[Courses] [Domains] Welcome to the domain names course.

Mary mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org
Sat Jun 5 16:36:30 EST 2004


Welcome to the Domain Names course.

This course will be a kind of a buyer's guide: what should you look for in a
domain name, where should you buy it, what can you do with it?

A domain name is a unique Internet identifier like "linuxchix.org",
"puzzling.org", "google.com", "planet.gnome.org", "hoyts.ninemsn.com.au" and
so on.

This course is aimed at people interested or possibly interesting in buying
and using a domain name who do not know much about the process. It should also
be useful for people who aren't interested in having a domain name at the
moment but are curious about the process.

Consider this message the beginning of an introduction thread, but of a
focused kind: If you're interested in this course, what do you know about
domain names?  Why are you interested? Anything you particularly want to know? 

I'd appreciate the answers because they'll help me target the lessons. However,
I won't significantly widen the scope for time reasons. If it turns out that
lots of you are interested in stuff outside the scope, perhaps I or someone
else can run another related course at some point.

This course will have six posts, including this one:

0. Welcome
1. Why own a domain name?
2. Choosing a domain name
3. Techie interlude: nameservers
4. Registering a domain name
5. Choosing a host

Since it's not a very technical course and should be easy on the reader, I'll
be posting twice a week.

This course assumes no knowledge of Linux or of Internet protocols, nor will
it give you much knowledge of either thing (some concepts about name serving
will be introduced in post 3 because you will need to know a minimal amount to
register a domain in the first place). It will mostly assume that the mail
servers, web servers, name servers and so on for your domain will be managed
by a third party.

Discussion is welcome, although if you have questions about hosting a domain
yourself on a Linux machine, techtalk might be a better list for them.

If you send a message about this topic, please put the string "[Domains]" in
the Subject like I have done, so that people not interested in posts related
to this course can opt not to receive them (you can configure this at
http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/courses ). If you're replying to
my posts, the string will already be there.

--- About your host ---

Your friendly local domain maven presently owns three domains: puzzling.org,
buglinks.org, and gardiner.id.au, registered between 2000 and 2003. She's used
three different registrars, seven different nameservers and has hosted in
about five different places.

She has no plans to acquire further domain names.

-Mary


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