Part I: Building Your First Web Site in Java

Generating Code 39 Extended in Java Part I: Building Your First Web Site

If you re into alphabet soup, you can toss around such terms as gTLD and CLTLD for the generic and country-level extensions, respectively, or even iTLD for international ones Why there s a small g and i but an uppercase CL before the TLD parts is one of the Internet s great mysteries

In the early days, it was easy to create a domain name because there weren t many of them in use yet These days, if you want to pick a three- or four-letter abbreviation or a single word for your domain name, you re very likely to be out of luck Everything short is already taken The solution Forget the acronyms and short names Use phrases instead The basic idea is to go for anything long enough that it s unlikely to have been used yet, but short enough to remember To find out whether a name is available, you either just enter a name at a commercial domain-name registrar (such as GoDaddy) that offers availability checks or use a WhoIs utility One of the most familiar ones on the Web is the Network Solutions page at wwwnetworksolutionscom/whois/indexjsp You might also try the nice set of tools at wwwwhoisnet (see Figure 5-3) or use a stand-alone tool like WhoIs ULTRA, which you can get your hands on at wwwanalogxcom/contents/download/network/whoishtm Take your time and poke around the AnalogX site You can get some other wonderful utilities there, too What do you do if you come up with a great domain name, but it s already taken and you ve just gotta have it Well, it depends If you re a company that already has a trademark, the domain name may well already belong to you as a matter of course, even if you haven t registered it yet Well, at any rate, it probably can t be used legally by anyone else If you ve been trademarked and doing business as, say, Joe s Acme Fabuloso Garbanzo Beans and Unicyle Maintenance Company, and that name s your registered trademark, anyone else running a site named www JoesAcmeFabulosoGarbanzoBeansAndUnicycleMaintenanceCompany com is probably easy game for your lawyers

You can often buy a domain name from the person or organization that s currently using it It can t hurt to ask, anyway Just don t ask Apple for www applecom or you ll hear all of the Bay Area laughing at you Another factor you need to consider when picking a domain name besides the likelihood that some organization is actually using the name and has already registered it is that some companies exist to do nothing but think up good names and register them These companies, sometimes called domain squatters, seem to have no intention of ever running real Web sites that use those names, but only well, it s hard to think of it as anything but holding the names hostage The only purpose they have is to own the name and sell it to you And if you think you ll get it away from them for pocket change, think again It ll cost hundreds of dollars at least and the upper end Limitless for a good name

After you pick a name, you need to register it so nobody else can use it This task is usually handled for you by your Web space provider who s used to

the job, probably has a bulk account with a major registrar, and fills out zillions of these applications every year The best-known registrar of domain names in America is Network Solutions (wwwnetworksolutionscom) It registers your domain name for $35 a year if you sign up for one year or for as little as $999 a year for a hundred-year commitment (although that offer might appeal only to the most extremely optimistic, and you can find better deals with a much shorter commitment) It used to be that you had to pay for the first two years at once, but in early 2000 this changed so you can pay for only one year if you prefer Many sites that offer assistance in registering your domain name still say you have to cough up two years money For a long time, Network Solutions was the only registrar on the block, but this is no longer the case Today many other registrars compete with it Prices vary quite a bit, so it s a good idea to shop around The popular GoDaddycom, for instance, has prices in the pocket-change range (like $199) The organization that accredits domain name registrars is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) It maintains lists of the outfits that are authorized to register your domain name To register a domain name by using one of the generic TLDs, go to wwwicannorg/registrars/accredited-listhtml and pick one of the registrars in your region To register one of the country-level TLDs, go to wwwianaorg/cctld/ cctld-whoishtm and click the name of the country; you find the URL of the country-level registrar at the bottom of the resulting page If you decide you don t like your current registrar, you can change Any of the others will happily take your business away from its competitors