Dan Harkless
Page created: August 18, 2000
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Validated HTML 5 +
CSS Last modified: September 8, 2025 |
Harkless.org is run by Dan Harkless, of Orange County, California, U.S.A. It has been in operation since 2000 (before which I had web pages through my employers).
Well, in the mid to late 90s, I wanted to register harkless.com, but it was already registered by a company selling email services to people wanting their last name in the domain of their email address.
It surprised me somewhat that a company had grabbed a name as relatively rare as Harkless, but apparently they had registered pretty much every last name they could get their hands on, back when InterNIC didn't charge an arm and a leg for that.
Sure enough, once their hold on harkless.com expired (and non-trivial registration fees had been established), they did not re-register. I imagine whatever money they were making off of harkless.com (if any) wasn't even enough to pay for the registration fees.
At this point, I should have registered harkless.com, but due to various reasons, I held off. In August 2000, though, I was finally inspired to register harkless.com. Two reasons for this. One, my 10-year high school reunion was coming up, and I figured it'd be convenient to be able to tell people my email address was simply my_first_name@my_last_name.com. The other reason was that I was setting up a site for a co-worker called His_last_nameFamily.com. He was forced to tack on "Family" because His_last_name.com, .net, and .org were all taken. Despite the fact that my surname is rarer than his, I figured I'd better get off my butt and grab harkless.com.
Unfortunately I'd waited too long. Despite the previous company's apparent failure to make money off of harkless.com, yet another "surname-domain-email-provider", NamePlanet.com, had sprung up late in 1999 and had snapped up harkless.com in early 2000. I suppose this business model once again became economically feasible after InterNIC / Network Solutions' monopoly over domain registration was removed and competition drove the prices down.
Therefore, I went with harkless.org. Of course, I didn't feel too bad about that, as by the original domain name conventions, that's the TLD one would use for a non-commercial, non-network-service-provider website. As of 2025, Hover Realnames is still operating harkless.com in a similar fashion to NamePlanet.
Oh, and what about harkless.net? Oddly, some Malaysian company called "TheTings DotCom Sdn Bhd" apparently "parked" it by registering it through DomainsAreFree.com in early 2000. There were no harkless.net DNS records, so they were truly just parking it, not using it for web, email, or anything else. I was thinking of grabbing the domain if TheTings let it expire in Febrary 2002, but wasn't gung-ho about it. I was interested in harkless.com not because I wanted to control all harkless.TLD domains, but because lay people are most familiar with the ".com" TLD, and sometimes accidentally type it instead of ".org" (also many browsers traditionally allowed you to simply type "domain" as a shortcut for "http://www.domain.com/"). So I figured I'd probably leave harkless.net for all those Malaysian Harklesses (??) to play with.
In November 2002, I saw that TheTings apparently did drop harkless.net after all, and a Scott Harkless from Ohio (not my cousin Scott Harkless) had grabbed it and was using it for his family photos. Was glad to see it in the hands of an actual Harkless. The site was apparently taken down as of 2018, though the domain is still registered to someone as of 2025.
Please note that your connection to harkless.org can be SSL/TLS-encrypted via the URLs https://harkless.org/ or https://www.harkless.org/.
Additional history of my web authoring (which goes all the way back to 1993!) is available at About Dan Harkless' Site, along with a Site Map of my own pages. A whole-site Site Map will be added here in the future.
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Dan Harkless
Page created: August 18, 2000
|
Validated HTML 5 +
CSS Last modified: September 8, 2025 |