A Domain By Any Other Name
Back in 2010, when I knew I was on my way out of the journalism biz, I decided to create a website to pitch my freelance services in writing and editing. To do so, I went to that great arbiter of all domains: GoDaddy.
I snagged my domain name of choice, openallnightediting.com, but found to my chagrin that I’d been beaten to the punch for a logical backup, lesliegura.com. I settled for lesgura.com. Didn’t think much about it at the time.
Once I had a publisher for my novel, Unwrapping, I began to consider the website issue again. I shut down openallnightediting.com, since I hadn’t been seeking (and no one had recently been offering, either, truth be told) freelance writing or editing work. I wound up starting this site using my old backup domain name from 2010. And began this blog to help promote Unwrapping and keep my hand in writing.
I also decided to do a little investigating to see if lesliegura.com was available because I’m using my full name on the book, and it felt right to have the website name match the author’s name on the book. Lesliegura.com was still taken.
But I happened to know the person who owned it.
More than 20 years ago, I learned there are actually two Leslie Guras in the U.S. It was my female namesake who’d beaten me to the punch on lesliegura.com. Not to mention lesliegura@gmail!
I’d been in touch with Leslie Gura when I was city editor of The Hartford Courant. Her son, David Gura, was, like me, a journalist. David has gone on to several top jobs in the field, and currently works for NPR. And no, I’m not related to Leslie and David. As it happens, though, David and I do share one notable trait—I dare say we are the only two Guras to earn master’s degrees from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
In any event, I reached out to Leslie again this fall, knowing she had never actually used the domain lesliegura.com. As luck would have it, her rights to the domain were expiring and she was more than willing to let me have it. It’s not a simple process, and Leslie helped out by sending me updates as GoDaddy kept warning her she was about to lose her domain name.
GoDaddy requires a bidding process as a domain becomes available. I had to pay to join the “auctions” part of Go Daddy. According to the company’s logic, the domain name was worth a minimum of $570. I figured I’d take a chance and see what happened. I bid the minimum $25.
Ten days later, I learned the domain was, in fact, worth exactly $25. I won the bidding.
And so it came to be that on Saturday morning, I took actual ownership of lesliegura.com, and by following not-always-easy directions and keeping my fingers crossed, anyone who types lesliegura.com or lesgura.com into their address bar will wind up here. For marketing purposes, henceforth I plan to call the website lesliegura.com.
To paraphrase (and steal) from an old Seinfeld episode, it’s good to be master of my domains.