The end of an era

Today, I let my domain registration for NoGagReflex.com expire.

It was a domain that had been with me for almost a decade, and was my first blog. The story about the selection of the name has been lost in the annals of history, but goes something like this. In the burgeoning days of the Internet, Jake and I sat ruminating on how one could make money with this new frontier. Neither of us felt like putting too much effort into it. The Internet was “easy money” anyhow. One needed only to register a witty domain name and sell it to someone with an even wittier idea. We looked for the sites with the largest traffic numbers, which were the adult sites. I registered NoGagReflex.com and he registered YourMomIsHot.com. We sat back and waited for the multi-million dollar offers.

Eventually, we realized that we were stuck with these domain names; a tough pill to swallow. That’s it, I thought, “NoGagReflex.com. Making the world easier to swallow.”! History was in the making. We interfaced with the Internet’s greats. We cyber-partied with the best of them. We even made a little money, which was later blown on even grander internet-money making schemes (not really).

Eventually, the stigma of the name began to take it’s toll. In an attempt to escape YouMomIsHot, Jake moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but he could not get away from the pull of the Interwebs up int he frozen north. He banished himself to a hermitage of Livejournal posts. Thankfully, his recovery is going well, though his Canadian accent does betray him from time to time.

When I realized what the domain name meant to others, I made it a mission to hold on to it, lest it fall into the hands of some smut purveyor. It became difficult to tell people at church what my domain name was. I registered ThinkingandDriving.com, but kept NoGagReflex as a domain alias, my dirty little secret. This year, I decided to begin to make the separation. I moved hosting to a free Go-Daddy account, to get back to the “banner supported” lifestyle of my innocence. Now, April second, 2009, NoGagReflex has returned to the cloud, the registration is canceled and I expect some porn mogul to finally snatch up the name and pollute the Internet with it. But my conscience is clear.

Please join with me in a moment of solemn reflection on the evolution of NoGagReflex.com over the years.