Back in action
I’m back. Not only did I stop blogging - as you see from the posts below, but my domain name actually disappeared for over four months (it used to be houshuang.org) - it’s a long story and I won’t tell it, suffice to say that my DNS registrar wasn’t very helpful, and I would have to pay over 150$ to get my domain name back. It wasn’t that much worth, so I changed it to reganmian.net (热干面 - a very tasty noodle dish in Wuhan, China).
A quick update of what I’ve been up to: I spent a year working for CARE Indonesia in Jakarta, and returned to Norway in the end of May. After that I have worked for a local museum in my city as a tour guide. I also had the chance to go to both the iSummit in Dubrovnik (Creative Commons conference) which was great, very inspiring, and the KDE Akademy in Glasgow where I also learnt a lot about the processes behind creating open-source software.
In two weeks, I am returning to Toronto to finish up the last year of my undergrad degree in development studies. I will also be TAing a course on International Development and International Communications, which I am really looking forward to - it will be my first time TAing, and it’s a topic very near to my heart. I will be doing a lot of research - both a larger thesis based on research done in Indonesia (still working out the topic), and hopefully and independent research class on open learning or open publishing. I also signed up for what seems like it will be a very interesting open course in “Open Education” - for me it will be a unique experience to both learn more about a topic that interests me a lot together with a group of passionate and experienced participants from different countries, but also to try out some of the ideas behind distance learning in practice. This course requires blogging, and I will be writing up reflections and answers on this blog as well.
So all in all, it should be a very busy term, but hopefully an exciting one, and I am planning to write quite a bit here - as always, we’ll see if it pans out.
(PS: The blog post below is incredibly out of date as regards the Wikipedia offline project. I won’t remove it though, in the spirit of blogs as honest archives. However, I might write an update a bit later.)
Stian
(picture from 爱狗 @ Yupoo.com)
August 30th, 2007 @ 17:50
Regarding the loss of your previous domain, that really sucks. I’m sure you fell victim to tasting and the TBR (to be released) lists from the registry. What happened was someone saw your name coming up, probably tested it to see if it had a certain minimum of left-over traffic (tasting - for a period so short that it cost nothing and the transaction could be reversed), and then paid for it.
The good news is that the only value in that domain is the residual traffic from your blog, and the chance you’d pay to get it back. So really, the asshole who bought it is out the cost of registration until he finally figures out that you don’t care.
Sometimes, I really do hate this business.
August 30th, 2007 @ 17:56
Actually what happened was that my registration expired, and the domain host (uhsdomains.com) sent me an email saying I needed to renew, giving me a URL. However that URL was consistently down during the week in which I tried it repeatedly, and when contacting them by email I received no answer. When I finally managed to get a hold of them, several weeks later, my domain had lapsed and been replaced by an ad site, and it would cost me 150$ to buy it back. They would also not release it and let me transfer it to someone else.
Either way, it’s not as bad as it could have been, since I had not been updating my blog for about half a year before this happened, so I had lost most of the visitors anyway - being in Indonesia. Now I registered the domain with my webhost, site5.com, whose customer service I’ve been very happy with so far.
September 1st, 2007 @ 13:23
Hey
Well, the ad site, as you say, would just be some domainer’s parking page. They put that up (as I’m sure you know) for the trickle of pay-per-click (ppc) traffic it can generate. It’s a simple business model, but it works. Park up enough domains that way, and if the income even just pays for the cost of registration, plus a tiny bit, it can add up. Then flip what you can reselling.
I’m interested in the fact that the link you received wouldn’t work. Could be a glitch of some sort, on either end, but there’s some nasty shit going on out there with registrar’s themselves reregistering expiring domains that belonged to their clients. They wouldn’t be using the same business name, likely, but it can still be the same players. Really nasty stuff. I could look into it if you’re interested in making a case of it, but given the circumstances it’s probably just as easy to let it go.