{"id":686,"date":"2018-07-26T22:17:17","date_gmt":"2018-07-26T22:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/?p=686"},"modified":"2018-07-26T22:21:05","modified_gmt":"2018-07-26T22:21:05","slug":"interviewing-my-domain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jrdingwall.ca\/blogwall\/interviewing-my-domain\/","title":{"rendered":"Interviewing My Domain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alan Levine issued this call<\/a> a while back, but I thought “better late than never” after reading Colin Madland’s<\/a> reply today.<\/p>\n

What is your domain name and what is the story, meaning behind your choice of that as a name?<\/h2>\n

I have a few domain names at this moment. For me, I bought my first domain – module13.ca<\/a> – in 2015. I only purchased my name domain – jrdingwall.ca<\/a> – a few months ago. The latter is as simple as advice my graduate supervisor gave us during one of our many kitchen conversation sessions years ago. So I’m a bit late to the game, but it is really nice now having my own name as the domain as it’s a bit easier to direct colleagues and acquaintances to.<\/p>\n

My first domain started as a bit of an instructional design joke. I was chatting one night on my way out of the office with one of my dear friends and colleagues from my early career in ID. We were talking about a few courses, which had any number of modules, and we started joking about including illusive 13th modules. Something about the name just stuck with me, and when I finally decided to purchase my own domain it was the only thing I could come up with. The sub-domains then became a part of the identify. I started a pressbooks install and called it 13books, “books beyond the dozen”. Or a courses hub called 13 courses. So now I seem to be stuck with a baker’s dozen worth of ideas.<\/p>\n

What was your understanding, experience with domains before you got one? Where were you publishing online before having one of your own?<\/h2>\n

Before buying my own domain I had made like 2 geocities sites when I was a kid. Followed by a very long gap in making anything on the web I eventually had a few blogs. The blogs were set up for classes I took during my undergraduate degree. Then there were a couple that were more for fun. There was one I set up using Blogger as an official blogger for Helsinki Summer School 2012. Another, also Blogger, was called 21 days of ice cream. I used that one to post videos of me eating all varieties of ice cream I could get my hands on while in Finland in 2012.<\/p>\n

I didn’t really think about domains at the time aside from what to call the site. So the summer school one was something like hss2012detef.blogspot (detef = designing teach education for the future). I also had to create some websites using dreamweaver, or Google sites while in school, and trust me, these site domains were as confusing and unintuitive\/boring as the detef one. I recently imported all of the content from other blogs into this blog, you’ll see “reclaimed” in the titles of these posts. In general I’ve been trying to close accounts that I don’t use anymore, and for the blogs I find a great deal of pride in bringing this content ‘home’.<\/p>\n

What was a compelling feature, reason, motivation for you to get and use a domain? When you started what did you think you would put there?<\/h2>\n

Mid 2015 I was a new solo instructional designer, and while I had a lot to learn about classical ID (cough LMS work) in higher ed, I had been introduced to the work of Alan Levine, Jim Groom, George Siemens and Stephen Downes, and many more while I was in grad school years earlier. Something about a lot of their work stuck with me, and I started to see some of the work my colleagues at the UofS DEU were working on and thought to myself “this is important work, and I’m not going to get institutional support to pursue it, so I have to do it myself”. It didn’t hurt that Reclaim Hosting<\/a> had recently started up, and that even though I had few interactions with Jim and his team, I trusted that they would be at the centre of the right community for me. I think I had recently been to a conference session by Adam Croom, and he demonstrated Reclaim’s installitron which made it look approachable to get started. So I was off, I purchased a domain, installed my very first instance of WP got to work.<\/p>\n

The first thing I wanted to create was a portfolio. I was transitioning from one ID position to another project and it seemed really relevant for me at the time to have a collection of work I could show. Looking down the line I thought I might also pursue freelance ID, so a company name and portfolio could be built around the domain. That eventually shifted, and most of the portfolio work is now on my name domain.<\/p>\n

What kinds of sites have you set up one your domain since then? How are you using them? Please share URLs!<\/h2>\n

Module13 is now a sort of random collection of sites and work, as well as a testing ground for me to try things out:<\/p>\n