I woke up early this morning (or rather a couple of mornings ago by the time I publish this) thinking about names. In particular about domain names, though I drifted on to more personal thoughts. I find myself in the rather ridiculous position of having 25 domain names, which is a little more than I really need.
It isn’t really quite so bad as that, as four are ones I hold for other people or groups rather than myself. Six of the others too are for sites I wrote for group shows I organised with other photographers, and one a group site I curate with another photographer. But that still leaves 14 that are all mine. Which seems slightly excessive.
The latest acquisition is of course Hull Photos at http://hullphotos.co.uk which I set up around a month ago. I was staggered to fine that that particular domain name was still available – as too were several others I considered. I chose it as being short, easy to remember and exactly describing what I intended to use it for. The ‘co.uk’ is I think entirely appropriate for a site dedicated to a UK city, and has the advantage of being one of the cheapest of domain registrations to maintain.
When I first registered a domain, I think back in 1996, almost any name you could think of was available. I chose buildingsoflondon.co.uk because I had already written a small site featuring London’s buildings (it’s still on-line but at a different address in that domain – and looks very dated, having only had the kind of essential changes needed to keep it working with modern browsers.) Later, largely because it was going cheap, I also registered buildingsoflondon.uk, and both this and buildingsoflondon.co.uk now point to the same page, a kind of front end to my work on London that I wrote around 15 years ago – with minor updates since.
At the time I intended ‘Buildings of London‘ to be a much more extended site, showing a good selection of the roughly 100,000 pictures I had taken of buildings of all types across the city, but somehow that has yet to happen – though it will probably come soon. Long ago I registered yet another domain for that purpose.
The 2012 London Olympic site in 1980
Another site with a specific purpose is river-lea.co.uk, which displays some of my work along the Lea Valley, which I’d photographed since the 1980s. I set up the web site in 2005; I’d been thinking about it for several years but went full steam ahead once London had been awarded the 2012 Olympic Games – and later many of the pictures went in to my book ‘Before the Olympics’.
An obvious choice for my work would be domains using my own name, and I registered two of these, petermarshallphotos.co.uk which is my London’s Industrial History site, written for me by my elder son as a present back in 1999 and still looking good, though some of the scans reflect an age of lower standards.
Then there is also peter-marshall.com, where I had to have the – in the middle because the site without it was already taken for a US preacher. Peter-marshall.com could be used for any of my sites, but I needed a domain for my Paris Pictures, and that’s it.
And of course there are two domains you are all aware of, My London Diary, at mylondondiary.co.uk (and mylondondiary.com and a couple of others) and >Re:PHOTO, this site, which is a name I find some people don’t understand but which is explained here. That had to be just re-photo.co.uk, partly because only a limited range of letters etc are allowed in domain names, but also because many people can’t easily find the ‘>’ or ‘:’ on the keyboard or phone.
______________________________________________________
There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.
My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
To order prints or reproduce images
________________________________________________________