I registered the domain name bluesmarties.com in 2003 and hosted it with company whose office was located in Richmond, BC.
At that time, a workmate of mine, who worked in the IT department of our employer (Creo was its name) recommended “mecca.ca” as a good, local, hosting service. The domain name itself I registered with internic.ca. I thought internic.ca was the only domain registering service available to Canadians at the time, but I was probably wrong. In any case, they registered it and I have kept the domain name all these years, even though I haven’t always used it much.
Back in 2003 I was working for this “high tech” company and had big dreams. The company made equipment and software for the graphic arts industry. The company colours were blue and white, which made sense, since one of the founders was an Israeli-Canadian, and Israel’s colours are blue and white. He brought in a CEO from Israel, who probably agreed with the colour scheme.
The first wordmark of the Company drew from the Oreo cookie. Creo just took that wordmark and chopped a bit of the O off to make a C. The font shape, at least the r in Creo was eventually changed to reference the shape of Hebrew characters.
Some of the company’s executive were boomers from Kitsilano, and they brought a hippie-to-yuppie culture. Very inclusive, very much a culture that encouraged people to feel safe in expressing their opinions. It was really a pretty good place to work. In the department where I began—a department of perhaps 100 people—my co-workers came from many different countries. People were clever and polite.
I put blue together with the idea of smart people working together and came up with “bluesmarties.com.” I felt slightly embarrassed about the name, because implying that I, myself, as creator of this imaginary company, was “smart” seemed conceited, so when people asked me how I came up with it I lied and said I named it after my favorite candy (Smarties being a Canadian candy made of milk chocolate surrounded by a candy coating shaped into an oblate spheroid (or a flattened sphere)).
These candies were coloured into eight different colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and brown. The blue, at that time, was a very vibrant blue. It has since been discontinued because a chemical in that blue food colouring was thought to cause hyperactivity in children, or at least to exacerbate hyperactivity in children already prone to ADHD.
One of my “big ideas” was to create a notebook that would be connected via Bluetooth to a device on your person. Smart phones weren’t common. The iphone hadn’t been invented yet. Blackberry phones had Bluetooth in 2004, and Bluetooth was a fairly new thing. Microsoft had a smart watch (I bought one) that used an FM band to sync data between devices (microsoft servers) and the watch, so the idea of syncing things wirelessly was around. I found it intriguing.
I thought maybe I could use my bluesmarties.com website as a journal and somehow sync it to the notebook, particularly with regard to notifications for calendar events. I put a blue led on the cover of the notebook, powered by a battery taken from the inside of a Polaroid S-70 film cartridge, and a simple circuit that made the led blink, and I imagined that when I had an email come in to my email inbox, or a calendar event due to occur, that somehow the blue led would start to blink.
But I never developed that idea. And eventually I stopped using the bluesmarties.com website.
After a few years, I blew it away. I changed the hosting service to Telus Shared Hosting, and re-started it merely to blog, with no pretensions to develop it into a web application, filling it with the same sort of content I would write in any personal journal.
And the years would pass. Sometimes the blog would become moribund, and I would blow it away and re-design it. Moving from basic HTML to fancier HTML, using applications like Dreamweaver, and then, later, WordPress.
I’m not sure how many times I blew away the old website and began a completely new one, always keeping the name bluesmarties.com. I did register other domain names over the years. Chrom.ca, for example. I built a website for a church, once. But I kept bluesmarties.com partly because the hosting service offered email accounts with the hosting package, and I had been using ian@bluesmarties.com since 2003 and didn’t want to stop using it.
The decades clicked away and eventually the internet became so full of cybercriminals and government agencies hacking websites that companies like microsoft and google changed their web browsers so they wouldn’t go to websites that weren’t secure. And by secure, I mean websites that didn’t use secure socket layer technology.
Buying an https:// secure socket layer (SSL) was an extra expense and a bit of hassle to install, so I just let the website be. But hackers–who knows who they were or where they came from–hacked the website and fucked it up, so I had to blow it away again and apply for a secure socket layer, which I did just a few weeks ago.
With help from tech support at internic.ca I bought an SSL and got it installed. Then I rebuilt the bluesmarties.com website using WordPress, and here we are.
The first few posts and pages have just been tests, to see what I can do easily. I won’t likely make this website anything other than a blog. I dislike facebook, for reasons I’ll get into in a later post, so this website will serve me in ways facebook wouldn’t.