Hover’s biggest feature is simply that it doesn’t try to mess with you.  I’ve found all the domain management stuff to be sufficient, although not amazing – but at least it just lets you work instead of screwing around trying to upsell you on things.  Additionally, Hover’s website is nice and clean and refrains from having NASCAR Driver Supermodels offer you AMAZING DEALS on .biz domains.

(Side note:  Don’t ever buy a .biz domain.  You might as well have your domain at .spam.)

My long term thought is that I want to move the various saaspire domains away from GoDaddy where they’re mushed up with domains that I personally own.  But I’ve actually never tried to move a domain from one registrar to another, so I thought I should give it a dry run with something that was real (i.e. not parked) but not mission critical:

This website right here.  Antipatter.

The procedure turns out to be simple.  First you have to “unlock” the domain at the current registrar.  I believe there are restrictions on the unlock (perhaps preventing you from changing registrars just before you have to renew – just when I want to change the most).  Then you need an “authorization code” from the current registrar, and you must give it to the new registrar.

Then you have to make damn sure your administrative contact into is up to date.  Now – here’s a secret:  I didn’t want to pay GoDaddy’s surcharge for not publishing my info, so I’ve given them really stale info to work with.  If you ever have run a WHOIS on any of my domains, well, I haven’t been in any of those places for awhile now.

Hover offers privacy built into their pricing model – there’s no option to NOT have privacy for your WHOIS info.  Note that their one year price is a little higher than GoDaddy’s, but the extra $5 is totally worth it to me.

Once the auth code is provided the request is sent to the current registrar, which then asks permission from whoever is the official administrative contact email recipient.  You reply in the affirmative.

Then they sit on the whole thing for about a week, during which nothing happens.  It reminded me a lot of a bank clearing a check.

In the end the domain transferred and I got a maudlin “Aw, we’re sorry to see you go” message from GoDaddy.  Pretty clean.  I did manage to screw up on not updating my nameservers fast enough, which is why Antipatter (*cough*) went off the air briefly yesterday.  However it wasn’t too painful of a process, so I’ll probably start moving other domains over.

About 11 months ago I became the Director of Technology for HUGE. This took a lot of my brainpower over, and the most immediate casualty was Antipatter. Mea culpa.

I’ve made fun of well meaning friends who have, in the past, spent a lot of time developing their own blog software, but haven’t really posted much. Of course they are now kicking my butt.
Then I became tired of the brown theme, and have spent too much time screwing around with the look and feel. That needs to change, but not at the expense of posting.

Finally, Twitter enables laziness in blogging on my part. Instead of developing an idea enough to blog it, it’s really easy for me to knock out 3 or 4 tweets that capture the barebones essence of my point. This is just lame.

So while I can’t really promise a particular frequency of posting here, I will do my best to put something up once in awhile. I’ve certainly had thoughts that could have gone up here in the last year, it’s just a matter of capturing them and getting them posted.

See you in a week!

UPDATE: Also installed Akismet, upgraded to WP  2.6, installed the auto-update plugin (awesome plugin),  and finally made the permalinks prettier.

Patter

Patter is a glib rapid speech, that accompanies and complements some actions, e.g., of an auctioneer, salesperson, caller (dancing), or comedian.

It was a slang word for the secret or cant language used by beggars, thieves, Roma people, etc., hence the fluent plausible talk that a cheap-jack employs to pass off his goods. Many illusionists, e.g., card magicians use patter both to enhance the show and to distract the attention of the spectators.

Antipattern

In software engineering, an antipattern is a design pattern that appears obvious but is ineffective or far from optimal in practice.