The Cost of Just Being Yourself
$0.01 – after a wait of eighteen years.
The eighteen years’ wait began when I received a note from a friend asking me why I had shifted my personal web site to being a commercial vendor of Microsoft software.
Wait, what?
A quick check revealed that it was true. My name now led to a page of Microsoft ads. I’d forgotten to pay my routing-service bill, and within a couple of hours a cyber-squatter had taken up residence.
The routing provider told me: “we don’t care if that’s your real name, tough luck.” The new owner of the route license told me: “pay me $XX,000 to get it back.” Yes, a five-figure sum.
Fortunately kevinbjorke.com had already been an alias to botzilla.com, which in those days was itself an alias to yet another (now out of business) service provider. I didn’t lose my site or data, but I’d been actively encouraging people to use my name as the address. Crash went that idea.
At the time, I checked the WHOIS database for the squatter’s license expiration date and set a reminder on my calendar to grab the name back after those months had passed. To my surprise, after two years the squatter renewed the license, though they never used the route for anything after a few weeks as a failed Microsoft shill. Just a dead-end URL.
I set another reminder. But they renewed again. And again. And again.
If they were getting the same listing rate I did in 2008, those years of leeching cost them $1422 in fees.
In 2024, they finally gave up. I re-registered the URL at a GoDaddy promotional rate of one cent.
So Now What?
botzilla.com, is not going away. Over the near future content will be moving here to kevinbjorke.com as a new site. For now, blog posts will appear simultaneously on both.
The software supporting botzilla.com, called Jekyll, is reaching its useful limits. Like an old car, it’s been needing a lot of duct tape and poking-around the engine to keep it current. The time sink of maintenance has reached a limit (as it did for the previous software, Moveable Type, which was an improvement over the earlier vim, aka “just do it all yourself from scratch”). It’s now difficult to add some key desired features without a tremendous hassle, so kevinbjorke.com is shifting to use software named Ghost.
As before, I’m self-hosting the site – platforms (and providers) come and go and you never know which billionaire sociopath might buy and distort “your” web presence. It’s not free.
As of today, the new kevinbjorke.com is a mere shell of a thing. It uses the default Ghost template, it’s mostly empty. I’ve decided to open it up even in that bare state, rather than get it all polished and pre-migrated. I’ll document the stages of the migration, and hope that the real-time how-to (or how-not-to) example will be useful to others someday.
First tip: pay your bills on time.