To hyphenate or not to hyphenate--a poll

[ksmith]

I will be purchasing a domain in the very near future. I can opt for a hyphenated name, as I did with kristine-smith.com, or go with nonhyphenatedname.net. I wondered if folks had a preference.


[Poll #1117448]

UPDATE: So far, the voting is: hyphen.com--7 8 votes; no hyphen.net--20 24 votes. I appreciate the comments.

Comments

[aeriedraconia.livejournal.com]

Hyphenated names are easier to read but they are a pain to remember when typing the web addy.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Ah. I couldn't get kristinesmith.com when I set up my website--it was taken by someone named Smith for, iirc, his daughter, so I didn't ask to see if he'd leave it go. The hyphen does make it easier to read since it is kind of a longish name.

I wasn't sure if .net was a stumbling block or not.

[aeriedraconia.livejournal.com]

"I wasn't sure if .net was a stumbling block or not."

The .net is not as common as the .com (though I see a lot more of them nowadays) but it is better than a hyphen, I think. The hyphen key on a keyboard is an awkward stretch to reach too.

[mithriltabby]

I like a hyphenated domain for readability, but the most common pattern is none. They’re cheap enough that it’s not unreasonable to get both and have one forward to the other.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Now that's an idea...

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Hyphens are hard to type.

If they are both available

[romsfuulynn.livejournal.com]

then get both or all
hyphens and not hyphens. If you do run across another Kristine Smith who needs one in the future you can be polite and share (or not).

[cabri729.livejournal.com]

Without a hyphen, you might get people calling you Kristin and wondering what the 'e' stands for. ;) Despite that, I have no real preference since I would just put it in my bookmarks anyway.

[e-moon60.livejournal.com]

I prefer unhyphenated. The .net domain names aren't as unusual now.

That being said, there are very VERY long names that I can't read or remember if they're not dashed or hyphenated. Can't recall one now, but anything as long as somedaywewillruletheworldagainjustyouwaitandsee is too long for me.

[phantomminuet.livejournal.com]

I say go with the hyphenate, if only for consistency.

our comments on the hyphen

[(Anonymous)]

Roger's not a fan of the hyphen. Most people, in his experience, will type in your name first without. The option of both would cover that.

However, if you're buying two names? For the sake of argument, would it be better to have one reference the most likely work to be searched?

Julie, stirring the pot.

To hyphenate or not to hyphenate

[(Anonymous)]

I'd go without hyphenation.

tomh

[madmoravian.livejournal.com]

I'd go with both, if possible. If just one, I'd buy the hyphenated.com

[(Anonymous)]

The biggest potential problem with hyphens is that, thanks to bad decisions by non-touch-typists back in the 1960s and 1970s, hyphens are used for command parameters on the command line in some operating systems... including U/Linux. (This, by the way, is one of the "advances" of PC-DOS: It chose the slash key for that function, because its designers were touch-typists.)

Here's an embarassing example from my own past: When I was setting up small-group conferencing software for the law school as a graduate assistant back in the day, we ran a program start from the talk program in BSD Unix in front of the program name, which one of the professors had named "xxxxx", resulting in a program name of "talk-xxxxx". While debugging that program, I was repeatedly entering "talk -xxxxx"... which turned out to be a request to one of my own students (that semester, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Aerospace Science — AFROTC instructor — as part of my reserve duty) to chat using the talk program, because the student's user name was "xxxxx".

For that reason alone, I don't like hyphens in domain names.

— CEP

PS As long as you're buying up domain names, you should consider buying up janikilian and forwarding it to your main domain, and doing the same with the protagonist's name in Gideon.