Master of My Domain...Not Quite

Would the Seinfeld fans in the back of the room please stop snickering and have a seat? Thank you.

Blogging used to be an easy gig with no costs attached. You got yourself a Blogger or a WordPress account, came up with a name no one else had, and started writing and reading other bloggers. Who cared what your domain name was? They all had "blogspot.com" or "wordpress.com at the end. There were a few fancy schmancy guys out there, like Glenn Reynolds over at InstaPundit. com. But, for the most part, you wrote for your friends, and most importantly, for yourself.

Then along came Google adsense. And Amazon. And respect. 

Holy crap. We weren't bloggers, we were "citizen journalists."  We took down Dan Rather.  We were the "Pajamahudeen."  

I was having email conversations with Hugh Hewitt! (Who? Never mind. It seemed big at the time.)

And I got stars in my eyes thinking I could actually make money at this stuff.

And I wasn't dot blogspot dot com anymore. Matt and I got us our very own DOT COM! 

We were (insert drumroll here. Fireworks here. Ah, hell. Let's just do the whole Angelic Choir) 

!!!!!libertyjustincase.com!!!!!

Brought in another partner, Craig. 

Got the website (not a blog anymore. I was a WEBSITE. say it proud, say it loud.) up in the stats of other blogs. Even got a tsunami of hits from 'ole Glenn Reynolds himself over at InstaPundit. 

We even started referring to ourselves as LJiC. Very classy. Very big-time.

But PajamasMedia never called after the initial emails saying how great I could be, and how they were putting together talented bloggers with a cool marketing tool that would make me lots of money. 

Adsense made me a grand total of 37 cents.  And Amazon? Sigh.

Matt became a pirate...sort of.  The military, after all the military blogging of 2000 and 2004, clamped down hard. Something about military bloggers having an undue influence on Presidential elections or something.

And the world moved on. And I got bored. Ran out of things to say. 

Craig kept things going, cross posting from his original blog, Red Satellites.  You can find him in my blogroll on the right. You'll notice he's still a "dot blogspot dot com" kind of guy. That's cool.

I got hooked in to Facebook, and Twitter. 

Matt decided he couldn't keep up the cost of the

!!!!!libertyjustincase.com!!!!!

site. And so we ended it. I wrote one last post, quite good I think, and we were done.

Until I got the blogging bug again.  

No stars this time. No choirs, except the one at First Baptist Church, Prague, Oklahoma, where you find my wife most Sundays.

And, I'm a "blogspot dot com" again. 

I'm writing what I want, when I want. I'm not worried too much about readers. I'm writing more for myself now, less for others. Feels kinda nice, to tell you the truth.

Found out today that libertyjustincase.com will cost me $299 to get back. Seems its in some kind of "renewal status" since Matt let the domain name expire. 

It may become available again in the next few months. If it does, I can get it for $10 a year. 

Who knows? Maybe I'll purchase it when it becomes available.  Or maybe not. 

There's something comfortable about being a blogspot. Sort of humbling. I think I need that,that humbling thing. I'm pretty much okay with being a "blogspot" kind of guy.  It's nice.