cartesian-heights.org

[jack]

How about cartesian-heights.org? It's distinctive, it's a nice name, it looks fairly easy to type.

Are hyphens sane in domain names? I know many sites automatically reject[1] any email address with a "+" in, is a "-" likely to be a problem?

If you saw it, would you remember if it had a hyphen, dot, underscore or nothing between the words? If I said "cartesian heights dot org with a hyphen" would you understand it?

Are you familiar enough with the adjective "cartesian" to be able to remember it if you hadn't heard it before?

[1] See standard "why go to such an effort to make life more difficult for people?" rant

Comments

[teleute.livejournal.com]

The general assumption of marketing is that a hyphen is actually unhelpful because people don't expect it - the standard currently is runonwebpagenames as you've probably noticed. However, if you're not using it as a major marketing campaign, it probably doesn't matter :-).

[lupie-stardust.livejournal.com]

I have to say, I'd never heard the word "cartesian" before I say your username. I'm not even sure what it means, still.

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

Are hyphens sane? Yes. I use - in place of the + when + is rejected.

If you saw it, would you remember? No.
Although I know enough about names not to expect you to own heights.org.
I'd probably try it - without a hyphen, get the "Cannot be found", and type cartesian heights into google.

If I said (etc)? Don't know

Are you familiar enough (etc)? Don't know. I've been familiar with your LJ name for ages now.

Have you forgotten how to use formatting? No I'm just lazy.


Alternatively, I could sell you liveflurble.com for a vast fee. I'm not using it any more.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I like the name. It sounds like an eccentric mathematician's mansion.

I've never known any problem with hyphens on the software side, but on the human side they're awkward and difficult to remember. As teleute said, it's more usual to just run words together. I think the only justification for having a hyphen is if the words would seem to mean something else without (like expertsexchange). The position of the word boundary in cartesianheights is obvious.

Are you familiar enough with the adjective "cartesian" to be able to remember it if you hadn't heard it before?
Definitely. (In your LJ username, "cartesian" is the straightforward bit, but I got confused by "daemon" and thought that cartesiandemon was you.)

[androidkiller.livejournal.com]

Cartesian-heights sounds to me like some sort of hotel, except with Mathmos instead of Basil Fawlty

[d37373.livejournal.com]

I would be a bit surprised if an email filter rejected hyphens. + Is more understandable, in that the stupid way to go is to assume that an email address has the same allowed characters as a URL. Wrong, but an assumption people make. Also, since the hyphen is part of a 'normal' domain name, you might hope that they won't screw it up - even if they would when you used a hyphen before the domain.

Also, the aim is generally to make things more usable, by alerting people when they mistype the address. I haven't seen statistics, but it may be a god trade-off. Not something I would feel happy about, the obsessive that I am.

Not sure if you've seen this, but it's the reason people don't do accurate validation: http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

[james-r.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with cartesian.me.uk ? (It's available).

[liv]

I like the idea of "Cartesian heights", it obviously connects to you, but it's your place, not you personally. And it's common words that are at least relatively easy to spell. On the negative side, it's still kinda long, so a similar problem to "cartesiandaemon", which is a very cool username until you have to type it.

I think a hyphen is likely to cause confusion though. Without the hyphen it's hard to read, but with the hyphen it's hard to remember. AFAIK it will only confuse humans, computers deal fine with hyphens in URLs.

[simont]

The trouble with "Cartesian heights" is that it trips my optimising instinct, and I think "why couldn't he just say y > 0?" :-)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

Are hyphens sane in domain names? I know many sites automatically reject[1] any email address with a "+" in, is a "-" likely to be a problem?

Lots of domain names do have hyphens, don't they? OK, so I can't immediately think of any, but...

If you saw it, would you remember if it had a hyphen, dot, underscore or nothing between the words? If I said "cartesian heights dot org with a hyphen" would you understand it?

Yes, and yes.

Are you familiar enough with the adjective "cartesian" to be able to remember it if you hadn't heard it before?

And yes. I think you can count on mathematicians, historians of the eighteenth century, philosophers, and trivia junkies. I was going to say French people too, but they might have a different word for 'cartesian'... :)