the build journal
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Week 19: man-a-tee — the world’s most relaxed NFT-ish project
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Back in June I made a trading card of a manatee. Gray, tired, half-lidded eyes, one flipper raised in the smallest possible wave. On the back, in the monospace voice of every NFT project I ever rolled my eyes at, a certificate of authenticity: permanently etched on the blockchain, procedurally generated, hand-curated and cryptographically verifiable.…
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Week 18: media-incident — a 2005 homepage finally gets a job
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I’ve owned media-incident.com since 2001. For most of that time it did one quiet job: it was the storefront for my domain reseller account. The OpenSRS renewal emails carry its red m-i logo, and the website behind it was a single page with that logo and three links: Contact Us, Registration Agreement, ICANN Policy. The…
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Week 17: loftscondos — “Lofts” is not a legal term
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I originally registered these domains in 2005 because the online real-estate tool I wanted to use didn’t exist yet. (It showed up the next February. It was called Zillow.) Twenty-one years later, the two names are the oldest real-estate domains in my portfolio, and age is the one thing you can’t buy for a domain.…
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Week 16: mntunes — the calendar I didn’t build
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mntunes.com has been sitting in the portfolio for years with a simple promise baked into the name: Minnesota music. The obvious thing to build is a gig calendar. Everyone wants to know what’s playing tonight, and a calendar is the kind of site people come back to. So in June I decided that’s what this…
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Week 15: My Lunch with Kevin Smith — dinner, no podcast
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In January 2011 the Nerdist podcast recorded a live episode at SModcastle, the little Los Angeles theater Kevin Smith had opened the year before as the first stage built for podcasting. The episode came out on January 17, simply titled “Kevin Smith,” and somewhere in it he did what he spent that whole era doing:…
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Week 13: 3-13 — eleven rounds, two decks, one argument
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Three Thirteen is the card game at our table. Eleven rounds; the deal starts at three cards and grows to thirteen; whatever number just got dealt is wild. It teaches in one round and lasts all evening, and for years the scorekeeping has run on paper pads I print myself, which works right up until…
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Week 12: minneapolos — the pun was the easy part
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Some domains get bought because of a plan. minneapolos.com got bought in January 2024 because the word made me laugh: Minneapolis with polos hiding inside it, a whole product category folded into a city name like a note passed in class. It has sat on the shelf for two and a half years waiting for…
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Week 11: reviewatron — the idea that had to earn its way back
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Week 11 was supposed to be powerballer: a parody blog so thoroughly pre-built that shipping it from a cruise ship required exactly one command. I did not run the command. There’s a lesson in that which has nothing to do with bandwidth and everything to do with appetite: a joke you were delighted by in…
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Week 10: cve.social — the week the ocean won
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Week 10 had a plan, and the plan had a certain glamour to it. I was going to stand up my own corner of the social internet from a deck chair in the middle of the Atlantic: a Bluesky handle that is just my domain, and behind it a small self-hosted fediverse server humming on…
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Week 9: cabinchoice — the name wanted the woods
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Some weeks you build the idea you planned. This week the domain overruled the plan. cabinchoice.com has been on the queue since the start as the flagship: cruise-ship cabin reviews, because picking the right stateroom is the best decision a cruiser makes after picking the ship, and the official deck plans are no help at…