I wanted to buy rshall.com. I wanted my email address to be m@rshall.com.
If you visit RSHall.com right now, you’ll realize – after a few seconds perhaps – that it belongs to some film producer named R. Scott Hall. Why did I think I could get such a sweet domain name?
Actually, it’s because when I first googled the domain, it was available. Well, not technically, but I thought it was.
See, I checked the domain, and nothing came up. I got excited. I thought I’d found the perfect email address. I figured I’d buy the domain, add my “M” in front of the “@,” and be all cool.
It wasn’t until I tried to register the domain, that I realized it was already sold. That broke my nerdy, little heart.
Before googling, I thought for sure it would be taken. Thinking it was available, though, launched me into, like I said, pretty much utter excitement. Taking that away as quickly as it came, hurt.
So I sat around and moped. I tried thinking up some other cool email address. Nothing else came close, though. M@rshallj.com looked lame, I thought. No words in the English language end in “J” – I didn’t want my email to end that way either.
M@rshalljones.com kind of defeated the purpose of having a short and snappy address.
The obvious choice of course would have been marshall@marshalljonesjr.com. I really didn’t want to have to write that all out. The shortened version, m@marshalljonesjr.com, seemed a bit better. That’s not really short, but it’s as short as I can get with this site’s domain name.
Finally, I came up with a new one I figured I could settle with: m@rshmail.com. That’s almost as short as m@rshall.com, I reasoned. And it kind of has a cool ring to it. MarshMail, like Gmail or Hotmail, but MarshMail.
But still, I wasn’t that enthused.
When I first started this site, I also thought of publishing it at MarshJones.com. At the time, that domain was available. Still, although it’s nice and short, I really didn’t like it that much.
I don’t mind people calling me Marsh – it’s kind of an informal nickname among friends. They call me Marsh without me ever saying anything about it. On the other hand, though, I never say, “Hi, I’m Marsh.” I never refer to myself as Marsh. So yeah, I didn’t want to start. I didn’t want to brand myself with that shortened version
So I kept thinking and waiting and procrastinating. Until finally, just recently, a friend who’s probably reading this right now, mentioned that I should do this, set up my email address to correspond with this site.
That sparked it. About a month still went by, though. I thought about it more, expecting to do it really soon but still didn’t.
Finally, and this time I actually mean “finally,” when I made the decision to kill the Facebook page and RSS feed and switch to email subscription by itself, I figured it was time.
Get my stuff together. Set up the email address. Publish.
And so that’s what I did. And that’s why I have a new email address now. And that’s why you can and should email me.
If it’s not going to be perfect, I didn’t want to buy and continue to pay for a single domain name for the rest of my life just for a second-rate email address. Also, unless the address is perfect, I didn’t want to sacrifice the branding. I want my email address to clearly show that I’m connected to this website. I want people who get my email address to think, “Oh, wow, he has a site. I should check it out.”
That’s what I hope they do now. That’s why I have the email I have now.
That, and I have some plans for when I get married that fit well with the “Mr.” part, not that I have any plans to get married yet. 🙂
All right, this is whole enough and long enough and drawn-out enough and definitely selfish enough now. Happy Day-That-Only-Comes-Around-Once-Every-Four-Years (February 29)! Adios.
