cjb.net

» see cjb.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

cjb.net was a small free service in the late 1990s that did one specific thing. it gave you a cleaner subdomain url that redirected to your actual homepage. you signed up at cjb.net, picked a name, said "send anyone who hits yourname.cjb.net to geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/4729/index.html", and from then on you only had to give out the short version. the redirect was just a dns trick plus an http meta-refresh, but it worked.

i used cjb.net in 1998 when i was 14. dial-up at home in turkey, ttnet, 33.6k modem at the time. my first websites lived on free hosts whose urls looked like uploaded.angelfire.com/freezone3/yourname/index.html. if you read that out loud over the phone to a classmate you lost half of it. cjb.net let me give out yourname.cjb.net instead. that was the whole pitch and it sold itself.

the service also handed out free email aliases. you could route [email protected] to your real hotmail or yahoo address. one more layer of vanity. one more layer of "my address is short and easy to remember."

~ the dossier ~

~ how it worked ~

the technology was simple. cjb.net owned the cjb.net domain plus a wildcard dns record that sent any subdomain to a single web server. that web server looked up the requested name in a database, fetched your stored target url, and returned an http redirect. for browsers it felt like yourname.cjb.net was a real site that always sent you somewhere else.

the email service was equally minimal. mail to [email protected] hit cjb.net's mail server, the server looked up your forward target, and sent the message there. no inbox to check, no real account. just a forwarding rule.

this was the right level of complexity for a free service in 1998. nothing to maintain except dns plus a small database. cjb could run the whole thing on one or two servers and they did. it ran for years.

~ the curtain ~

cjb.net never had a dramatic shutdown. it just degraded. through the early 2000s it kept working. through the mid-2000s the email service started losing messages and the redirects became unreliable. by 2008 most users i knew had moved their vanity urls to other services or stopped caring about vanity urls because nobody was sharing geocities pages anymore.

the underlying reason was that geocities and angelfire, the things cjb.net redirected to, were dying or already dead. once your destination was a 404 your cjb.net redirect was pointing at nothing. the service became a museum of dead links.

by 2010 cjb.net itself was effectively gone. the domain technically existed but the service did not respond. there was no announcement. the maintainer seems to have moved on. a small piece of late-90s personal-publishing infrastructure quietly turned off.

~ what it left ~

the muscle memory of "type your name dot cjb dot net." for a brief window in 1998 to 2003, telling someone "my page is at yourname.cjb.net" was the standard way to share your free homepage url in turkey too. it sat between the messy hosted url and the proper domain you would never afford as a 14-year-old.

the principle of url shorteners. cjb.net was the same idea as bit.ly twelve years before bit.ly. the difference is that cjb.net redirects pointed at your homepage and bit.ly redirects point at twitter posts. the underlying mechanism is identical. cjb did it first for the early personal-web crowd.

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