terrellm

If you make "cow food", you probably want CattleFeed.com instead of CowFood.com or CowFoodOnline.com. A cow is a female bovine while cattle is one or more bovines of any gender. Not being picky... I'm a HN'er who makes his living writing software and running e-commerce stores for the cattle industry :D

As patio mentioned, there is the exact match bonus where your domain (com/net/org) matches the query exactly. Also, an exact match domain tends to lead to anchor text (inbound links) with the keyword. So the one-two punch of an EMD (exact match domain + keyword-rich anchor text) is extremely helpful.

One word of caution with EMDs... I bought an EMD CattleTags.com for an e-commerce store and have had to work on my branding to encourage people to link to me as "Cattle Tags Online" or "Cattle Tags Store" rather than "CattleTags.com" which isn't as desirable.

Congrats on the purchase. A good .com domain definitely enhances credibility outside of the startup world over a domain hack.

This domain sounded familiar and I see where it recently sold for $115,000 to an "non-profit startup".

The seller shared his story in the comments at http://www.thedomains.com/2011/06/30/domain-investor-brian-w... (scroll down to July 25). It's interesting to see that while the buyers claimed to be a "math educational non-profit startup", the seller was skeptical of the story.

FYI this article is from November 2008

Perhaps they are hoping you will reply to the email message so they can grab your email and add it to their spam lists?

I have it happen a lot on some of my e-commerce sites.

Not an acquisition deal as in "signing the contract this week" like with Skype but rather a deal for the opportunity to match an offer in the event that another company wants to acquire Nvidia.

From the article:

The deal gives Microsoft the exclusive right to match any offer for 30% or more of Nvidia's outstanding shares by a third-party." The agreement appears to be over 10 years old, dating back to the time of the contract for the GPU of the original X-Box.

Maybe they cut the scene where the other village were wearing Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl XLV Champions t-shirts. A tacky hat still blocks the sun better than no hat.

I'm not Patrick but I'll still reply since you posted it here on HN and I've used similar techniques to rank my software programs.

1) Exact Match Domain bonus: When your domain is a non-hyphnenated .com, .net, and .org, Google gives it a bonus as the domain is often highly relevant to the given keyword. This is why you often see undeveloped domains sell for such high prices.

2) Targeted Anchor Text: Since his product is called "Appointment Reminder", people will use that phrase in the link.

3) Quality, relevant links: Checking out Open Site Explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org), you can see that he has some quality and relevant links.

4) Modest search volume: According to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal), there are about 720 searches a month for the exact term "appointment reminder" and 6,600 searches using the phrase.

Yes, but I can switch companies when I'm not happy with my current company or don't like their policies. Also, my AT&T phone can call my friend's Verizon phone.

The course is titled "Introduction to Computer Applications", so I'm not sure how it's "the worst course ever". Where I went to school, 101 classes were for non-majors who needed a credit from a particular college or department.

There are a lot of people who can't create calculations in a spreadsheet (as phirephly mentioned) or organize information into a simple database. Without having these basic skills, an individual is at a significant disadvantage when they enter the workforce.

As far as Office 2007 goes, sure Office 2010 has been out for a little while but universities teach using the versions of the software available in the computer labs... perhaps WVU hasn't upgraded yet.

Paypal is not safe as the buyer could be using a stolen account. Even if they are using their own account, they can still file a dispute and Paypal will side with them since there is no physical delivery.

If you want a secure transaction for selling domains, use an escrow service like Escrow.com, Moniker, Afternic, or Sedo.

Yet another example of why sites need to validate requests on the server side instead of just assuming Javascript or Select lists will handle all of the validation.

Another technique to use if you can't just modify Javascript is to use the Firefox Tamper Data plugin and intercept & modify requests.

Duplicate of the post that was killed at

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2047486

Oh and as a Textmate user, I do wish it was true :)

Original Page: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

While it may seem humorous, buying a domain name of someone else's trademark (registered or unregistered) with the intention of creating confusion is cybersquatting. The registrant probably knows this as they are hiding behind Whois privacy.

