¤ jetless heights

+ Thu, August 19

The Domain Name

Picking a site name these days is hard.  Very hard.

You’d be surprised how many names are taken.  A good 90% of everything I thought of had already been bought and squatted on.  I didn’t take note of all of them, but I’d say I either thought up or was suggested a solid 100+ ideas for site names with only 13 of them making The Possible List.

The Possible List

The first item was phild.org, parodying my good buddy nickd at (you guessed it) nickd.org.  The idea being that we’d replace my online presence with a little script that copied his site, changed the name and placed it here.  Maybe one day.  audiophil.org was another idea, smacking of groaning humor with its wordplay on “audiophile”.  As much as that idea tickled my puntacular self, it didn’t survive the One Week Test.

The One Week Test

Just as with a band name or a song name or an anything else name, you’ve got to be able to come back to it and instinctively say, “mm, that is right”.  You have to be able to do that for a long time, some would say every time.  If you can’t find immediate agreement with a name after only a week, there’s no reason to assume you’ll be able to do it in a month, a year, three years.

The Possible List, Con’t

Speaking of songs, it should come as no surprise that quite a few songs registered with me as possible names.  rockaction.org, sonicblue.org, autumnsweater.org and octopad.org all had a moment or two of consideration.  Good, but not good enough.

Moving away from music, The List becomes more varied.  For a short while, cooperblack.org was a consideration.  Cooper Black is a typeface that has seen a bit of a rekindling recently for its nostalgic charm and sophisticated design, you might enjoy a lost VH1 special on it entitled Behind The Typeface.  However, despite the font’s beauty, naming a site after a font is endlessly tacky, limiting in design and downright dorky all at once.  It is a nice font though.

midtones.org had a nice run as the top contender for a while, just as allthearms.org did.  Midtones was a little too mundane and “allthearms” is slightly unreadable without spaces.  Vestiges of allthearms.org can be seen in the current image in the masthead which I photographed last summer in an alley in Ann Arbor.

tappman.org was a tip of the hat to a fantastic book.  I yearn for it tragically.

Finally, I settled on jetless.org, pulling “Jetless Heights” from a misheard Hum lyric:

I dreamt of jet this high,
seeding clouds from the other side,
and glowing softly until the underbelly shines,
and the back skims through the steam,
feeding upturned mouths and sprinkling awake,
like a dusty sleep you took too soon.
And you,
you need watering if you are to bloom.

Hum was an endlessly complicated band, wrapping a beautiful core with layers and layers of delicate sound and development.  Their attention to detail and perfect execution is something I can only hope to achieve.  In any event, the song is If You Are To Bloom and you should buy Downward Is Heavenward yesterday.

In case you were wondering.

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