When I looked at my GoDaddy account last night, I was sure I've been on crack for the past year - 39 domains. And those are just the ones at GoDaddy. Surely there must be some projects I'm "working on" that people don't know about. Let's see what I can share.

Before I go on let me say this: Will someone please redesign GoDaddy's site? kthxbye

I've got a couple of domains for the kids. I've been trying to convince them to start a little video project, reviewing movies. I thought that a low-impact introduction to the web with a movie review site would be interesting to them. They could watch a movie and tell the camera what they think. Getting them into the idea hasn't been successful yet. I did get Abby to make a video about the cats that I have not yet put online. Whether this is something that you could do (or want to watch) regularly, I can't say. That's two domains.

There are the domains you know about that I talk about with reasonable frequency. This one, for example. Red Alt. My astronomy book wiki. The microwiki software site itself. The gift registry site. My personal web "business card" site. That's six more.

I use midnightcircus.com these days only for email. It used to house my roleplaying site.

I talk about Pastoid a lot, my URL-shortening and code-pasting site. I have actually registered four domains on GoDaddy for Pastoid -- .com, .net, and .org plus pastio.net. On a different registrar, I've registered past.io, too. That's five domains.

I've got a slew of Habari-related domains, many I've not told people about. Two of the more interesting ones are habari.me and habari.us. Rent on these two domains is now double what it once was. All told, five domains.

Then there are the esoteric projects that don't get enough love for lack of time. Stonepath.org, my task management and deployment project. I have a domain to replace my lousy homeowner's association site with something good. devlunch.com is to be a site geared toward getting developers together for lunch, like a meetup.com for lunches. I've reserved fluttr.com for a another Flickr-related project I'm building, something much bigger than Kubrickr. almostfriday.net used to house my Almost Friday episodes, which I intended to expand upon, but then interest waned and the host went wonky. kobolds.com is the intended destination for an online game that I'd eventually build. onyxmirror.com is the intended destination for the roleplaying game that I'll eventually write. I registered secretagentchallenge.com recently to revive a feature of the old midnightcircus.com site as a podcast. jetalt.com may eventually be a new blog software, if "Fall 2006" ever arrives.

There's a domain for Berta's wiki, where she puts addresses and dates and records information about random household things. I have another domain for Berta that she's using to organize her all-too-frequent family reunions. I've got a redirecting domain, stabity.com, for Brian's Livejournal site.

I have two domains that I use exclusively to test junk, chr0n.com and cr8er.net. You'd be surprised how often these come in handy, especially when testing pingbacks and such.

There are two domains that I registered for clients ages ago, and it's just been easier to register them year after year than bother calling them and trying to get them transferred.

I've still got the registration for the old qrke.com domain for some reason.

There are two domains I have for projects I don't talk about. And one domain for something I've not decided to do anything about yet, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but after years of sitting on it, just seems vindictive and pointless. It's kind of like walmartsucks.com but much more creative and has nothing to do with WalMart. I might just let that one expire.

And then I've got a domain for the house, so I can easily connect to home when I'm away. DynDNS for the win!

I think that's all 39. I should go for 40, just to make it a round number.

I was just poking around looking at some domains today, and checked in on the .com version of this site. I know it's been squatted on for some time, and I'm always shocked at how much money they're asking for it. Who else is going to want that domain but me, and who do they really expect is going to pay $7088 for it? That's crazy.

Is there no way we can fairly determine who is squatting on a domain and make them stop? There's this whole (I'll call it) black market of people selling domains that they're not going to use for anything except to extort money from people who could put them to good use. Apart from BuyDomains.com, there's that awful site Sedo.com, that encourages regular people to do the same thing. It's horrible. I have a very low opinion of people that make money this way.

There should be an alternate registrar that disallows this behavior. You should be able to point their DNS servers, and it'll serve you the address that better applies to that domain. For example, if I've registered asymptomatic.net with the regular servers, and my site is deemed to be neither squatter or spammer, then you'd see my site. If I then register asymptomatic.com with this alternate service, they would evaluate the best use of the .com domain - whether it be the existing squatting site or a mirror of my .net content - and then serve the IP address of the server they deem best.

