The domain experience is about to get upgraded

It’s near time for slutty domain registrars and confusing DNS hosts to die in a fire.

I’ve wanted to reinvent the domain registration and management experience for a while. Every time I use what’s out there now I die a little inside. I have over 100 domains and I register new ones fairly often. Here’s my current experience:

I start with Instant Domain Search when I think of a domain or need to come up with a domain. Real-time check-as-you-type really helps you in the brainstorming process. There’s actually nothing wrong with this. It’s the most fun part of the experience, but it ends here.

Then I register. If it’s not a fancy TLD like .io or something, I use the registrar that I have most my domains with: Cheap Domain Registration. This is perhaps the worst part. It’s basically a GoDaddy reseller that I stumbled across a long time ago and started registering domains with. Since I’d rather not have my domains across several crappy registrars, I’ve decided to stick with them. Plus, it’s such a frickin pain to transfer domains. I’ve done it a few times and I still don’t even know how it works.

Anyway, it’s effectively GoDaddy, which is the most popular registrar. I don’t exactly know why. It’s probably the sluttiest of them all. It’s so noisy, fake, and slow. Decent prices, but of course they’re going to try and upsell you in every way possible. They got me once because I was in a hurry and I clicked the wrong thing. It’s at least (yes, they give you the option for more) 3 pages of upsell offers.

However, it does have good support, which is important because DNS and domains are such a pain to novices. I sort of like the fact they call me sometimes after registering asking if I got everything set up. I told them never to call me again, but that I’m happy they’re doing that.

That good karma goes out the window when you try and manage your domains. This is the slowest part, and the second worst part of the experience next to avoiding all the upsell traps. Luckily I don’t need to use it ever except for DNS.

Now, it’s nice of them to provide free DNS, but it’s so hard to get to and so clunky once I’m there. I usually want to use EveryDNS just for that, but I still have to use their interface to point my domain to EveryDNS. I also tend to use their web redirect for making naked domains go to www, since each one of those would use up my limited number of records on EveryDNS. So I’m stuck with them for that usually.

Once I’ve got it pointed to EveryDNS, it’s pretty okay. The EveryDNS interface is not so pretty, but it’s quick and to the point. I remember getting a bit confused in the early days, partly due to the interface and partly due to DNS not being the most user friendly of technologies. Unfortunately my free account can only have 20 records, including web redirects. I should probably just donate and get that lifted, but I suppose I’m lazy. I usually just swap out domains I’m not using anymore, or end up using my registrar’s DNS for simple domains.

In the end I’m using up to three systems, DNS and registration both being quite a hassle, particularly in the setup. But if you register a lot of domains, make a lot of sites, you’re in setup mode quite a bit. There are a lot of things that could be better, from the UI to the sales process. It could all be one nice solution that’s just done right.

So I decided to start working on that. It’s called domdori, which is short for “domains done right.” The core experience looks like this:

You find a domain with real-time search. Then you use Amazon 1-click payment to buy the domain right there. You now have the domain. The default records don’t make your new domain point to some ugly, slutty landing page advertisement. The default landing page is whatever you make it. In fact, the DNS settings can default to whatever you want. You get not only an advanced DNS manager UI for power users, but a very straightforward DNS manager UI with smart defaults and complexity abstracted away for most users.

That alone would just completely make my day, but there’s more (in a “less” sort of way). Only, we’ll save that for later. Until then, a public alpha of domdori is approaching…

Why minimalist software wins at workflow

Recently I’ve been evaluating software to help support agile/scrum development on our team, and ideally to roll into our NASA Code product for others to use. We’re already married to Trac, so we’ve been playing with Agilo and are looking at some of the other agile plugins for Trac. Unfortunately they’re all so heavyweight, despite some that claim not to be.

I came back to a realization I’m sure a lot of us have had: most software sucks. Especially software that’s intended to augment some real-life process. When asking Timothy Fitz (my insight into the amazing continuous improvement processes used at IMVU) about recommendations on agile tools, he said: “a board and post-its (seriously)”

This is part of the reason most enterprise software sucks so terribly. Enterprise is about lots of real-life process and workflow, and given that process augmentation software even in small doses generally sucks, large amounts of it will suck exponentially.

A lot of us have learned that less software is more effective. One major attraction of Trac was their goal of staying out of the way through minimalism. The trick with minimalism, in general, is knowing what’s actually important—the essence of the message or design. This is a big part of my design process. Asking, “How can I fold these requirements into fewer features and UI?” instead of directly implementing a feature for every requirement.

The other thing about minimalism is that, like abstraction (another form of compression), everything you leave in the design makes such a huge difference. In programming, when you make abstractions, you’re deciding what you can assume. This means abstractions can go in different directions depending on the assumption requirements of what’s going to use the abstraction. The risk with minimalist software is that a simple design choice can drastically change the direction of the abstraction and make or break whether the software fits your needs.

Luckily, minimalism buys you a sort of abstraction that can enable projection. By this I mean that users can project their actual process and workflow onto the software. If it doesn’t have features that impose a particular process, users are free to do what works for them. This is why wikis are so powerful.

Coming back to Timothy’s “a board and post-its” remark, why do you even need software? If you can do it without software, why would you want to bring software in to slow things down?

Software does have a couple strengths. First, it encodes process in way that means you can automate parts of it. Nobody has to worry about manually typesetting when using a word processor. Second, it persists and organizes information that would normally be lost in handwritten notes, or worse, somebody’s head. The trick is getting these advantages without getting in the way.

A naive approach to software design is thinking that perfectly modeling a system, such as your development process, is the way to good software. I used to think this. It sounds great because then you can programmatically reason about every aspect of the system. But in the real-world, no two systems are exactly alike. In fact, a given system can change quite a bit in its lifetime. So there’s really no point to modeling systems with that kind of precision.

However, I’m seeing a lot of this in agile/scrum software. Requirements have stories, stories have tasks, organized into iterations and releases. CRUD for every noun mentioned in scrum. This on top of abstractions in a direction different than we need. Numbers where it doesn’t really matter. Nice pie chart breakdowns we’ll rarely use. Top it off with horrible UI, since with all these features there isn’t time to make them easy to use.

Honestly, Pivotal Tracker seems to have the best abstraction of agile. It folds requirements, stories and tasks into just stories. It automatically and dynamically creates iterations and calculates velocity. It keeps you on a single page, keeping you focused on what’s important.

Unfortunately, we can’t use Pivotal Tracker since we’d need it on our servers and the licensing they offered doesn’t scale if we want to essentially give it away as part of NASA Code. It’s likely I’ll want to just start nudging Trac in the right direction using Pivotal Tracker as a model reference, pulling together code from Agilo and other plugins. If there’s one thing that complements minimalist design, it’s an extension architecture, and Trac has an excellent plugin system.

Anyway, as far as augmenting process and workflow, I’ve always liked the idea of starting with a wiki and lazily formalizing the process into custom software as needed. As long as you can keep it under control, mind your requirement abstractions, and avoid writing too much software.