I was being secretive about the problem that I was having at work the past week because I didn't want our competitors to figure out that we had let our domain name expire and then use a jedi DNS mind trick to steal the domain name from us. Having your domain name expire is about as bad as it gets for a web site. It is up there with having all the files get deleted and then have a backup that can't be retrieved from the tapes. What makes it even worse is that not only does your web site go down but all of your email also fails. To boot you don’t have very limited control over the solution. We registered our domain through namesecure.com and calling namesecure on the telephone or through their web site is more likely to yield an intelligent life form than the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project.

So having your site down and your email down is the web marketing equivalent of having your pipes freeze and burst to fill your basement with a pool of water that you could stage mock naval battles in. Aaron tried to send the entity namesecure money as soon as possible. The first attempt yielded a credit card form to do what is called reclaiming the web site. Apparently there are rules that allow you to reclaim your web site so that it doesn't get snatched-up during your panicked grace period by evil domain name speculators and mean competitors with nothing better to do.

As a side note with domain names Ron had thought it would be good to secure a valuable domain name back in the heyday of VirtuMall. He had figured we could get rich quick on campaign98.com back in 1995. Strangely he didn’t anticipate the next 30 years of campaigns when the Internet would become one of the most powerful vehicles for political expression.

So Aaron gave an automated form credit card information on Tuesday because it was a holiday on Monday and Aaron was skiing and the robots were sleeping. The next day when we gathered to figure out how to proceed we learned that they were unable to process credit cards for a domain reclamation so they asked instead to have a certified check mailed to their headquarters. Now I am not sure that a real person asked for this check and it may be evidence that a self-aware computer program has realized that it needs funds in order to continue to grow and reproduce through the network (probably to send it's cyber progeny to college) and asked for the money. Aaron also dug up evidence that namesecure which was now earning the malicious nickname nameinsecure was a bankrupt shell of a company being run by only one employee, the Wizard from the Wizard of Oz. So we waited all day after Shelley had rushed to get the check out to Virginia.

We considered trying to claim the domain through people who would actually answer our phone calls from the other domain registration people. The folks at Snapnames were real and friendly people from what we could determine but they recommended that it would be faster to pester the empty shell of namesecure than to try to reclaim the domain through an outside DNS registration provider. Apparently you can snap a name but you need to wait the obligatory month while people in marketing departments run around like chickens with their heads cut off.

So on Thursday, the day when the certified check was supposed to arrive, we checked with the overnight registered mail service that was delivering the check and found that at 3PM the check had arrived and had been refused at the address. So now they had a credit card and had forced us to place a check in the mail that was as good as cash. So Aaron continued to write emails trying to explain why we needed to talk to a real human being but didn’t receive anything but emails from women with numbers after their names in messages like sincerely alice004 or jane125 who sent the same form email each time. It reminded Aaron of an old Star Trek episode where they were on a planet full of people who all had duplicate names and were all androids but there was one name in the directory that was unique, Norman, who happened to be the creator of the whole planet full of androids. So Aaron sent me the audio clip of Spock explaining how he figured out the situation. We were ready to slip someone a small cash fee to kill the wizard, probably named Norman, and get our domain back and running.

At this point I had some important calls that I had set-up for the week with potential business partners including a social networking company, a search engine company, and a major ISP with a few million subscribers. So I created a duplicate of the web site on an old domain and pointed each of these people to the site as we were talking on the telephone so that they could get more information about the product and download the demo copy. Meanwhile we couldn’t get any email so I didn't know what was happening with them.

So on Friday afternoon towards the end of the day the site started to take hits again. The namesecure people had actually done something to reclaim the web site. It came back and we were back in business again. Now just because people can find your web site doesn’t mean that they like you or your software but at least the rain has stopped and the lemonade stand is open. Now we just need some sunshine.