April 5, 2022
A lot of my projects are under the domain elk.sh
. When I don’t want to buy a new domain for a project, I stick it as a subdomain under elk.sh
— you can even see all the projects under that domain.
It’s really all about having something as short as possible, so that the final domain (something.elk.sh
) isn’t too long.
I first bought the domain in the summer of 2018, in the summer between freshman and sophomore years of high school.
I was taking inspiration from the hosting service now.sh
from ZEIT (which has since rebranded to Vercel), which would let you assign your projects a something.now.sh
subdomain.
I wanted my own version of that, where I could choose any subdomain without other people having already claimed all the good ones.
.sh
is a top-level domain ending that’s meant for the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, but in practice it’s used for a lot of tech projects because the popular programming language Bash uses files that end in .sh
(like my-script.sh
).
So I went on a search for three letter words that were available .sh
domains. Eventually I came across the name elk
, nabbed it, and here we are today.
It’s honestly not the best name — elk.sh
is a pretty arbitrary string of letters. But it doesn’t really seem to have mattered. When users have cared enough, for example with Blocks (blocks.elk.sh
) in high school, they’ve committed the letters to memory well enough.