Good morning,

The Friends of Locomotive 169 has a new website:

http://www.friendsof169.com.

You'll see we're a "dot.com" now, so please revise your bookmarks and/or favorites to the new URL.

The site is under re-construction, but you'll find most of the earlier content at the new location.


In other 169-related news:

-the Board elected on September 14, 2012 is:

President - Chuck Proudfoot
Vice-President - Jack Damrath
Treasurer - Lee Conner
Secretary - Jim Poston
Board Member - Melody Johnson

-the next Volunteer Day is Saturday, October 6th at the Pavilion.


Thanks for reading!

-Jim

So, does this mean you are now a "for-profit" commercial concern?

Can't see there's any profit in it. Nice to have that poor old thing getting some attention.

dave

Not the point, Dave. Non-profit organizations qualify for the .org extension; irm.org, nmra.org, rypn.org. Commercial ventures use the .com extension. I don't really care what their status is, but potential donors might.

What's the story?

It makes the most sense to retain ownership of any/all relevant domains and use the ones you aren't publishing (or have changed) to redirect to your new one.

Why not retain the former address and have it simply redirect? Changing bookmarks and the like is not user friendly, but by maintaining the original domain you maintain and protect ownership of the name/idea and protect the brand.

Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

I mean, we don't need "rypn.com".

".com" makes most sense when you have a brand name or well known company name, and your customers expect to just type in the name of your firm +.com.

Similarly, for academics it is ".edu". Our university does not own "udayton.com", and has no desire to (if they did, they would - we have the money).

'Evening...

We had a problem updating the ".org" website - we could update the database, but couldn't publish - and we couldn't get hold of our web person to fix the problem.

The 169 Board had previously discussed changes to the website, so we decided this was as good time to make the change. While a re-direct would have been nice, we weren't able to exercise that option.

It's true that non-profits use the ".org" suffix to identify themselves as a non-profit, but in our case, "friendsof169.com" was available, so we took it.

We're definitely still a 501(c)3, and will get that posted on the website.

Thanks for your interest,

-Jim

Tip to those initiating web stuff: separate your domain registration from the web hosting. Keep the domain registration under the control of core executives, and let the junior volunteer manage the hosting (which is more technical). If the junior volunteer disappears, you just stop paying the bills, setup a new hosting somewhere else, and redirect your registration to the new server/host.

Management of the registration does not require any special skills, it is just like managing your credit card.

I recommend "GoDaddy" for registrations. Big company with stable reputation and good customer support.

A technical glitch with hosting is no reason to be forced to change your domain name. A domain name is a rather big deal, and changing it mid-stream very badly hurts people's ability to find you. You say "just update bookmarks" -- well, people don't. Heck you can't even reach 90% of the people who have bookmarked you, because you don't have their email. It's bad enough with links. Most of the links to your website will never change no matter how many emails you send the webmasters. We have something like 110 links pointing to the old SMRS site, and I tried for a year to get people to change those links, 100 fruitless emails, and 95 are still wrong. A lot of people WON'T change, especially in social networking - people will not re-edit blog postings, forum posts, tweets, etc. and that's where most of your mentions are in this day and age. A fellow writes a blog posting in 2010, and to him that's ancient history and he assumes no one reads it, but he's wrong, because of the magic of Google search.

There's the real damage. All those wrong links, collectively, tell Google that the old site is important. This is called "link relevance", the slang term is "Google juice". Which has a cash value. The old site will be bought and sold among speculators because of that link relevance. They know how to stuff it with ads or spyware and extract a revenue stream from that, leveraging off your reputation and scamming your customers. Worse yet, it makes you look like you closed down!!!! People see parked pages and assume you're done, not moved.

If you're just starting out and nobody links to you, then this is not a big worry. Still, your domain name is your property and you should take better care of it, all due respect.

I know this is greek to a lot of folks. Heck for a lot of you, it didn't even occur to you that ownership of the domain exists, and that you can own a domain, and this is separate from paying the guy who hosts it. You just figure if you change cell phone companies of course you get a new phone number, therefore if you change hosters you get a new domain name. Oh wait, hold on, you know perfectly well that you can keep your cell phone number. Well, same thing here.

There's one thing you can do to make life a lot easier:


Yup, yup, yup. I've been saying that for a long time. First, register your domain with company X. And then, do your webmastering/web hosting with company Y. Don't mix the two.

