Tags

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Serious squatting

With everybody and their brother trying for the past couple years to bust into the the online calendar market, how is it that calendar.com is sitting there with one of those stupid fake-search-engine advertising pages?

Way back in the '90s, Skip Montanaro of Music-Cal fame put it to good use. Digging through the archive.org history it looks like he may have sold it to mail.com.

I had to do a whois to see that mail.com still owned it. What the hell happened to that company? Sitting on calendar.com for the past two years is an astounding move. Or, rather, lack thereof.

Monday, March 5th, 2007

1 comment

• Comment from Dave, 3 weeks later

Tell me about it. I recently went domain name shopping and was astounded to find that there are so many dictionary words taken and being used for nothing but fake search sites. They are parked by their owners who are simply trying to make a buck.

I actually contacted the owner of one such site to see if he would be interested in selling it. He wanted $7K!

I've owned a dictionary word domain name for a decade or so and over the years have been contacted a few times about it (it's not for sale) but no one has ever offered me anything more than a few hundred bucks.

I did finally settle on a domain name for a new venture. It's a two word domain name and it cost me less to register six different TLDs than it originally cost me to register my first domain name.

Funny thing was the guy wanting $7K for his idle domain took offense when I said he was a squatter. He thinks he's a legit business man.

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