new domain; who dis? ffg.co.zw is my new personal domain.

After five great years using farai.xyz, I’m moving to a new domain, ffg.co.zw.

Why

Two reasons:

1. America’s dominance in tech is a huge chokepoint, particularly on the supposedly decentralized internet. I’ll elaborate further in the future but Baldur puts it well. If you think about it, the implications are severe, affecting the many things we use on a daily basis, like payments and WhatsApp. It’s very depressing to think about, but better to worry so you can figure out how to deal with it.
2. I can get a 3 letter domain for $10 using my local (Zimbabwe’s TLD), co.zw! I thought I could get a two letter one but that didn’t work as I’ll explain shortly. Ironically, farai.xyz and ffg.co.zw are the same length but 🤷🏾‍♂️.

Getting a co.zw was more complicated than I thought

I use Name.co.zw to get co.zw domains since it’s a nice enough experience. As a Zimbabwean, I only pay $10/year for a domain vs $50/year for foreigners. I haven’t run into trouble before so I thought I could get fg.co.zw since it was marked as available, something rare for most TLDs.

I also wanted to pay in local currency since it’d be cheaper but I didn’t realize how much cheaper it would be. I think they had forgotten to update the exchange rate or something but if it was a problem, they would have told me by now.

I bought the domain over Christmas so I hadn’t heard anything until they forwarded an email from the TLD registry saying that the co.zw doesn’t support two letter domains. I didn’t know that, but the registrar should have. Thankfully they credited my account so I could think of another domain.

Three letters threw everything off since I couldn’t think of a slick domain. One option was f-g.co.zw but that’s a mouthful. Another option was imfg.co.zw similar to the im.farai.xyz I was using but it doesn’t sound as slick. I then decided to go abstract and had narrowed it down to tfg.co.zw and ffg.co.zw. Had I gone with the former, the t would have meant, the as in “the FG” where FG is my name.

Instead I chose the latter where the f means “fg”, a recursive acronym in typical coder fashion although I’ve done recursion properly and have a base case that’s my name.

Having settled on a new domain, I bought it with the credit they gave me and waited a few more days where the registry asked for “business information”. Never had I been asked for this in my time buying domains so I was surprised. Also, my domain isn’t a business so I’m not sure what to put. I settled on personal blog and they approved my domain.

What Next

I guess it’s time to move everything that was hosted on im.farai.xyz onto this site. Thing is, I had just consolidated nearly virtually every single post I’ve worked on ever since I’ve started blogging.

I want to see how long I’ve come in terms of blogging and use it as an opportunity to clean up my old blog posts. Expect a big series on this as I approach 10 years of blogging.

As I’m doing this, I want to ensure that all the previous URLs redirect to something on my current site. After all, cool URIs don’t change. Or not?