Today is the 11th anniversary of Ledfrog.com. This was the day back in 2000 that I submitted my first domain application to solidify my presence on the Internet which was still a growing force not nearly the size that it is today. Here’s a little back story on the domain and why I decided to register it.

AOL 3.0

Readers of my site and those that know me personally most likely already know this part of the story, but it fully explains how the name “ledfrog” came to be. When the Internet was first starting out, there was a plethora of random companies offering services to get you online and it was often a confusing and tedious process—usually ending in a frustrated user with no email. America Online came out of this mess with software for Windows 3.1 back in January of 1993. It was to be the start of an online empire and the most popular Internet software/service the world would ever see.

I didn’t jump into the AOL world until version 3.0 (June of 1996) when we got our Windows 95 computer, but when I did, I was hooked! The thought of having access to the entire world and to be able to communicate with thousands of users anywhere at any given time just excited me.

I can’t remember what my first screenname was, but I do remember it having some numbers in it. See, back in those days there were so many people on AOL, that it seemed like no matter what screenname you came up with, you had to put numbers on it just to make it unique. Well, I sat out to change that. I wanted a short, pronounceable name that had no numbers, didn’t incorporate my real name and wouldn’t be something I’d regret using after growing up.

On July 22, 1998 I was 16 years old and sitting in front of my parent’s computer thinking of that name. At the time, I was using a picture of a small tree frog for my desktop background and listening to Led Zeppelin. It was that simple. Ledfrog was born.

Domain Name

While in high school, a friend and I started building cheap little websites that were hosted on free webservers like FreeYellow.com and Xoom.com. These sites were nothing more than collections of pictures and links for things we were interested in at the time, but for me, they were the start of a new hobby. The problem was that when I do something, I like to do it “pro” so I got tired of having a weblink that looked like: http://www.freeyellow.com/members/pages/username/index.html and wanted something more like http://www.something.com.

At the time, there weren’t any companies like GoDaddy.com where you can register about any domain you want in a matter of seconds. Before, you actually had to print out a paper application, fill it out by hand and send it off with a check for 2 years of registration minimum. It was $35 per year back then!

So again, I sat there thinking—this time of what domain I wanted to get. On a sidenote, I really wish I had a lot of money at this time. Looking back at how many valuable domain names were still available just blows my mind. But like any investment, there are never any guarantees. Most of us never would have thought the domain business would get to where it is.

Anyway, wishing to spend my $70 wisely, I opted to stay with the ledfrog name and decided to create a brand out of it. From that point forward, this domain has served as a fan site for Metallica, an FTP server, a collection of links to popular “hacking” tools for AOL and other things, a personal page for me, an FTP server again, a blank page, a forwarded page to other domains and now finally (since 2008), a blog mostly about technology. I remember one of the greatest satisfactions I got while running the FTP server was when I asked a co-worker one day if he knew where I could download a particular freeware program and he said, “There’s a site I found called Ledfrog.com that has a lot of stuff…you could try there.” I was floored that someone actually knew my site without me telling them about it!

I’ve come a long way with this domain and through the years I’ve owned well over 80 different domains, sold a few and made some money, started websites and failed, had ideas that never materialized but had fun each and every day. For me, Ledfrog.com had withstood the time and is currently my oldest and most active domain. It is here to stay for quite a while!

The votes are in…as of today, the heads of the Internet (as I like to call them), ICANN has voted to allow virtually an unlimited amount of new domain names to be made available for registration. To see what I mean, let’s break down a current domain name:

ledfrog.com is a 2nd-level domain registration within the .com namespace. With .com being a top-level domain (TLD) that allows unregulated registrations in the 2nd level, anyone can register a .com domain if it’s available.

Throughout the years, new TLDs or extensions were adding to the domain system to help alleviate demand for domain names. Among vanity extensions such as .travel, .info and .biz, each country in the world was assigned a 2-character country code to allow those countries to offer domains to its citizens. More recently, ICANN approved the use of .xxx specifically for adult-content sites.

This system has worked rather well consider how old DNS is! However, with the advent of new technology and masses of people jumping online each and every day, large companies have had to register handfuls of domains just to protect their brands and trademarks. With over 300 TLDs currently available, these costs can add up. Current registration costs can range from $7 to $600 per year for each domain. That’s even if they can get their brand as a domain. Dealing with cyber-squatters and other infringers have likely cost companies millions of dollars.

The future of domains appears to be the availability of new, custom registrations of top-level domains. Imagine Apple Inc. being able to own .apple or .iphone!

To be honest, when I first heard this news, I was worried. I feel like part of the domain system is the uniqueness of it—the rarity of it. Of course, this could just be me looking at it from a business standpoint, but I’m under the impression that offering these unlimited domains will essentially devalue domains as a whole.

That was until I found out about the registration costs! ICANN has announced that each application will carry a fee of $185,000 while annual renewal of the domain will cost $25,000. This should stop 99% of the spammers out there for sure!

It’s clear that these domains will be somewhat of a luxury for large coporations and/or the rich individual who might want to register some generic domain name like .car or .games which makes me feel better about not letting another million useless websites appear online overnight from people looking to make money off selling a domain name.

While this new plan seems like a good idea on the surface, another concern I have is how the public will accept this. Anyone who follows the domain industry knows how hard it has been to promote any domain other than .com, so how will this be any different? The Internet world is so used to typing in something and then following it with .com or another known extension, but this is just confusing. Typing in .apple just doesn’t make sense, but I guess that’s what people said 30 years ago when people were just learning about the Internet.