Thanks for the compliments.

Today it's primarily my wife (support & some marketing) and me (development & marketing) running the business and we have two home-based support reps. Our main product is a cattle software program that lets ranchers keep track of their cattle including information such as breeding, calving, purchases & sales, medical treatments, pedigree/lineage, etc. Once they have recorded this information, it helps them make management decisions so they can be more profitable. Our website is at http://www.CattleMax.com.

My wife and I were in a similar situation when we graduated college - she had a degree in agriculture development and I had a degree in information systems. Back in 1999, we couldn't have had two farther apart career paths - agriculture in small towns and technology in the major cities.

Instead, we decided to create our own jobs and blend our skills together. The result was several agriculture software programs that have been sold in over 55 countries. This business has been our main source of income for the last 10 years and allowed us both to work from home and raise our family.

Living near College Station, TX (home of Texas A&M University), I volunteer to work with students often and am seeing more and more students that want a financially rewarding and satisfying career while maintaining a lifestyle balance. In many cases, entrepreneurship offers the best chance of achieving this goal as you are in a position to decide which opportunities you pursue and which you pass.

Original Source: http://launch.is/blog/2010/12/3/how-to-name-your-startup-and...

When I was in a similar situation a few months back, I chose to find another option rather than running the risk of confusion by my customers with me on the losing end.

While instinctive for many HN'ers, remembering to misspell and use .ly is an unnecessary burden for people like parents and non-tech friends. In my case, the average age of someone in my market is 50+ so I went with a .com.

A disclaimer is that I do invest some in domain names on the side. Unfortunately I hadn't bought this particular name years ago so had to pay $1500 for it.

Pardon the unsolicited suggestion but you may want to reconsider your domain name.

I'm not sure how academics would be on misspelling "scholar" even if it's a clever URL hack. It's sort of like wearing a suit with sleeves too long and pant legs too short to your job at a fashion designer - it just doesn't fit in that context. That's just my opinion.

Also, there's another site at scholar.ly that has its own coming soon page.

I really see Coda/Espresso and Textmate filling two different roles rather than competing head-to-head.

For Rails development and other scripting, I use Textmate. I appreciate the extensive syntax highlighting, extendability through bundles, and the wide selection of themes. The lack of FTP built into Textmate isn't really an issue as I use Capistrano for deployment via command line.

For editing my marketing websites, basic PHP scripting, or anytime I need to edit and FTP files, I use Coda. It's a great all-around solution and almost worth buying a Mac just for it (and Textmate).

I tried Espresso after having used Coda for a while and just couldn't make the switch despite being a big fan of their CSSEdit. I primarily blame that on me getting so used to working with Coda.

I too was getting tired of the fan noise, heat, and extreme CPU usage caused by Flash. While I was tempted to uninstall Flash, I thought I'd try Click to Flash (http://clicktoflash.com/) first.

I've been happy with Click to Flash and appreciate having the ability to turn it on when I have to have Flash (Google Analytics, Pingdom, YouTube, Slideshare.net, Vimeo, Pandora, etc). Unfortunately, I just don't think it's possible to run without Flash and still be able to achieve the productivity some of the prior mentioned Flash-enabled websites give me.

Bonus points on the link bait for the 37signals job board.

Who needs banners or AdWords when you can create clever content and get links & traffic from startup, design, and tech sites?

DMOZ does matter, as do many of the old directories that are hand curated (Yahoo Dir, Business.com, Best of the Web, and hundreds of small directories).

These directories are valued by the search engines because all listings are not automatically approved, so there is a certain quality aspect to the listings. While the directories don't send very much traffic, they do pass trust to the sites they are linking to.

It can be tough to get a DMOZ listing, particularly if the category you are applying to doesn't currently have an editor. However, it's worth it if you can get accepted.

