Saturday, September 1, 2007

Fancy Pancakes: Let the Journey Begin

When it came to naming this site, I struggled; in fact, it's been two hours since I first decided I wanted to create this blog today. I mulled over a few names, asking myself: What is my essence? I then started checking blogger.com to see if they were taken. You need a simple yet catchy and memorable name that also reflects your personality.

Disappointingly, even the slightly obscure names were taken- blueblankie, sift, mindlock, mindsift. Fancy Pancakes was available, but I wasn't sure I wanted to tell people to "go to my blog, fancypancakes." I didn't want to have to explain the name every damn time, nor was I sure it captured my personality.

I started considering more options, growing increasingly surprised at how many names were taken: Read me, Read it, KO, Me.

What REALLY made me angry was that all of these sites.... NO ONE WAS USING THEM! They were dead sites; someone got the name in 2001, posted something like, "Haha this is a blog," and never returned. Blogger has a policy of letting people keep names even if they appear unused because "sometimes a person goes back to a blog after a long absence, and we want our users to be able to find their original name." Well, damn you blogger.com, get a clue.

Here is a list of names that are taken but unused: football, hyper, stalker, stink, poop, thegeorge, undecided, gogogo, googoogaga, Connecticut, mindtrap, mindsink (two entries), whatsshakin (one entry), feature (3 entries in 2001).

For some reason this really irritates me. I mean, it's OK. I can live with Fancy Pancakes, because it reminds me of the pancakes I make for my nephews.

Here are a few names I also considered, ONLY because they are available and relate to me SLIGHTLY: Stamfordloser, datawife, robotwife. I don't really want to explain these names, but if you like any of them better than fancy pancakes, let me know.

Note: This post was previously published in Aug 2007.
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