{"id":6691,"date":"2016-12-22T10:08:07","date_gmt":"2016-12-22T10:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=6691"},"modified":"2016-12-20T15:26:07","modified_gmt":"2016-12-20T15:26:07","slug":"by-any-other-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=6691","title":{"rendered":"by any other Name…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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The latest acquisition is of course Hull Photos<\/em><\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

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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<\/em> because I had already written a small site featuring London’s buildings (it’s still on-line but at a different address<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

At the time I intended ‘Buildings of London<\/em>‘ 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.<\/p>\n

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\nThe 2012 London Olympic site in 1980<\/small><\/p>\n

Another site with a specific purpose is river-lea.co.uk, which displays some of my work along the Lea Valley<\/em><\/a>, 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’<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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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<\/em><\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

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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<\/em><\/a>, and that’s it.<\/p>\n

And of course there are two domains you are all aware of, My London Diary<\/em>, at mylondondiary.co.uk (and mylondondiary.com and a couple of others) and >Re:PHOTO<\/em>, this site, which is a name I find some people don’t understand but which is explained here<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n


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