Where did your domain name come from?

I watched a panel today at SxSW and the moderator, Lynne Johnson, asked a great question of the panel. She asked each of them to explain where the name of their weblog came from. Hearing their answers was great and I think everyone should explain where the name of their weblog comes from.
So, I encourage you to explain the origins on your own weblog and use the tag ‘blognameorigin’ to help people find our post.
For those new to posting tags, basically a tag is a kind of flag to search engine on how they can sort your post. If you put this code in your post, it should work.
<a href=”https://technorati.com/tag/blognameorigin” rel=”tag”>blognameorigin</a>
And then you should see a link like this appear: on your post. If you click on that link, you should see the posts of all others that used that tag.
With that said, back to the main idea…
The Story of cruftbox.com
Back in 1997 I registered the domain name pusateri.org as a personal site for photos and stories. It served me well and in early 2000 I started using pusateri.org/cruft for my nascent weblog. The word cruft was a word I liked since I had first heard it in college.
To me the word represented exactly what my site was, random bits of unimportant crap.
In late 2001, I decided I wanted a site for the weblog alone, to keep the family stuff a little separate from my ranting weblog. I wanted cruft.com as my domain name, but alas, it was taken.
John Walker, founder of Autodesk, had already registered cruft.com, .net, and .org. I emailed him and asked about his plans. He said he wasn’t doing anything with them, but that he was saving them for something ‘good’. I apparently didn’t count as ‘good’ and he didn’t want to give me any of the domain names. (It’s four years later, and e still hasn’t done anything with those domain names…)
Back to the drawing board I went, trying to figure out what to do. After a bit, I came up with the idea that the site was realy a container for my cruft and not so much cruft itself. At that point, I started playing around with names like cruftcan, cruftstuff, and boxocruft. I finally settled on cruftbox, mainly because it was a easy to pronounce word and it ended with a X, the mark of all things high tech.
And so, cruftbox.com was born.
What’s your story?

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5 thoughts on “Where did your domain name come from?”

  1. Where did your domain name come from?

    Michael Asks: Where did your domain name come from?
    OweBoat was the result of a search for a few different domain names about debt. I wanted something that wasn’t too serious, too long and that got to the point of what the focus of the site is, whi…

  2. Thanks so much for coming to the panel, Michael, and for introducing yourself to me earlier in the weekend.
    I’ll see you in Los Angeles.

  3. Whence does “Emmanate”, uh, emanate?

    Michael, all fired up from a few (I’m assuming, or projecting) alcohol-hazed days at SXSW, wants to know where my domain name comes from. Or maybe he means my blog name? And he suggests a rel tag in there to…

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