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It seems like everybody has a vanity domain these days. Back in high school, I had PCJ.com. It went away in a good way when Internic started charging for registrations, and I eventually settled on diff.net.

I didn't want a .com because I don't think I have anything commercial to offer on my personal web page. My criteria were fairly simple -- easy to type, relatively easy to say, and unlikely to offend others in English or other languages.

Having most net neighbors with a Levenshtein distance less than 2 be non-offensive web sites was also a plus so that visitors don't get a bad experience with a typo. My guess is that will also cut down a bit on spam from accidental or purposeful misspellings when people sign up for things like a free nytimes.com subscription.

The only really annoying thing about diff.net is that it is aurally ambiguous; if you say that your email address is "something at diff dot net" it's not obvious how many 'f's there are.


Last modified: Friday, 01-Apr-2022 07:30:46 PDT
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