Something is Wrong with WordPress

Anyone who has tried to post something on this site or fill out one of my contact forms has either received an error or been told that everything was fine, only for nothing to happen.

We’ve recently upgraded to the newest version of Word Press so that might be the problem. Either way, I’ll post as soon as the problems have been resolved.

In the meantime, you can email directly at rick AT ricklatona.com if you need anything.

Also, the newsletter subscription is still working, if you haven’t signed up yet I suggest you do!

I’m Going To Enter The IDN Market

I think I’m going to start buying and selling IDNs. If you don’t know what they are, this Wikipedia article does a great job explaining them.

Historically, I’ve been a pure .com guy but about a year ago I started getting serious with .net names as well. It’s time to grow my base again so I’ve been going over the options.

As most of you know, I loathe .mobi names and .tv names are too confusing to me due to the annual fees. Info, biz and the rest have potential but they aren’t there yet and I think it will be a long time before they are.

I’m going to place my bet on IDN names for growth. I’ll only deal in IDN.com names and I’m going to be cautious as first because admittedly, I don’t really know what I’m doing yet in this new area.

I’ll only look at the doing deals on the best of them as well. Meaning, actual city names or category killers are the only ones I’m interested in. Please, don’t send me your IDN names unless they are really great. 

I’m no longer going to ignore this market. Excuse me if I ask a lot of questions when you contact me because I am a newbie once again.

I’m Going To Enter The IDN Market

I think I’m going to start buying and selling IDNs. If you don’t know what they are, this Wikipedia article does a great job explaining them.

Historically, I’ve been a pure .com guy but about a year ago I started getting serious with .net names as well. It’s time to grow my base again so I’ve been going over the options.

As most of you know, I loathe .mobi names and .tv names are too confusing to me due to the annual fees. Info, biz and the rest have potential but they aren’t there yet and I think it will be a long time before they are.

I’m going to place my bet on IDN names for growth. I’ll only deal in IDN.com names and I’m going to be cautious as first because admittedly, I don’t really know what I’m doing yet in this new area.

I’ll only look at the doing deals on the best of them as well. Meaning, actual city names or category killers are the only ones I’m interested in. Please, don’t send me your IDN names unless they are really great. 

I’m no longer going to ignore this market. Excuse me if I ask a lot of questions when you contact me because I am a newbie once again.

Welcome NamePros.com Fans

No doubt, many of you are coming here for the first time. If you don’t know me or you’ve never heard of me, I sell domains. I sell a lot of domains.

My newsletter is the biggest in the industry. I send it daily Monday through Friday at random times. In the newsletter I sell premium domains at or below wholesale prices. Here are just a few examples of names I’ve sold this year and their corresponding prices. I’ve chosen these samples to give you a feel of what you can get from me for various price levels.

Nursing-Homes.com - $1000
Beagles.net - $2000
Microcomputers.com -$12,000
Baltimore.net - $17,500
CreditCrunch.com - $20,000
SaintAugustine.com - $60,000
Thin.com - $200,000

The only way to find out about these deals is to sign up for the newsletter at the top of this webpage.

Being that this is also RickLatona.com and not RicksListOfDomains.com I also blog about my personal life. It has only been a month or so since I’ve launched the site so it is still starting to take on a life of its own.

More features will be coming live throughout the coming weeks but I’ll do my best to not crowd the site and the mission too much. At the end of the day I just want to sell a lot of domains at great prices.

Please, if you haven’t done so already, join my newsletter. That’s what this is all about.

All Domain Sales are now Newsletter Only

This is why you must sign up for my newsletter if you haven’t done so already. I’ve made a decision that unless it is something special like my post about SanJuan.com, I will no longer be putting domains for sale on this blog. In order to find out what domains are available every day, you must sign up for my newsletter. Do it.

How I helped bring down Internic.net

I’d like to share one of my more interesting stories about the evolution of the domain business. The year was 1999 and I was VP of Sales at Interland, Inc (now web.com), a large hosting company.

ICANN had just been formed and was tasked with the job of breaking up the Network Solutions monopoly. Nothing had been done yet and nobody knew what was going to happen.

We were registering 30,000 domains a day for our customers. Network Solutions was mailing us an individual invoice for each one. We had 3 store rooms for their paperwork.

The very first ICANN conference was to be held in Singapore and being we had such a vested interest in what would happen, the CEO and I booked our flights and headed for Asia.

I suppose it was the first domainer meeting of any kind. Most of the people we met there were the early guys ready to start their own registrars. Five lucky companies would be picked as the first to have a license to compete with Net Sol. One particular memory that stands out to me was Richard Foreman from Register.com participating on the big teleconference screen. He had the most to gain as end users at the time either went to Internic.net (owned by Network Solutions) and Register.com to get their names. Register.com wasn’t even making money on the names. They were just registering names through Network Solutions for their site visitors at no profit. With that approach he was the only potential competitor starting with its own customer base. It’s amazing that they blew that opportunity. Who the heck uses Register.com these days? You have to call their support number to get an auth code!

