$17.29 - What's In a Name - ROOPHLOCH 2024

2024-09-14 - [53] 6:28

I'm writing again outside today to participate yet again in ROOPHLOCH 2024. At the moment, I'm grilling some frozen chicken breasts outside because chicken is a tasty addition to my salads that I mentioned in my online post "Making More Salads". I'm down about 15lbs since I wrote that post and should be able to fit my measurements for the tux for the wedding next month.

It looks like it might rain soon, so hopefully I can get this post and the chicken done in time.

$17.29/year

It's likely that quite a few of yall who have a domain name got an email in the last few months or year that mentioned a price hike of renewing the domain. In my case, the price hike brings it to $17.29/year. $1.44/month, or nearly 5 cents a day. That's not really expensive, but it did cause me to think about whether I thought my site was worth 5 cents a day to host. That's on top of the about $2-3/year energy cost to host my site on a Raspberry Pi 2B.

Would I pay $0.05 a day to be a part of and contribute to the Web ecosystem? Honestly, I'm having a hard time saying yes to that. The web has become an incredibly tainted cash grab culturally controlled by groups that don't want you to experience anything else on the Web. If you do experience other parts of the web, don't you dare go where Facebook and Google can't keep an eye on you! For good measure, better put a login wall over basic information on webpages.

Would I pay $0.05 a day to be a part of and contribute to the Gemini ecosystem? Absolutely! I know actual human beings have read my posts and appreciated them. Any response I get to any of my posts via email come from folks who saw my posts in a Gemini client, not a web browser. I know actual human beings have read my recipes and appreciated them, have read my game reviews and appreciated them, have seen the progress of my Gameboy Tarot Card designs and appreciated them.

Gemini vs Web+Gemini

It's a bit strange that the more I think about it, the more I feel like $17.29/year is absolutely worth it to host content over Gemini, but somehow adding the Web to it makes it a little less worth it to me. It's like how adding some kale to an incredibly unhealthy salad drowning in ranch dressing doesn't make the salad healthy and actually increases the calorie count of the unhealthy salad. Honestly, I think the ranch in this analogy is probably Javascript. There's a reason I block javascript from being served or run on the web version of my site and why I prefer to use a browser with poor/no Javascript support like Netsurf or Dillo, even though I get stuck having to use "modern" browsers to do things like renew my phone service for another month.

I suppose giant images, videos, and incredibly dense/unreadable HTML tags contribute to the ranch dressing part of the analogy as well. It's not uncommon for the web browser I'm using to need to download 10MB+ of data before showing me only a little bit of text on a mostly empty screen. Sometimes the resources will download in the background repeatedly, bringing 10MB+ to 100s of MB in a short period of time... for only a site that's only a little bit of text on a mostly empty screen. "That website is so minimalist!" I'm not quite sure how 100MB of resources and needing 70% of my CPU to load a Steve Jobs quote on a mostly blank background is minimalist...

I will keep the Web version of my site running. Thankfully there is enough freedom on the Web that I can limit my site as much as I want to, or tile sparkly Tweety Bird GIFs in the background, or make blinky text. Unfortunately once a web link to another site is clicked on my site, there's no safety guarantees whatsoever about the rest of the web. I heavily prefer the lack of client side code that can run over Gemini.

There is something refreshing to me about Gemini (and Gopher) having a "1 request equals 1 and only 1 resource" mentality. So much so that, with the exception of images on the Web version of my site, the HTML files are a single resource per request. The minimal amount of CSS on my site and the favicon are built into each HTML page instead of loaded as an external resource.

What's In a Name

I like my domain. vigrey.com is short, sweet, and to the point. I renewed it until the beginning of 2029 so I don't have to worry about renewing for a while. A lot of my online identity revolves around vigrey.com.

There is an issue though with revolving so much of my online identity around vigrey.com. It means I have trapped myself into at least 1 more account (although it's 2 here, one being my email) by needing to have an account with the Domain Name Registrar.

My site is hosted over tor, which means I get a free (or as many as I want) .onion domain name as long as visitors connect to my site over the tor network. When everyone wants your money and think it's basically morally a crime for you to have any of your money without giving it to them, it's nice that there is at least one guaranteed free as in beer way for me to have a domain name, even if it needs to be at least 62 characters long.

Ending Thoughts

I don't think $17.29 will be the highest cost for me to renew my domain name. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if the registrars collude at some point to market .com domains as "Premium/Serious/Dignified/Legacy" domains that require premium prices to renew. Heck I wouldn't be surprised if they decide that their customers should only be businesses that can aford high premiums. Until that point, I am still willing to host my site over Gemini for the cost of about $0.05 a day. Because the web is where everyone is at, I will host my site over the web as well, even if the web has disappointed me and leaves a bad taste in my mouth because the higher powers consistently made decisions that made the web psychically suck more and more over time.

It would probably be smart for me (and maybe some of you reading this who bought a domain name) to come up with a "post domain name" strategy in case I need to get rid of my domain name one day, probably due to cost or some yet to occur rules or regulations from ICANN. Maybe one day I'll organize my thoughts on and write about domain names and registrars.

Looks like the chicken breasts are just about done grilling. Good timing!

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