Part 1: What? Not Another Website!
Here we go again. I built my first website in 2003. That site was also about the 51st North Carolina (and other things). The site was up from 2003 to 2007. It came crashing down when I got in a payment dispute with iPower hosting, and they released the URL.
My second website was online from 2016 to 2019. That website was primarily a blog dealing with ways to exploit award travel. In the eight years before the pandemic, I flew for free 75 times and spent 76 free nights in hotels. The blog died when my new hosting service, iPage, cheated me.
Lesson learned. Do not use hosting services that have names starting with lowercase “i”.
My first domain was www.kiward.com, the closest I could get to my name at the time. The second domain was www.commonfolktravel.com. What a mouthful! Getting a decent domain name these days is tough. If I wanted to build one around my name it would probably be something like www.kirkrwardwholivesintexasbutgrewupinnorthcarolina.com.
I got lucky with 51stNCT.com. I actually wanted 51NCT.com, but stupidly, I queried the name a few months before I was ready to buy a domain. That query apparently triggered a robot to reserve the URL. So I wound up with my second choice, www.51stNCT.com, which isn’t too bad
Second lesson: don’t query for domain names until you’re ready to buy.
Anyway, that’s a short history of my adventures on the interweb. This site will be dedicated solely to Civil War topics, especially North Carolina units, and even more especially, to the 51st Regiment North Carolina Troops. I’m still configuring the website, but I expect the content to grow quickly over the next few months.
Stay tuned.
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