An ethical company Y will tell you "Oh. You have your own domain registration. Please set your DNS servers to
ns1.companyY.net
ns2.companyY.net "
(this varies depending on the hosting company). And then you log into Company X and click through a couple menus, it gives you a few boxes, and you just type those names into the boxes. DONE. That refers the domain, and the hosting company takes it from there. But you retain ownership of your domain. And you can switch hosters just as easily.

Now, GoDaddy also provides hosting. If you register domains there, DON'T HOST WITH THEM. Host with somebody else. This is very very important. It seems easier "just get it all in one place", but it becomes an absolute nightmare if you ever want to move, because it's easy to change hosting... but changing domain registrars is a major hassle because of security. I know one person got burned with GoDaddy hosting, so they tried to yank both their hosting (easy) and domain registration (HARD). Of course, she didn't grasp that they were separate things, she saw it as one thing. She thought GoDaddy was deliberately making it hard to prevent her from leaving. That was not true. They were safeguarding her domain against a fraudulent transfer, which is exactly what a registrar ought to!

If you start with any random web hoster, most of them are not registrars, so if you try to yank your hosting business (only), they won't want to be your registrar, and so you are stuck with the hassle of a registrar transfer.

Of course, if you are hiring a person to do the whole website soup to nuts, he may want to start over on a different domain, or insist you transfer the domain registration to himself. That is insane. It is the equivalent of hiring a chauffeur who says you must sign over the pink slip to your car!!! Obviously that is nonsense. They know how valuable your domain name will become, and they want to lock you in by owning your domain instead of you. If you fight them enough, they should hand it over. You can always take it back in a lawsuit or UDRP action, but the company is hoping you'll just stay with them instead.

In this case, I see (via WHOIS) that friendsof169.org is owned by: Noel Jerke, SiteToolset.com LLC, Coppell, TX, 972-745-3735. He is the legal owner of the domain. The registrar is GoDaddy. This domain expires in 26 Oct 2015.
Friendsof169.com is owned by Jim Poston, Monte Vista, CO. No company name. This domain expires in <1 year.

So that's a major step in the right direction: own the domain. The only "pro tip" I would provide beyond that is prepay a number of years in advance. You can pay up to 10, and at most registrars the cost is about $10/year. You see this in any professionally run website. Google.com expires in 2020. The cost is nothing, as compared to the damage caused if the domain expires and is snatched up by the aforementioned speculators. It costs them only $10/year to snatch it away from you, and it doesn't take much "google juice" to be worth $10/year. To say nothing of the potential profit of ransoming it back to you.

The story I heard for some time was that the National Railway Historical Society got www.nrhs.com because nrhs.org got snatched up by North Rutherford High School in New Jersey.

A cursory check just now finds that www.nrhs.org is currently defunct, and apparently ready to be snapped up by the NRHS, probably for less than the cost of one member's annual dues.....

There is no requirement that you be a non profit to claim a .org domain name... or be a business to claim a .com...

It is good practice to register you group as both .com and .org... In general, the search engines go to a .com first... so having both with a redirect can make searches easier...

Also, it prevents confusion... NRHS can be a railroad historical society or a high school... at worse, it prevents a malicious individual from trying to profit from the confusion... Some years ago, a pornographic site registered 'whitehouse.com"... The official site of the home of the President being "whitehouse.org" Since the .com version has been used by various groups for various purposes... there is a wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehouse.com

What would happen if one of your members became angry with your group (of course this would never happen to a railroad preservation organization...) and set up a .com site to air his/her point of view?

Randy Hees

When a group of us started Baltimore Beer Week several years ago, the first thing the appointed web guru--an employee of the flagship sponsor brewery--did was to instantly register every conceivable URL connected with the name that was available, including bbweek.com, baltimorebeerweek.org and baltimorebeerweeksucks.com, just to be on the safe side. It's a recommended practice if you're in a business that might just possibly garner traffic in negative feedback, if only from harassers, or inspire imposters.

Follow-up on NRHS.org: I received an e-mail from NRHS HQs saying that they were aware of the situation and indeed had offered a not-inconsequential sum to the high school "squatting" on the NRHS.org URL, to no avail. I suggested that the cash offered be put instead to playing "vulture" on the domain to snap it up the second (literally) it became available instead. It just HAPPENS that the registration expires in the very near future..........