This was originally posted on my blog, but thought it’d be nice to share it with the folks here on Medium.

Working as a developer, designer, and general web enthusiast I know how important your online identity is. So finding and deciding on what mine would be was no small feat. I didn’t really want to choose something I’d then end up changing my mind on, but also one that would stand the test of time.

Now there’s 3 things that really drove my search:

• Keeping it short
• Keeping to my identity as an individual
• The battle with TLDs, and those bought to resell

Let me explain how these three led me to dunn.cm

Keeping it short

Nobody likes typing long domain names, and better still they wont remember them. I wanted to just use my surname if possible. I always liked the look of cleverly written url’s for names like youtu.be, instagr.am and goo.gl, and fancied and.ru, but a Russian guy owns this and wanted €10k for it. Sadly there’s no chance of a du.nn domain as .nn isn’t a TLD nor is it one that is scoped to come any time in the future.

Keeping to my identity as an individual

This was the main priority. I already own AndruDunn.com + AndruDunn.co.uk but they are long to write out. Also, I wanted my email address to look good, and by using either of those domains it ends up being repetitive — dru@andrudunn.co.uk. I ultimately wanted something that would give me –andru@dunn.tld so when someone emailed me it looked like my name.

The battle with TLDs, and those bought to resell

Turns out as much as I love that my surname is Dunn, so do other Dunn’s around the globe, AND so do random people out to make easy cash. Dunn is a great surname, I’ve always loved it for how short it is, but also how it is memorable.

Simply, I would have loved Dunn.com but the owner was not up for selling his domain even althoughthe site is untouched since 2003.

Dunn.co.uk is owned by a random with a £3k price tag, so no luck there either.

Dunn.co is being used for a celebration of the surname Dunn, no budging there.

Dunn.eu is another domain held by extortionate price ransom.

Dunn.io would have been a great shout, as its been adopted by many of the web community, but no this domain is simply being used to display a singular ‘a’ – honestly go have a look.

The list goes on.

Left to my devices I used two of the domain registrars that I most liked their UIs and which searched multiple domains at once – iWantMyName & NameCheap. Here I could search all the possibilities of Dunn.TLD and where my despair of “all the good ones are gone” kicked in.

Now you might be thinking, just get one of the new TLDs being released this year? I would have loved to, but my problem is I need a general purpose domain. I’d like dunn.design but that’s not available yet, and it’d also look like I’m just a designer. I toyed with the idea of dunn.codes but this might look like I’m just a developer, or some Dunn orientated wowcher.

My next port of call was then using an international TLD that would be succinct, as most of these TLDs are two letter extensions. I mentioned earlier about short urls, and Wired was the first company I saw using the .cm TLD. Their links on Facebook/Twitter were wrd.cm and I liked it. It just so happened that dunn.cm was available, so thanks to Cameroon and NameCheap for actually being the cheapest to register it with, here I am.

finding an identity on the web nowadays can be hard, and will involve some compromise

It’s not a spelling mistake

As I’m now doing the rounds of getting logins and contact details amended, I ran into my first developer who thought I’d made a spelling mistake of .com, which was an initial worry of mine choosing .cm, but if it’s good enough for Wired, it’s good enough for me. I like that it’s short, unique, and it’s my new home online. It’s just evidence finding an identity on the web nowadays can be hard, and will involve some compromise.

It will only get worse

Yes, this year they have actually started to introduce a whole host of TLDs to diversify the web, but how relevant to businesses are most of these TLDs? and how long will it be that overcrowding on the web happens again? Where it becomes so hard for a company or individual to get a their space of web capital.

But also at what cost to individual’s privacy?