Trademarks are not limited to just one per word/phrase but instead based on classes (categories). It's possible for someone to have a TUVW as a software program and also a TUVW pharmaceutical drug. I've got a similar case with one of my software programs where there is a similar trademark related to a plant seed. If there's another trademark in the same class as your product, then simply adding Online may be a tough sell.

However with today's legal system and intellectual property rights, it's not always a case of who is right but rather who has deeper pockets. You'd definitely be advised to talk with an intellectual property lawyer if there is a possible concern.

Also simply owning a domain name that displays ads or otherwise doesn't have a full business is not necessarily cybersquatting. "Squatting, or cybersquatting, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else" [1]. If anything you may could be considered a cybersquatter if you registered TUVWOnline.com and attempted to benefit from TUVW's trademark. I know that's not your intention because you are asking how to stay legitimate here on HN but the mislabeling of cybersquatting is a pet peeve.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting

A friend of mine has a similar type of software where he is somewhat of a middle man. He charges the company $x base + y% of the transaction. His customer is required to have their own merchant account and his service just processes through their merchant account. The $100 would never run through his account.

Depending on the nature of your business, another idea would be to charge a convenience fee to the exhibitor, but having exhibited at tradeshows for many year I would find that annoying. However, it wouldn't stop me from exhibiting. Annoyances are par for the course for anyone who has ever exhibited at a tradeshow managed by someone like Freeman.

If a customer is shocked that they will only receive $95 of a $100 transaction for the value you add, then it may be time to re-evaluate how you communicate your value or find a new customer.

My guess is that Facebook uses separate domains to ensure their company email accounts don't end up with spam issues due to the overhead of sending out all the notifications for their users.

I've got dozens of "your friends are waiting for you on Facebook" notifications to email addresses that are not even linked on Facebook. I can see where people would mark these as spam.

Also given the less savvy end of the computer user spectrum, I can see where people will just click 'spam' as a quicker alternative to clicking delete and then 'Yes I want to delete'

Finally with the sheer volume of notifications generated, I can see where some overly sensitive mail servers may block the sending domain for too many messages.

I'd not build a business on a non-.com name unless I intended for it to be a part-time/passive business whose primary traffic stream was SEO. Also while the URL hacks are cool to us, our parent's just don't understand them and will type the site name + .com.

I usually like to get the .net and sometimes the .org of my product, but seldom go beyond that. While it's in the domain registrar's interest to sell you .info, .biz, .us, .co, .whatever else, I don't see a lot of benefit. The one exception would be if you are marketing to a non-US country (eg. if marketing to the UK, perhaps get bot the .com and the .co.uk).

If a domain doesn't pass the "ear test", where someone hears your name and must be able to find your domain on the first attempt, I'd definitely get other popular variations.

If you do buy a lot of variations in the beginning, be sure and forward them to your main site while tagging them with Google Analytics. That way, you can check GA and see which ones send traffic before deciding if each is worth renewing. Shameless plug but I wrote a blog post on how to do this at http://www.keepingitrural.com/leverage-unused-domain-names-b...

It's nice to see Microsoft partnering with companies that offer cool technology to build businesses with. It presents some nice alternatives to many of the popular FOSS technologies. Competition is good for everyone.

When I was in school, many classes were standardized on particular models such as the TI-83 and TI-85. On the first day of class, my teachers would always say "I teach using this model and if you don't have it, you are on your own". I didn't want to be on my own so I bought the recommended model.

In business, you can price based on "cost plus a markup" or you can price based on what the market will bear. In the case of TI, they price based on what the market will bear.

Most domain registrars will show their own parking page full of ads by default when registering a new domain name. Could there by chance have been eBay ads on the Godaddy parking page for your domain?

If the page didn't resolve at all, it could just be eBay going down the list of domains that end in "bay" and sending out scary letters from people who don't have last names.

I always recommend putting up a one page website with something like "Coming Soon" rather than running the risk of stirring up a company because of the registrar's parking page.