Pete Millspaugh
@petemillspaugh
Writing a book about domains @ dotcom.press Programming & writing @val.town Digital gardening @ petemillspaugh.com
headed to ICANN in Seville tomorrow so I got a DIY stamper for ole fashioned business cards, this is so fun!
alright, I'm doing it - trying to make "abottom" happen 1. it's shorter than "at the bottom" 2. people will get it, because "atop" let's get this thing in the dictionary
first time I've licensed a cartoon! this particular cartoon was pinned to the bulletin board outside the dining hall at the summer camp I went to and worked at for eight summers, and as far as I know it's still there
doodling for a blog post on @val.town as "the Salt Fat Acid Heat of vibe coding" (as in: don't turn your brain off, learn to cook/code!)
updated my garden note...and interestingly enough (I don't remember writing it) I'm not so sure about the tattoo bit anymore
I get the sense texting (and writing elsewhere) in all lowercase is strongly considered a gen z thing these days, but I learned in @gretchenmcculloch.com's Because Internet that it was a Unix hacker thing (great book, btw)
and might as well shoot my shot from the footnote... @ftrain.bsky.social I'd love to find a print copy of that 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek issue - do you know where I could find one?
new blurb who dis dotcom.press a book's website is a nice place to riff on things you'll eventually print on the physical book (title, backcover/flap blurb, bio, etc.)
improved my TLD wiki and wrote about the 2026 round: dotcom.press/archive/domainia huge thanks to @case.bike for collecting the data behind the wiki!
Ah, thanks for sharing! Guess I'll stick with left-justification since they've done the research. I didn't think of readability at e.g. 400% zoom (screenshotted here for reference) I wonder if their recommendation extends to printed books which are almost always fully justified w hyphens
I'm considering switching to `text-align: justify` with `hyphens: auto`... are there any gotchas? I don't like hyphens breaking up anchor links, but other than that? I'm leaning toward the visual balance being worth the looser text tradeoff
dot meow: the next queer corner of the Internet (like selling Subarus to lesbians) dotcom.press/archive/dot-meow write-up on @dotmeow.org's cool TLD bid! in memory of my childhood cat "one-eyed jack" (who was two-eyed when these pictures were taken)
in 2015 google put up a backwards homepage on com.google with a CSS transform they still use the .google brand tld for some things, like registry.google
TIL that "top posting" in email replies (now the norm) is considered bad email etiquette
more doodling and writing on the job blog.val.town/talk-of-the-town-feb-2026
started playing with mcp servers today and built a little one with just one tool to look up country by ccTLD val town for the server and @cloudflare.social's ai playground for testing is a nice feedback loop
I like how gwern.net hyperlinks have ::after hints like “W” for Wikipedia links
Why are there so many C words in AI? Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot... I noticed that all the Townie slash commands in @val.town start with /c ...which maybe @jxnblk.bsky.social did on purpose?
a favorite part of my new job is getting to* doodle for blog posts, like this octocat (drawn with my mouse in @excalidraw.com lol) *not just getting to, but encouraged to
Reading about @dpla.bsky.social in John Palfrey’s book Bibliotech, and they use a nifty domain hack! dp.la (which is the ccTLD for Laos)
I put together a timeline of domain history from DNS to 2026 gTLDs. Inspired by @deno.land's Brief History of JS and @neal.fun's Internet Artifacts (which is amazing if you haven't read through it before!) dotcom.press/history-of-domains
By a strange coincidence Anguilla is the country where AI has had the biggest (proportional) economic impact so far... dotcom.press/archive/anguilla