Our New Home at ncdropout.org
Students in my introductory news writing class get an automatic F when they make a silly factual error like misspelling the URL of a Web site about which they're writing. When I misspell it, it costs me $38.57 ... thus allow me to put a fair price on every point a student wants to buy from me -- 77 cents.
That's a long way of saying that the URL of our project will soon be changing. We still love Ibiblio.org and will continue to be hosted there. But the students rightly suggested that the long URL was going to be a serious marketing dilemma, and they came up with www.ncdropout.org as our new home. It will be live in the next few days.
How we chose the name
Students like the name N.C. Diploma Dilemma. (Actually, they liked N.C. Dropout Dilemma better, but The Salisbury Post used that as the name of their series last year.) But they were concerned about the difficulty some folks might have misspelling "dilemma." They wanted something that would be easy to type and descriptive.
The first decision they made was that it needed to have "nc" in the URL.
The second decision they made was that "dropout" needed to be in the URL. Actually, they first said they wanted "dropouts" in the title, but we talked about the difference between saying "someone is a dropout" and saying that someone is "a person who dropped out." In the former case, it implies that the person is most importantly defined by this one characteristic. In the latter, the characteristic is one of many. So, in order to be fairer and more accurate, we settled on "dropout."
From there, there were some other proposals on the table. The primary debate was whether it needed a noun to sit behind the adjectives "nc" and "dropout." Some ideas were "report," "news," and "talk." Report was rejected because it would sound like something the government published. News was rejected because the site is about more than news, and is more evergreen than timely. And Talk was rejected... I think because the students thought it sounded to frivolous.
How we registered it
Registering a domain name is painfully easy. I went to www.godaddy.com and said I wanted to buy ncdropout.org. The site told me it was available. I also decided to buy ncdropout.net and ncdropout.com just in case someone accidentally typed in one of those two common alternatives.
For one year of registration, the .org domain cost $15.19, the .com domain cost $10.19 and the .net domain cost $13.19.
The only problem is, I bought ncdropoutS.org ... and there went $38.57 down the drain.
I went back and typed in the correct domain name and now we're all set.
Once the domain name is registered, we had to tell the world that this domain should always point back to our site on Ibiblio.org. This is the job of domain name servers. I've set up domains on Ibiblio before, so I knew that they had instructions on how to do it.
The next thing that will happen is that the good and kind folks at Ibiblio.org will work their magic to make sure that our new domain name points to our old one.
Of course, things can get much more complicated than this, especially when you are concerned about search engine optimization and making sure that the reputation and traffic you earned from your old URL is inherited by your new domain. There are whole companies that consult on that kind of thing. But overall, the process is fairly easy. With any luck, you'll be readig this post at ncdropout.org right now.
- Ryan Thornburg's blog
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