I suppose one could consider that the beginning of the Wongery, even though it wasn't yet accessible to anyone but its creators. But if one did want to choose a date for the Wongery's beginning, one could also choose the day that I registered the domain name, several weeks prior. (December 9, 2008, to be exact. So what did I do in the weeks between then and writing the first article? Well, install MediaWiki on the site, of course, for one thing, but aside from that, I have no idea. That was almost fifteen years ago. I have enough trouble remembering what I did this morning.)
Or rather, I should say, that was the day that I registered the domain names. Because I registered three domains with "wongery" in their names: wongery.com, wongery.net, and wongery.org. One of those, of course, I planned to use as the "official" domain name, and the other two as redirects.
But which was which? Uh... that I don't think I was really consistent about. Arguments could be made for and against any of them:
- .com is kind of the "default" top-level domain, and when people look up a domain, they'll generally first assume it's dot com unless they know otherwise. On the other hand, the "com" is supposed to stand for commercial, and everything in the Wongery is released under open licenses; it's explicitly not commercial. (Well, I do hope I might make money from it someday, but that's not its main purpose.)
- .org is the domain name used by Wikipedia, the first and most famous MediaWiki, and the site that the Wongery is loosely patterned after (in some ways). On the other hand, it's commonly associated with nonprofits and charities, and while the Wongery may not exactly be a commercial enterprise, it's not a nonprofit either—like I said, I do hope to make some money from it someday.
- .net is one of the most popular top-level domain names—the second most popular generic top-level domain after .com, and unlike .com not necessarily associated with commercial enterprises. On the other hand, it is associated with network service providers and similar enterprises... and the Wongery isn't that, either, even more than it isn't just a commercial enterprise or a nonprofit.
As I said, I don't think I've been very consistent about which one I've been using as the primary domain name; I think I've had internal links pointing to different top-level domains at different times. This is... not good practice. I don't know much about SEO (obviously, as witnessed by the Wongery's current lack of visitors), but I do know that using different URLs for the same site or page is harmful for SEO because it splits the, uh, weight of the links, or whatever the correct terminology is; I don't really know what I'm talking about here so I should probably just stop.
Right now it's wongery.com that's the primary domain name; both wongery.net and wongery.org redirect there. (I didn't actually remember whether this was the case, so I just checked.) But is that really the one I want to be the primary domain name? I was actually kind of leaning more toward having wongery.org as the primary domain name; again, much about the Wongery was inspired by Wikipedia, and some of the flavor intent of the Wongery is intentionally that it should come across something like an excerpt from a Wikipedia-like reference by, I don't know, some æalogical organization.
On the other hand, just because the Wongery is patterned after Wikipedia in some respects doesn't mean it has to copy it in all respects, and in particular that it has to use the same top-level domain name. After all, Wikipedia is a nonprofit; the Wongery isn't. (Right now, in fact, the Wongery isn't much of anything; I intend to register it as an private limited company, and should probably do that before the hard launch, but I haven't done so yet.) It isn't exactly a commercial enterprise, or a nonprofit, or a network provider, but of the three it's closest to being a commercial enterprise, in that, as I've already said a few times just in this post, I do have some hope that I might make some money from it someday, whereas I have no plans to ever register it as a nonprofit or turn it into a network provider. So, yeah, I guess .com is the one that fits the best, and the fact it's the most popular top-level domain name and the one that people are likely to try first is just an added bonus.
So, while I was actually still undecided about the matter when I started writing this post (which was more than a week before it was posted, because as usual I procrastinated a lot and didn't get around to finishing it), I guess I may as well leave wongery.com as the default, as it is now, and have wongery.org and wongery.net as redirects. And if and when I move the Wongery to a different hosting plan (which I probably will before the hard launch, if only to separate it from my other websites), I'll make sure to implement it the same way.
Maybe someday if the Wongery becomes popular enough .wongery will itself be a top-level domain ha ha sorry that was a stupid thing to say. (Or write.) (I mean, it is something I've thought about, but in the same way I've thought about a number of other outlandish pipe dreams that I know are never going to happen.)