After installing WordPress just yesterday, I’ve got myself a workable template and see some interesting possibilities. Wandering through the software I stumbled upon a link to Matthew Mullenweg’s blog. He’s the founding developer behind WordPress. That’s all well and good, but what really caught my notice, besides his blog’s beautiful title graphic, is the URL. It’s http://ma.tt/. How’s that for geek cool?

You know where I’m going with this, right?

I was soon discovered the Cook Islands were assigned the .ck top-level domain. Having http://ri.ck/ would be freaking sweet. Would be sweet, but for a few problems.

  • They followed the UK standard of defining second-level categories. For example, .gov.ck is for government sites, .edu.ck is for educational institutions, and so on. With this scheme, there is no way to get my URL!
  • Domain registration applications cost $150. If accepted, you get the name for two years, and you must re-register every two years to keep it. While it’s only slightly more expensive than the $10 a year I pay for this alienshore.com domain name, it’s too rich for my blood.
  • They’re very mindful of the ‘creative’ possibilities available because of the way they’ve set up their domain names. The Wikipedia reports:

    Domains considered profane, e.g ‘blow.co.ck’, ‘mybig.co.ck’.…etc, will not be considered on any level, and the application will be dissolved with the applicant being notified, and future requests for the same domain name will be ignored.

It doesn’t take much thinking to realize that having one’s application ‘dissolved’ means you’re not getting your $150 back. Even worse, they regularly check .ck sites for profanity or anything they deem inappropriate. If they discover profanity or inappropriate content (whatever that means), they pull the name without notice or refund.

No http://ri.ck/ for me. Not when one would have to be crazy to spend that kind of money when other top-level domains are almost free incomparison, and especially not when a bunch of Internet nannies will be checking up on my shit. No thanks!