Why Stinkrag.com?

Back around 1995 or 1996, during the early phases of Interwebs hysteria, domain names were being scooped up left and right, by companies, by people with a kernel of some idea that would make them rich when they got around to learning how to make a website, by people hoping to resell clever domain names to people with a kernel of an idea but lacking a perfect name for it, and so on. All the words in the dictionary were gone. All of the words in the dictionary, with an “e” or an “i” stuck on them (”etoys”, “ipublisher”…) were gone. Phrases, combinations of words, all getting scooped up quickly. Typos of popular domain names, plurals of singulars, singulars of plurals, all being scooped upm in a fever to stake out a claim.

I was working for Kaplan, the education and career services division of the Washington Post Company, though these were the years when they went on an acquisition spree, so the pieces I was involved with were increasingly with their then-core test-prep business, Score! Learning Centers and the corporate website, and not much with the continuing-ed stuff like Dearborn, the online correspondence schools that evolved into Kaplan University and the career-fair and job-posting and career-fair arms. The online rebranding of the test-prep business under the name kaptest.com in homage to the toll-free enrollment number was my idea.

Anyhow, before any of that happened, Online Marketing Guy Mike Biamonte loped over to my cubicle.

“How do I find a good domain name? All the good ones I think of are taken.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “Did you know ‘www.com’ is taken and so is ‘wwww.com’ is too?”

We spent a few minutes on whois to see how many “W”s in a row people had registered. Five? Ten? Twenty? It was something like twenty in a row. How much traffic did someone expect to get at “www.wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.com”? At $39/year to register a domain, I thought it was sort of belaboring the joke.

I don’t remember what sort of website we were looking for a domain name for. Maybe it was for a website of “fun, educational quizzes and brainteasers”. We were a test-prep company. People came to us for tricky multiple-choice questions, so it sort of made sense.

We batted around a few domain names and checked whois to see if they were taken. They all were.

We tried some bad ones, ones that contained words that a lot of people misspell, ones that contained homonyms, so they couldn’t easily spread by word of mouth. As we tried things out and discussed this domain name vs. that one, we arrived on some general principles of pickinjg a good domain name.

• It should be short enough that it’s easy to type.
• It should be unambiguous enough when spoken that there should be little or no guesswork in how to spell it. “pets.com” is good. “lycos.com”, not necessarily so good.
• It should be memorable. If you hear it or see it once, it should be burned into your brain.
• It shouldn’t be easily confused with other domain names.

We tried some more things out, didn’t like the convoluted, ambiguous things that were available.

Then, lightning struck.

“I’ve got it. The perfect domain name.”

“What?” sez Mike.

“Stinkrag.com”

“Stink rag dot com.” He laughed, turned it over in his head.

“It’s short.”

“Yeah.”

“You know exactly how to spell it.”

“Right….”

“It’s memorable.”

“It is,” he admitted, maybe turning a little pale.

“It’s not going to be confused with something else.”

“No.”

Somewhere, someone’s email dinged. A phone rang.

Mike shook his head. “It’s disgusting.”

But why? What did it even mean?

“I don’t know. It’s just digusting.”

After that, whenever the question of what domain name to give some new business idea came up, Mike would shoot me a look

“Not ’stinkrag’, Steve.”

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Here I am, ten years later, thinking I should start blogging about little coding ephiphanies I have while working on development projects, if only for my own reference. I don’t want to crap up my regular blog with it. It would bore my remaining readers (I’ve been posting much less since it got me a freelance writing gig for Actual Money, funny that), what with being a non-technical blog after all and what with hardly a soul in the state of Florida using Ruby on Rails.
Let’s see. A website for posting throwaway tech notes that spill out of work on a broader project that are likely to be of little or no use to anyone else.

Eureka.

“Stinkrag.com“.