After reading about Matt’s name change, I decided to investigate locking up a shorter url for my own web identity–not that anyone else besides me cares what my domain name is. Unfortunately, someone already owns sco.tt, though I frankly couldn’t have afforded the $500/year registration fees even if it was there for the taking.
However, I did manage to lock up scottjon.es, which makes me feel slightly better for missing out on scottjones.com by a week, many years ago (stupid aircraft sales company). Yes, that’s a .es extension, which gives the site an international flair without the non-English words. It also shortens it by a few characters and gets rid of the “r” in rscottjones. I thought long and hard about that, as I’ve branded myself as rscottjones for several years now online (it’s my username at every social networking website) and didn’t want to lose that history and momentum. However, the only time I actually use the “r” is for my domain name and logins. Offline, few know that I’m actually R. Scott Jones and not the more generic Scott Jones. Since I started going by Scott in 1990, that’s remained a personal dilemma–apparently one I’m not quite ready to put to rest just yet.
In addition to scottjon.es, I also picked up sjon.es to further reduce character count. I had wanted jon.es, but alas, that was already taken, too. However, sjon.es is not far off and could still prove useful in an increasingly iPhone-like world, where computing devices–and their associated keyboards–continue to shrink. By the way, if you ever need to register a .es domain and don’t speak Spanish, I’d recommend dotster.com. You can purchase in English and pay in dollars, though you’ll fork over nearly twice as much as a normal .com. However, it’s far cheaper than several other .es registrars I found, most of which charged $50-200 a year, apparently mostly to schmucks who clicked on the first link they ran across without checking out the competition. If you do speak Spanish and want a better deal, check out 1and1.es, which sells them for just under $10 after the exchange rate.
Both sjon.es and scottjon.es currently redirect to rscottjones.com. I’m undecided if this will change in the future, and am still contemplating if I wanted to make the full switch over to one of them.