http://screlvana.blogpot.com/ works too. Wish I knew what a screlvana was.
Oh we could have great fun with that.
'muppets'
'heretics'
etc.
- they should be looking at the logs, if they're smart enough to make a 'catchall' (it's quite easily done, one suspects).
I agree, I hope they look at their logs, but even if they do, I doubt it will make a difference. The site owner doesn't seem to know that how we witness matters. You're gonna be a lot more effective witnessing on the web if people don't feel tricked, and if they actually read what you write.
So I was just thinking, as a thought-experimnt, what if I had *.blogpot.com? Is there a way to make it a good witness? I'm quite sure that's what the siteowner really wants, and I applaud him/her for that motivation. I don't think they accomplished it, though. I'd be interested to see their click-through, page view, and length of visit statistics. You can bet they are really low, and that most people leave as fast as they can.
The whole thing could be improved by:
1. Acknowledge the phony address. There ought to be some semi-humorous kind of intro, like,
"You probably didn't mean to type blogpot.com, but here you are, and maybe you were meant to be here..."
2. Then, an easy way out to the real blogspot, so people don't feel like they've been had; followed by an interesting alternative, like this:
What are you really searching for? Click here to go to the blogspot page you were probably intending to visit, or... take a risk on something else.
"Click here" would have to be scripted to take them to the corresponding blogspot page. Then from "take a risk," link to one of the better presentations of the gospel already on the web.
And that's all. Theological differences aside, one huge problem with what they tried to do there is that nobody is going to take time to read it, especially an unbeliever.
Go to howstuffworks.com and read about How Domain Name Servers Work, and you'll understand.
In a nutshell, your computer goes out to the server for .com and it asks for the IP for blogpot.com. Then, your computer goes to a separate server maintained by the owners of blogpot.com and asks for the IP address of XYZ.blogpot.com, where XYZ could be anything. Under ordinary circumstances, the name server at blogpot.com would look up XYZ in a database and return an IP address within the blogpot.com domain. But if the owners are being tricky, there is no database. They set up their name server to ignore XYZ and always return the IP address to their website.
Pornographers used to use that same tactic back in the late 90s. I typed in wheatherchannel.com once at work and got bombarded with auto-popup porno ads once.
I'm just sayin...
I forgot to add...
Its pretty easy to do what they did. All they did is register the domain name blogpot.com and then put their html pages there. They probably use their "page not found" page to display the first page.
www.hageemustdie.blogpot.com
They use a dns wildcard. If you ever buy your own domain, your registrar (or hosting firm) should be able to help you out with that.
Commenting by HaloScan