The service could be entirely opt-in. You'd have to change your DNS settings on your computer to use the alternate service. It wouldn't be like the nasty stuff that Network solutions or Verizon foisted on people to be "helpful" in finding results for typed domains that don't exist. It would be specifically targeted at dealing with these spammers and squatters. Perhaps the service could even offer some level of configurability so that you could override its choices for specific domains or domains with certain qualities.

Anyway, it's both amusing and annoying that they're asking $7k for asymptomatic.com. I'm surely not going to pay for it. Since I'm likely to be their only target buyer, maybe they should put it at a price I would find reasonable. Or maybe I should create a legal entity for my domain name and sue, since I've been using this domain far longer than they've had asymptomatic.com registered. I think maybe I don't care quite that much.

I've been advertising with Google for a while, and I've added a few domains to my competitive ad filters over the years. I recently got a message from the AdSense folks telling me that I shouldn't exclude those domains because they monetize well on my site. I don't know why. Let's take a look:

blogger.com - Probably does well because my site is often returned as the top entry for many "blogging" search terms.
datingfly.com - The first of a handful of dating sites to plaster their fannies on my site, I wouldn't trust getting a date to the looks of this site, nor do I like the idea of hawking "love services" from my blog. Seems kind of skeezy.
perfectmatch.com - A competitor to the eHarmony dating site. I'm not really sure what the attraction for dating sites is to my blog.
philadelphiasingles.org - This dating site is interesting because it's directed at people in my area. More about that after the list...
rojo.com - They are a web aggregator that upset me one day when I realized that it's basically the Entertainment Tonight of aggregators, skimming the surface of web news and going no deeper.
savethechildren.org - I was getting tired of public service ads showing up on pages that Google didn't know what to do with.
subscriptionsforsoldiers.com - At some point at the beginning of the Iraq conflict, these ads started showing up on very inappropriate posts.
thebiotechdictionary.com - My guess is that these guys mistakenly thought that buying ads on sites that had domains with terms that were the same as in their dictionary would increase their pagerank for those terms. Even though that's not true, I didn't want to help them redefine where Google points "Asymptomatic".
thegayquiz.com - Hey, your lifestyle is your lifestyle and I respect that, but my mom (and other family) reads my blog, thanks. If dating sites aren't cool, this fluff site certainly isn't either.
typepad.com - Really, I have no idea why I blocked this domain.

Something I re-learned recently is that it's pretty darn easy to correlate an IP address to a metropolitan region in the US. That's how they manage to target ads to geographic places. Google actually seems to have narrowed the metro areas into the regions that most tools use to define what the region is. Or, worded in a less convoluted way, Google seems to have defined what metro regions are on the web. That's kind of weird.

Anyway, I've unblocked all of those domains above. Today, I have stopped caring about that. Hopefully people find the services they advertise here useful.

Also, while I'm mentioning problem domains, I've been inundated with tons of 419 emails. They're not from Nigeria, but they all have some bank money that they are unable to claim, and all seem to need my help to claim it. I must be very trustworthy if all these guys want me to handle their millions.

Each new email seems like a new variation. It's a real pain. They're sneaking by the spam filters pretty easily these days. I'm going to need to contact Webmail.us about it if the problem persists.

Still, by using a method I employ for registering accounts at different websites, I have found at least two sites that have either sold my email to the 419 people or have accidentally released my address to the world for 419'ers to pick up for spamming.

These two sites are justinvincent.com and colorlovers.com. I'm sad about this in both cases, since justinvincent.com has a really handy PHP database connection object that I use or emulate for nearly everything. And colorlovers.com is a pretty cool color palette selection site that I was kind of fond of.

Anyway, you'll notice that I'm not linking to them above, just listing out their domains to shame them.