Category: casey.com

“Are you Master of your Domain?”
“I am King of the County. You?”
“Lord of the Manor.”
“I’m Queen of the castle!”
– Jerry, George and Elaine, in “The Contest“, Seinfeld, aired 11/18/92

I didn’t know her. Her name was Kathleen Creighton, but she went by ‘Casey’, presumably a reference to her initials. Kathleen was well known on one of the earliest online communities, The Well (her WELL username was ‘casey’). She was the BBS/online service reviewer for the San Francisco Bay Area computer newspaper MicroTimes, and a contributor to WIRED magazine’s Street Cred section. And, she was a tech savvy online pioneer who staked a digital claim on the domain name ‘casey.com’ when she registered it in August of 1994. It was a time when the word, domain, would for many first bring to mind an episode of Seinfeld which added ‘master of my domain’ into our modern lexicon. But speak of an internet ‘domain name’, and you’d likely draw a blank stare.

That’s what writer Joshua Quittner found and reported in his October ‘94 WIRED magazine article “Billions Registered”, in which he described the surprising number of Fortune 500 companies who had not registered their domain names, many of which had no idea what a domain name was or why they would want one. To demonstrate his point, Quittner registered the domain ‘mcdonalds.com’ in the process of educating the McDonalds Corporation what it was and why they should care. He ended that article inviting readers to email him at ronald@mcdonalds.com to offer suggestions on what he should do with the domain. He eventually relinquished it to McDonalds in return for a $3,500 donation to a Brooklyn school for computers and internet access. McDonalds was lucky.

Sadly, Kathleen Creighton passed away just a few months after she registered ‘casey.com’, before she ever had an opportunity to make any use of it. There was no web site, no email addresses, just a WHOIS registration record with a contact name and email address to whom my inquires went unanswered. When I next sent my inquiry to the technical contact on the registration record, they informed me of Kathleen’s recent demise, and transferred the domain to me. I had just happened to be the next ‘Casey’ who was interested in staking the same digital claim that Kathleen had, and the domain became mine. Was I lucky? If so, it’s always come with the sad reminder that it came from somebody’s passing.

The oldest capture of casey.com by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is from December 27, 1996. And it’s a picture of the landing page of the Internet provider I used at the time (Capital Area Internet Service). The next capture is almost two years later, on December 2, 1998, shows a full website, and it’s awesome! A photoshop filter accident as the main image, image mapped navigation (WITH alternate text links), an animated GIF fake traffic counter, and YES, that’s some Comic Sans! So when did casey.com launch on the World Wide Web? The clue is there under the the ‘last updated’ link in the upper left corner. Casey.com launched on January 24, 1998.

In the 20 years since, casey.com has evolved from a personal website, to a company site (during my self-employment phase when casey.com even sponsored my kids soccer teams), to a blog, and then to a neglected blog. Somewhere along the way social media diminished my necessity of having a personal website. Homesteading online has gotten simpler, and generic online tract housing now swamps the now old little houses on the digital prairie.

Even better than a URL, has been having an @casey.com email address. My ‘Contacts’ application reveals how friends emails have changed over the years; @aol, @erols, @earthlink, @hotmail, @verizon, @gmail and so on as providers and their offerings come and go. It doesn’t suck having an email address that’s yours forever. One that rolls as easily as your name, because it’s your name. Sorry to all the other Chris Casey’s out there, but I’m chris@casey.com and have been for more than 20 years. More recently it was a thrill to give my new daughter-in-law her own casey.com email address.

A couple times each month, I receive inquiries not unlike my outreach to Kathleen Creighton those many years ago, asking if I’d be willing to sell casey.com. The short answer is “No, casey.com is not for sale”. A longer more honest answer is, “Everything has a price. If your offer means a life of wealth and leisure, I’m listening.”  Who knows? Plenty of domain names have sold for that much and more (though they tend to be nouns, not names). But that’s just a nice daydream. Deep down my real domain dream is that casey.com, my little slice of digital real estate, remains in my family for their use for many years to come.

In the updated (2000) version of his book, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold (Master of his domain at rheingold.com) wrote about the passing of his friend and collaborator on The Well, Kathleen Creighton, aka ‘Casey’.