I’ve been on the Internet since 1997 and I’ve seen a lot of changes in the domain industry and this is by far the largest of them all. But one thing has remained true throughout all of it—nobody remembers a domain extension as well as a .com domain. In this case, only time will tell if this will change.

As usual, I’m late to the game! It’s a good thing I don’t purport myself to be a newscaster of any form because sometimes I feel like I’m the last to know. Even after I discussed the death of IPv4 the other day, I still wasn’t aware of June 8, 2011. But as it stands, June 8 is the day where 243 huge Internet organizations will participate in a 24-hr “test flight” of IPv6 across their servers and networks.

World IPv6 Day

On this day, the likes of Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Akamai will be offering their websites and services over the IPv6 protocol. The basic idea behind this plan is to motivate other industry leaders and hardware manufacturers to continue getting devices and services ready for the new protocol.

Fortunately, these changes will be transparent to end-users, so there will be nothing special you need to do in order to see your favorite websites. Computers and hardware have in one way or another supported IPv6 for some years now, but if you want to verify this, proceed to the test site that’s been setup to run a series of tests on your computer system. It will tell you your current IPv6 compatibility and what, if anything, you can do to fix problems.

I’ve been an active Internet user for many, many years and I’ve often wondered how long it would take to run out of IPv4 addresses and as of February 11, 2011, we no longer have to wonder because it’s happened! There will come a day when IPv4 is no longer supported and it’s important now to ensure that systems across the world are able to operate on the new protocol.

More information

The Internet Society (isoc.org) is probably your best bet for obtaining more (and updated) information about this event, so I’ve posted some direct links here for you to get the information you need:

• World IPv6 Day FAQ
• List of websites already operating on IPv6
• Official press releases

I’ve scoured the Internet looking for the answer to this question and I have found it. The question was, can you you install multiple WordPressMU blogs and have them run under one webhost. The short answer is no. However, as with most things in the online world, it is possible with the right “tool”.

If you’re wondering why I would want to have two separate installs of this, it’s because I have more than one client on my web server, each of which are running their own sites. This is fine for most applications, but when you start dabbling in things like SSL certificates and wildcard sub-domains, that’s when the trouble starts. These are just two items that require their own IP address.

One of my clients would like to run multiple blogs on his WordPress Network, but because I’m already doing that for Ledfrog.com, I’m essentially blocking him from doing so. This is because Ledfrog.com is the main domain on my server and any changes utilizing different ports such as 443 for SSL certificates or services like WordPressMU that use wildcard sub-domains have to go through the server’s IP address and since this IP is assigned to my domain, his will not work.

The way WordPressMU works is once you convert your WordPress install into a network, you have the ability to add new sites to it. These sites utilize all of the main structure of the original WordPress installation while creating a separate blog directory inside the wp-content folder to store all of that blog’s specific files such as media uploads and so forth. Plugins and theme are then made available to all sites provided that you (the network admin) have made them available. The advantages here are that you no longer have to install a whole new copy of WordPress, create a new database, download all the same themes and plugins or manage different webhost accounts every time you want to start a new blog. Everything except the media files are shared. You can imagine how much faster updates are too!

Anyway, to make this happen, you need to create a wildcard sub-domain ‘A’ record in your DNS server that points *.yourdomain.com to your server’s IP address. This is needed because when you create a new site on your network, a virtual subdomain is created. An example of this is my personal blog site, Ledfrog.me. When I created it in my network, I was actually creating me.ledfrog.com.

The real magic happens with a feature called Domain Mapping. This is where you can map a real domain (provided it’s been added to your DNS server) to any virtual WordPress site you have created. Using the same example, I was able to map the domain Ledfrog.me to my virtual blog, me.ledfrog.com, so when you access either of those URLs, you’ll wind up at Ledfrog.me. Make sense?!

So all this is fine and dandy when you’re working with one server, one IP address and one main domain, but in my case, another client of mine would like to create his own network. The problems begin when you try to create the wildcard sub-domain. While doing this is possible and serves a valuable function—allowing him to create his own real sub-domains—it does nothing for WordPressMU!

I’ve contacted my webhost, I’ve ran all over Google and even tried Bing out for the first time looking for some help with this and eo far I’ve found two answers. First, I keep getting sent to sets of instructions that allow you use vhost.conf files in your client’s vhost container to allow the use of a wildcard sub-domain. This process basically has you creating a conf file that you then configure into Apache to tell the server that you want it to be included into the configuration for that site. It’s great for adding site-specific features to httpd.conf without affecting your whole server.

The second answer I get is the correct one. You can’t use WordPressMU on two separate installations without an additional static IP address! To verify this, all you have to do is install it on another client on your same server and watch what happens when you try to access one of the the virtual blog sites. Here’s what it does:

Domain1.com is the main domain attached to the server’s ONLY IP address.
site2.domain1.com is a virtual blog site created inside the WordPressMU installation.
site2.com is the domain that is mapped to the sub-domain above.
If you access site2.com, you are really only looking at site2.domain1.com.

Domain2.com is in another client’s hosting account on the same server and same IP address.
site2.domain2.com is a virtual blog that’s created inside the WordPressMU installation.
If you access site2.domain2.com, you are redirected to Domain1.com with an error about registrations being closed.

The reason for that is because site2.domain2.com is being read as a sub-domain of Domain1.com!!

I hope you’re not confused. More so, I hope someone who reads this is laughing their head off because they know the way around all this. Oh and by the way, I’m not try to escape having to purchase a separate IP address. It’s just that my host won’t sell me one without a valid reason and apparently this doesn’t count because they said it’s possible to use one address!