I have a great domain name, really it doesn’t get much simpler, it’s my first name. I know it’s great because I keep getting ‘offers’ from people wanting to buy it off me. It’s not for sale.

The offers I’ve had have ranged from “Hi my name is Dean and I think you should give me this domain name” to “I’m thinking of changing my business name and thought you’re domain would be a good option” to “Would you sell me this domain for $300”.

Yeah, no.

They come via email, via twitter, and most recently via unsolicited Facebook messages.

Seriously though, $300? Sure, doesn’t sound like much, but it cost me more than that to get it in the first place.

Rewind.

Several years ago when top-level .co domains first became available I took the opportunity to try and secure a great short URL for this site. I ended up putting in two waiting list registrations (*not* cheap, and didn’t guarantee you anything), one for dean.co and one for djr.co in the hope I’d be lucky enough to score at least one of them.

I’d wanted a super short domain name ever since Matt Mullenweg had switched his site to ma.tt. Originally I had looked into what would be necessary to get de.an, but that was out of reach - super expensive and pretty sure I needed to be a resident of the Netherland Antilles… and then the Netherlands Antilles were dissolved and its .an domain country code discontinued.

But now there were these new .co domains available. Surely I’d have a chance…

The deal was if no-one else wanted the domain you wanted then you got it, all you had to do was pay the registration fee - which was not included in the original waiting list fee. If someone else also wanted the domain it would go to auction.

I’m sure the .co registrars must have made a ton of money during this process…

Turns out no-one else put in a request for djr.co, so it was mine, sweet. However there was one other request for dean.co so it went to auction.

I was convinced I’d miss out, either as a result of the other party putting in a massive bid and blowing me out of the water, or by it being a close auction and me missing out due to shitty timezone differences.

However, what actually happened was that whoever the other person was never placed a bid and I got it “cheap”.

Success, I was now the owns of a domain name that was just my name. I was pretty pleased with myself.

Ok, back to the present.

Telling me your name is also Dean and that you’d like this domain isn’t going to change my name. Newsflash *my* name is Dean too…

If this were a particular recent superhero movie we’d probably totally be friends right now with an earth-shattering revelation like that.

Offering me a couple of hundred bucks for it also isn’t going to change my mind. I now have a lot of things tied to this domain name in one way or another and the hassle of untangling and rerouting those things well exceeds such small monetary rewards.

So, unless your offer has enough zeros on it that I can buy happiness (ok, that one isn’t actually possible), a sweet house, retire, live of the interest, and still have a whole lot of zeros left over, then I don’t want to hear it.

Go find a different domain name like I had to a decade ago when I originally registered deanjrobinson.com because my first choices of dean.com and deanrobinson.com were unsurprisingly already taken.

---

Oh yeah, and today is May 1st and I’ve taken part in the #may1reboot, so if you’re looking at this outside of a feed reader, then it likely all looks different to the last time you were here. Hopefully it’s mostly functional.