“The day the news of Casey’s death was announced, people started testifying online. Dozens of people revealed that their first welcoming email came from Casey, and that she had provided free, unpublicized technical support as they learned their way around the WELL. At her funeral, her family was surprised to find Casey’s family and face-to-face friends outnumbered by a factor of ten by all these people she had known “through the Internet”.

My day will come too. But there are all kinds of Caseys; first name Caseys, last name Caseys, nickname Caseys, businesses named Casey… and whether it’s my own family or someone else who becomes its new master, casey.com will carry on after me. Until that time, with gratitude to Kathleen, to Casey, my turn as Lord of the Virtual Manor that is casey.com continues.

For most of the last 15 years I have had some sort of online presence or other.  Working at the intersection of politics and technology means I have a closet full of campaign yard signs and a GoDaddy account with a collection of domain names, most important among them being my own, casey.com.  Over the years, both the technology and the content of my online world have evolved along with the tools and my own interests.  Once such change came this week, when I moved my blogs from TypePad to Posterous (on which this will be one of my first full postings).  Over the last couple of years, Facebook and Twitter have largely replaced my personal blog as my primary online outlet and I could no longer justify paying $15 a month for a blogging when very good free alternatives were available.  The process of moving old blogs posts from one system to another is a bit like moving from one home to another.  The tasks gets can get sidetracked as you re-read old posts, just as you might get off task while moving by going through an old box of photos.  And it was that sort of reflection, combined with a New Year’s determination to write more, that inspired this blog posting.  Probably of interest to few but myself, but it’s always been the case that I am my own main target audience online.

My own online presence was established sometime in 1997.  The earliest capture of casey.com from The Internet Archive is dated December 27, 1996 and shows a welcome screen from CAIS, the Capitol Area Internet Service, my first ISP.  Sadly, the whole year of 1997 is a black whole, and it’s not until December 1, 1998.  The oldest ‘What’s New‘ entry from January 28, 1998 says the whole site is new.  I’m pretty sure it’s my oldest site, I don’t remember another, but aging is a terrible thing and my memory often fails me.  If The Internet Archive says this is my oldest web site, who am I to argue?  Looking back, I’m still pleased with this simple page, and my current web site is not dramatically different.  I’m sure I was proud of my image mapping (alternate text links provided of course!), and my gag on the then popular feature of an odometer style hit-counter still makes me smile (it’s an animated gif with endlessly spinning numbers).  My “Web World” is divided into simple buckets; Family & Friends, Work, Diversions, and My Book.  It’s telling that the Capitol Dome appears three time, Admiral Ackbar once, and that I once wore a suit and tie.  I still wear the shirt from that photo with Ackbar, but I rarely wear a suit anymore.

Sometime in June 2000, I launched a re-designed site.  The content was essentially the same, but a new large family photo dominates the page.  This was shortly after I left the U.S. Senate after eight years of working there, and a subtle plug for my new Internet Consulting firm can be seen along with my book plug.  And gone are those old school image maps, I was using Adobe ImageReady at this point, and all about the slices and mouseovers!

The new look only lasted about a year.  My business partner left to go to law school, and so CaseyDorin Internet Productions became simple casey.com, and what had previously been my personal web site, was now my business site, launching in August of 2001.  It started as a clean and simple plain HTML site, but at some point around this time I was introduced to Movable Type web publishing software.  A friend installed MT on my server and I began using it for my client sites.  The animated soccer ball led to team photos of my son and daughter’s soccer teams that I had sponsored.  It was already fun watching my youngsters and their teammates play soccer.  It was cooler still watching them do it in jersey’s with my casey.com logo on the front!  My website’s focus had changed to be primarily for my business, but my personal life was still closely connected to it.  For four years I was my own boss and only employee, and casey.com showcased a wide variety of Democratic clients with whom I was fortunate to work with.

2004 was the year of the blog, and I jumped on the bandwagon big time.  Just look over in the right column of this current version of my blog, and you’ll see how my output has never been higher than it was in 2004 and 2005.  My interest in technology, writing, an online exhibitionism converged, heated up by the Presidential election year.  I spent the last three months of the campaign working full-time at the DNC.  And while it was devastating for Kerry to lose and give a second term to Bush, it would also mean the end of casey.com as a business.  For some time I had been encouraging clients to use NGP Software’s contribution and campaign database tools as the back end for the web sites that I built for them.  Now NGP offered me a job, building a team to continue what I was already doing and I jumped at the opportunity to work there.  It took me until the following year to once again makeover my website, returning it to it’s original ego-centric purpose in March of 2005.

