Register.com and URL forwarding

A good friend, looking for a CTO job in NYC, called me to ask what I thought about register.com. He sort of thought that because “www.JoelOnSoftware.com” has a big ad for register.com on the bottom, that I was affiliated with them in some way.

Actually, the correct URL for Joel on Software is supposed to be “joel.editthispage.com”, where I sure as heck don’t have any ads for register.com.

But I wanted to reserve the domain name “JoelOnSoftware.com” for when I get rich and can afford to host it myself. So I used register.com to register the new domain name, and then used register.com’s “free” URL redirection service.

And that’s the problem: their free redirection service frames your site with a big fat ad. Lame.

For now, I’ve added a little bit of Javascript to get rid of the ad that they put up… but it still flashes briefly. Now I’m kind of hoping that people mistakenly believe that if you use register.com, your web page will have a big register.com ad. That would teach them to sneak their nasty ads in where they don’t belong!

Cobalt Qube

We’ve set up a Cobalt Qube for Fog Creek. It’s doing a nice job as a web server, email server, CVS server, firewall, NAT, and a few other things I haven’t figured out yet. All told, we got all this stuff running with about 3 hours of work between us… compared to several days of work when I set up the same thing for myself on a new Linux box at home.

When the Qube came out about a year ago at $999, they bragged about how it “doesn’t need a keyboard and monitor” and therefore can be a lot cheaper than a PC running Linux. Well, this thing is still $999, now a heck of a lot more expensive than the equivalent PC, and I’m sure it’s still selling like hotcakes… know why? It’s because of the software. Software adds value faster than it adds cost. Prediction: Cobalt will outsource all the hardware stuff and become a pure software company.