the build journal
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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…
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Week 8: The flip sprint — what a clever name is actually worth
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I have a domain-buying habit. For years I’ve registered names the way other people buy lottery tickets: see a clever combination that’s somehow still available, grab it, picture the thing it could become. Most of them became a line on a renewal invoice. This week I finally did the thing I’d been avoiding, which is…
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Week 7: gopherguts — the part of a guide that isn’t the writing
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I’ve owned gopherguts.com since a past life and let it sit for years. The name is too good to waste: Gopher for the University of Minnesota, guts for the honest, in-the-trenches version nobody puts in the official brochure. This week it became what it should have been all along — an unofficial guide to being…