OK, I went and registered dan.tobias.name, where I intend on moving my more personal
webstuff (leaving dantobias.com as the location of more businesslike things like
my tech tips, and using the home page of dantobias.com as the "portal page" to all
of my stuff while "dan.tobias.name" has the more specialized purpose of telling about
me as a person). However, I'm totally frustrated so far in my attempts to get
that domain into a state where I can actually use it.First, the registrar (GoDaddy)
screwed up and failed to put the domain into my account so that I could modify its
name servers. It showed up in the .name WHOIS as of the original live date
in mid January, and GoDaddy charged my credit card for it a week or so later (after
first having to get a new credit card from me because they said the old one was expired,
although it was actually good until the end of January), but it wasn't until a couple
of days ago (and lots of emails and phone calls to their tech support) that they
finally got it so I could modify the domain record.
OK, those are the usual rough
edges around the original launch of a new TLD (I had similar troubles with .info
and .biz names in their original launches), but now it's finally fixed, so I can
use the name, right?
Think again... my attempted name server changes failed to
go through and still aren't reflected in the WHOIS over two days after I tried to
make them. When I contacted GoDaddy tech support about it, they told me that
changes to .NAME domains can only be submitted by registrars in conjunction with
batches of new name requests for the periodic additions of new names, which are done
only once every two weeks. Hence, apparently my changes won't go live for up
to two weeks, and if that change is screwed up, I have to wait another two weeks
before they try again.
I wonder... is this really the way the .NAME registry works,
or is GoDaddy just giving me a snow job? Unfortunately, the .NAME registry
site offers no sign of any contact email address where I could try asking them directly...
not that this would be likely to be fruitful anyway, since support problems in the
launch phase of new TLDs seem always to wind up in limbo where the registrar claims
it's the registry's fault and vice versa.