In simplest terms, we've always been a loosely-knit organization of "ghouls" that are playing this game. Besides, we always thought that some "real" business would like the dot-com version of the domain ... something like the Walmart equivalent of a big box coffin outlet store. We were not greedy; we were happy to share. Note that the band that is named "Caskets on Parade" used to be found at the dot-net domain ... they're on Facebook now, but their Facebook page claims the old dot-net address as the location of their website — oh well, we welcome inadvertant visitors regardless of how they have arrived.

     When the website went "live" on the internet it was hosted on a university's servers; being even vaguely commercial was a no-no, violating the terms of service. The campus radio station where our contest got it's start was required to observe this limitation as well — they are found at wkar-dot-org, not at wkar-dot-edu or wkar-dot-com. Once the "U" ended alumni accounts in March of 2007 we found ourselves moving to a commercial service provider ... suddenly we could run all of the ads that we wished, if we ever got around to setting the site up to display them (in 2008, we did; learn more here) and we could be any top-level domain for which we wished to pay the registration fees.

     Most visitors are still blundering into the site by way of a search engine query ... you click the link on the search results page and you wound up here without needing to know that we are a dot-anything. When all of the old cataloging at Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Lycos, AskJeeves, etc. "broke" from the move, suddenly we appeared to have "gone dark". (we don't care if Microsoft's crappy Bing search ever finds us) Wikipedia users, too, would just click on a link at the bottom of the page that they were referencing and (hopefully) find their way here. (we've tried to fix all of the linkages that still say that we are at MSU, but several pages are "locked" and we've been unable to edit them to repair the broken links)

     Friends started complaining about not being able to find the site. The original casketsonparade-dot-org domain still worked, but nobody remembered it — they kept typing dot-com after the domain name and would land in the cybersquatter site.

     So, surrendering to the inevitable, and to protect the "identity" and "good name" (giggle, snicker, guffaw, ...) of casketsonparade we finally started to register casketsonparade in other top-level domains (tlds). So far we have brought the biz, cc, co, info, me, mobi, name, net, tv, us & ws tlds into the fold.

     We have also registered the casketonparade and kasketsonparade name mis-spelling variants in the biz, com, info, mobi, name, net, org & us tlds. As bad as the hosting costs are, registering all of these domains is really starting to add up.

     What we're really waiting for is the day that casketsonparade-dot-gov goes live ... seems like it would be a great domain for the Social Security Death Index! What about casketsonparade-dot-edu? Could be a very educational site. And, if the U.S. Army decides to "be all that it can be," they can put up a casketsonparade-dot-mil site — at the rate things are going it would certainly qualify as truth in advertising.

page last updated 02/06/2011