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Comment by frikk | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious as to why/how this post thinks the URL is (companyname.website)? It's obviously from the comic, but I'm curious about the mechanics.

edit: derp. the url points directly at companyname.website and my Chrome build has a bug that prevented me from seeing that.

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As an XKCD comic, I thought this one was just ok, but what made me post it to HN was when I went to check the availability of companyname.website and found out it redirected to the comic :)

I did the same thing this morning with the intention of recreating the web page from the first panel of the comic, but someone beat me to it to make this redirection (which have to admit I find less cool than my (and I guess many others) idea).

Someone? Didn't Randall do it? I believe that it's part of the joke.

Maybe I don't know, the whois info are hidden.

oooh. awesome, thank you! I probably should have checked the actual link. I think my Chrome build has a bug where "show url on hover" gets disabled after some time. I guess I can blame my confusion on that ;)

I get the context, but it's still not that funny.

I don't think it's really meant to be side-splittingly funny. Just a fun meta sort of thing.

Because Randall Munroe owns companyname.website specifically so he can point it at this comic.

[Yes, you can own a .website domain too!](http://radixregistry.com/dot-website/)

dig companyname.website

companyname.website. 3217 IN A 184.168.221.2

curl -i -i http://companyname.website

Location: http://xkcd.com Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

Yes, it's a redirect. The domain is registered on GoDaddy and uses a domain anonymizer (you can't see who really registered it).

xkcd runs on IIS? I haven't seen an IIS header since 1997.

He probably just created a redirect in the domain host's web interface.

Just checked, and xkcd runs lighttpd.

thanks. that makes more sense. probably the registrar uses IIS, then.

got a downvote for that, btw. weirdest downvote ever. maybe I upset some hardcore IIS fan or something?

According to Netcraft, IIS (Microsoft) has about 27% marketshare, and I occasionally see an ASPX extension every now and then. No good reason you wouldn't see an IIS header, but I don't know why someone would downvote you for not noticing things.

[1]http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/01/15/january-2015-we...

I don't know either, but they're really into it. I'm in negative numbers on every comment in this subtree. (except, hopefully, this one.)

No, it's just because comments like "IIS sucks" or "my webserver > your webserver", like, "my programming language > your programming language", or, "my text editor > your text editor", are lame.

I'm not an IIS fan, and I didn't downvote you, but only because you were already < 1.

sure, but I didn't say anything like that. I said I had no idea it still existed. I legitimately thought it was discontinued around 15 years ago.

I was more concerned that Mr Monroe registered with GoDaddy.

.website is a new TLD; Randall probably just registered it, and put a redirect to that specific comic.

Neat, I didn't notice!

I guess xkcd's author has bought it? I tried digging a bit with WHOIS, but didn't see any actual names.

It has a DNS A-record pointing at 184.168.221.2, which didn't have much content. Not sure how the forwarding happens, but didn't spend a lot of time on it.

Fun!

There's a whole bunch of new tlds that are not, as of yet, in common use. 'companyname.website' might have been 'acme.com' 20 years ago (and you'd also have been laughing all the way to the bank, eventually).

Because it is? Did you read the comic? It's part of the joke.

My Chrome build has a bug that doesn't show the URL when hovering over links. I didn't even realize that it was not pointed directly at xkcd. Doh!

I'm mobile right now so can't confirm, but I'm guessing that Randall bought that actual URL and it's serving up a 301/302 redirect to the xkcd site.

I assume it's a redirect.

Did you try typing companyname.website into your browser?

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