The whole meeting turned into one big measuring contest with everyone bickering about rules and how the new regulated non-monopoly domain market was going to work.
In one particular heated exchange the speaker was talking about how the various retail front-ends would communicate with Net Sol’s central servers and something occurred to me. I stood up and I said, “Excuse me, what is going to happen to Internic.net? It’s basically a retail front-end for Network Solutions but few webmasters know that. They think that Internic.net is some official organization like ICANN wants to be.” Cheers, Screams, Yelling!

One Net Sol representative stood up and ‘answered’ me by saying “Internic.net is just an antiquated form-mail system. It doesn’t matter.” Then he just sits down.
Now, furious, I scream “You didn’t answer the question at all!” I swear a near riot broke out people were so angry.

When I got back to my hotel that night, Internic.net redirected to Network Solutions. It stayed that way for a while. It was major news at the time for us Internet peeps. Perhaps you remember articles like this one? http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,2071303,00.htm

For that one brief moment in time I was a new maker, or at least a news nudger.

SanJuan.com - Own the oldest American city

After 7 days of island hoping in the Caribbean we at last arrived in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I own SanJuan.com so I had a special interest in the city. I’m selling the name but more about that later in this post.

It’s the oldest American city and the center of commerce in the West Indies. Yeah, you heard me right. The oldest city is not James Town. It’s also not Saint Augustine as you Floridians were told in grade school. It’s San Juan. The people there are Americans that pay federal taxes and social security like the rest of us who carry the same passport. Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory since the Spanish American war at the end of the 19th century. We won it along with Guam, The Philippines and Cuba. On hindsight, we should have kept The Philippines and Cuba as well but at the time the American populace was worried that our government had imperial tendencies. Up until that point we were a neutral country in foreign affairs. Oh lord, how times change.

According to Wikipedia, nearly half a million people call San Juan home with over two million people in the greater San Juan metropolitan area. There are another million people that pass through every year on cruise ships or to hit the area directly as tourists.

You can find information about the domain after the pictures.

SanJuan.com is now number 2 on Google for the search term “san juan”. This is a term that gets searched for over 14,000 times a day according to SeoDigger.com. I had the site built a few months ago just to attain that ranking. Almost everything has been done for you. All you need to do is buy the domain and site from me and sign on advertisers. This is something I don’t have time to do and my business is selling names. I originally wanted half a million dollars for this name. I’ve lowered my expectations all the way down to 350,000 or the best offer. If you want the name, hit me up and we’ll see if we can work something out.

There is something great about having kids with different spring breaks

There is something great about having kids with different spring breaks. While I’m Island hoping with my youngest, I’m just 11 days away from spending a week in Jamaica with my oldest. My friends and family can enjoy pictures of that trip too while I annoy domainers with completely non-relevent ramblings.

So far we’ve hit the U.S. Virgin Islands, St Martin/Maartin, Antigua and St Lucia. The boat was supposed to stop in Barbados today but due to large swells it couldn’t safely dock. Instead we are out to sea and tomorrow we’ll drive around the Caribbean’s Pompey, Montserrat, to look at the volcanic ruins. All this before returning to the home port of San Juan, Puerto Rico. It’s there that I am looking forward to the most, simply because I own sanjuan.com.

P.S. Never tell a personal trainer you’ve just met that you climbed Mt Kilimanjaro. I’ve worked out each day on this ship and the guy has nearly killed me each time. Damnit though, I’m going to get in shape.

I think it’s time for a new domainer term

I’m calling it a pull-back. Indian-pull didn’t seam politically correct. Excuse me if someone else has already given it a name. If so, please send me a link to a message board post where it has surely been discussed.

It appears GoDaddy.com gives you the option to cancel a transfer, after you have done an account change and the new owner has accepted the domain. How ludicrous is this? I’ve just had it happen a second time. Someone sends you a name, so you send them the money. The next thing they know, they pull it back! All they have to do is go to their account, go to pending account changes, check the box and click cancel. They can do this after it is finished!

Now in both cases it worked out fine because they had pulled it back because of a misunderstanding and quickly did another account change. It still leaves a huge door open for fraud.

I’m sure other registrars would let you pull back a domain as well, after you’ve pushed it.

Has anyone else experienced this?

I think it’s time for a new domainer term

I’m calling it a pull-back. Indian-pull didn’t seam politically correct. Excuse me if someone else has already given it a name. If so, please send me a link to a message board post where it has surely been discussed.

It appears GoDaddy.com gives you the option to cancel a transfer, after you have done an account change and the new owner has accepted the domain. How ludicrous is this? I’ve just had it happen a second time. Someone sends you a name, so you send them the money. The next thing they know, they pull it back! All they have to do is go to their account, go to pending account changes, check the box and click cancel. They can do this after it is finished!

Now in both cases it worked out fine because they had pulled it back because of a misunderstanding and quickly did another account change. It still leaves a huge door open for fraud.

I’m sure other registrars would let you pull back a domain as well, after you’ve pushed it.

Has anyone else experienced this?

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