No, I'm not going to tell you about the vast areas of land which I own, control and made a fortune from in far off lands, as those who know me wouldn't believe it, but it is about my ill advised venture into computer domains. Wikipedia tells us that "The Domain Name System (DNS) is the hierarchical and decentralized naming system used to identify computers, services, and other resources reachable through the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks." So you can see why I became confused.

In my early experience of computers (a Sinclair ZX80 was my first!) I was quite content to fathom out how I could use them and so increase my knowledge of the world about me. But using them re-kindled my interest in electronics and I wanted to know how I could build my own computers and create my own websites. Building computers was no problem (there were kits for that) but when it came to naming my websites here the problems started - I have already touched upon the use of web names in the Introduction to this website. I tried several alternatives but eventually decided that the best solution was to have my own domain names - at the time of making this decision I thought I was going to own my own domain names but I soon learnt differently, I would never own them but would have to pay annually for the privilege of using them.

However things seemed to functioned well and the annual cost was not exorbitant, but I became curious. When I copied a web address to a different location I found that the actual address was not the one I had given to the website but a much longer address given by the company who stored the website on their computers (Google in my case) and I paid the domain fee to a middleman who had control of the domain name and just redirected users, and emails, to the company that stored them for me. I think that's how it worked, but in my confusion I may have misunderstood something and I suspect that things may have been even more complicated. (It is! : see WhifflersWalks Domain Expiry email from Nominet)

I realised that if I used the full Google names in links to my websites, cut out the middleman and the domain cost, all I would lose would be the hidden personalisation, the website could still display my chosen name on screen. So what's the problem? Nothing at all - if I had realised this before I started setting up websites and email addresses - but I now had to unknot things to simplify them and inform a large number companies who I communicated with to persuade them to change their records to include my updated email address, some of them making it more difficult than others and some virtually impossible, definitely not as simple as I thought it would be - oh! and there were a few friends to inform as well...and remind...and remind again...etc.