This new site reflected the growth of my online world.  No longer just a destination where my personal content could all be found in one place, it was instead a portal that combined my own content, especially blogs posts and such, but contained a variety of links to my activities elsewhere on the web, such as my auctions on eBay, photos on Flickr, swag on CafePress, and a number of randomized links to the things that interest me such as The Cubs, Apple Computer, and my own family tree.  This site also included a prominent link to the Internet Archive for casey.com to share it’s evolution with visitors. 

Everything changed in 2007.  With my blogging output already in decline, new online outlets became available to the made it easier to find an audience of my friends, and to share my thoughts online in a rapid-fire manner contrary to the more thoughtful type of writing I typically sought to create for my blog.

My first post on Facebook was on February 9, 2007.  Here’s what I said…

Chris Casey Wednesday, pipes freeze, burst, water in basement
Thursday, powerbook dies, hard drive failure, everything lost
Thursday night, wife succumbs to the flu, major upchucking…
TGIF!

I joined Twitter in May of 2007, but after a single tweet I set it aside and forgot about it.  I really just didn’t ‘get’ twitter.  It wasn’t until July of 2008 that I became an active tweeter.

Here’s my second tweet from three months later …

But after that slow start, my tweeting picked up, especially at the next year’s Netroots Nation conference in in Austin.  And I know exactly why.  It was in Austin in July of 2008 that I stood in a long line and bought the 2nd generation iPhone, a gadget I had waited a very long time for.  Mobile access to Facebook and Twitter allowed me to embrace each wholeheartedly, and I now reached my online world in tweets and status updates rather than through blog posts.  My people would see what I wrote, and I prolifically wrote more while saying less.  According to TweetStats, I now average 3.3 tweets a day.

It’s interesting that I announced my location in my first two tweets (also my only two tweets for all of 2007), as it foretells the later arrival of location aware services that the currently all the rage thanks to our gps-equipped smart phones.  At the close of 2009, I began exploring location services on my iPhone.  I was familiar with Foursquare (first checkin on 12/29/09) and Loopt, but knowing that there was likely other options out there, I iput the question out there on Facebook, and I learned about Gowalla.

My first check-in on Gowalla was when I created my Neighborhood ABC Store on January 8, 2010.  For a time I used it equally with Foursquare, but I enjoyed the interface and interactions much better on Gowalla and now effectively use it exclusively for ‘checking-in’.  I’m exactly the sort of OCD geek that finds it appealing to make sure the world knows I’ve been to the neighborhood McDonalds, have earned my Voyager pin and plan to one day complete that Sea to Shining Sea trip as well!

And then here I’m am, writing about this all, in my good old (new) blog here on Posterous.  Once I publish this post, it will be tweeted and added to my Facebook wall.  I guess this post will require a ‘Part II’, because I haven’t even mentioned Ancestry.com, Find-A-Grave, PayPal, eBay, Flickr, TwitPic, etc. etc….

But I’m ready to move ahead with Part I here, so just stay tuned…

For about the last five years or so, I’ve maintained my blog using Movable Type’s (MT) software on my own web server. And during that time, I’ve been happy with the program and it’s features. It has allowed me to build and tinker with sites on my own server. But a server admin I am not, and when, from time to time, things go hinky on my server, I am not well suited to troubleshoot and fix the problem. Over the last several months, my MT installation has been very inconsistent, and is just as likely to return a server error as it was to work as it should.

I have been using web.com as my web host for about the last four years. Their VPS Root server allowed me to create the sub-sites I desired, and I was familiar with their service and support. Unfortunately, their service has suffered, and competitors offer hosting package with more features and more disk space at less cost.

And so, it’s time for me to move on. For my web hosting, I’m moving to Host Gator and am currently working at moving my life/files to my new server. As for my MT blogs, rather than install MT on my new server at Host Gator, I will instead use Six Apart’s hosted blog service, TypePad.

I’ve spent part of today, migrating my blog’s to TypePad. It’s too soon for a full review, but so far I am finding it promising and looking forward to letting them manage the burden of keeping things up and running. And hopefully, having restored reliability to my blog life, my recent lull will come to and end. Stay tuned…