A few years ago I tried to register the domain perlhacks.com. It wasn't available at the time so I registered the domain perlhacks.org instead. As so often happens, I didn't have time for the project I planned to use it for so it did nothing useful until I made it a redirection to the O'Reilly catalogue page for Perl Hacks. At that point I largely forgot about the domain.
A couple of weeks ago I got an email from someone telling me that perlhacks.com was for sale. This was a domain reseller and they were targeting me because I already owned the .org. They were asking for $997 (but the web page also said 'make us an offer'). They must have been pretty desperate as over the next week or so I got three or four more emails from the same people. They never dropped their price though.
Today I got another mail from them. And this time when I visited the site the price had dropped to $99. I mentioned this in passing on the #london.pm IRC channel and someone else pointed out that actually the domain had lapsed and was available for anyone to buy. In which case, $99 was far more than you'd expect to pay.
I checked with my usual domain register and found that the domain was, indeed, available. So I ordered it. Actually three of us ordered it at about the same time and my registry obviously had the fastest systems in place as I got the registration. For less than ã10. I then took great pleasure in replying to the people who were trying to sell me the domain telling them what I'd done. I didn't get a reply.
But now I have both perlhacks.org and perlhacks.com. And I still don't really have a plan for what I'm going to do with them.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Make it a place where a user can post a "hack" and people can vote it up or down. You can then tagged the "hack" so if I go there and I want to see "Vim" hacks I can do a search.
I am not aware of something similar...though I don't know all the Perl sites out there.
Re:perl wiki hackes
sigzero on 2008-10-30T19:21:27
That would be good. That way it becomes "self maintaining" as much as possible.
Re:perl wiki hackes
linuzer on 2008-10-31T02:49:46
if you need any help just let me know, probably i can spend some time.