I’ve always had a bit of a domain problem.

The way it usually shows up is simple: I hear a word, a place, a business name, and my brain immediately goes into “who owns the .com?” mode. This occupies my brain so much that I ended up writing a blog post about it and turned it into a game I play (mostly with myself, but often with friends), called Is It Snagged.

Of course, when my son’s U9 baseball team kicked off this spring, I didn’t just become a dad on the sidelines. I became the ****guy ****thinking about baseball.com during warmups (owned by Reflex, btw). Even though I didn’t end up snagging baseball.com for millions, I did sponsor my son’s team and created custom Snagged jerseys for them.

But, that’s the thing. Once you see the world through domains, you don’t really turn it off.

When we first moved to New Jersey, we landed in a town called Maplewood, so obviously my brain immediately went to “who owns Maplewood.com?” I found out that the domain was owned by a family-run trucking company (Maplewood Trucking) in Southwestern Ontario, and they’d held onto it for decades. It wasn’t just a domain to them; it was part of the business and the family history, so it wasn’t for sale. That’s pretty common in this world, and not everything has a price (which, to be honest, I fully respect).

So when I moved to South Orange in 2021, it was inevitable that I looked up SouthOrange.com. It felt like it should already be gone, owned by a city or locked away in internet history. But it wasn’t. I ended up tracking down the owner of SouthOrange.com, (who also owned WestOrange.com), and reached out to him. After a mere ~3 years and plenty of back-and-forth, we eventually met up in person and it happen.

It was a fairly straightforward domain negotiation, which usually means a mix of patience, timing, and slightly outdated infrastructure holding the internet together to get a transfer done.

We had to navigate registrars from the mid-nineties and over the phone support for an hour or two, but eventually, later that day, SouthOrange.com was mine. And for someone who is a domain collector like myself, that was very gratifying.

So, ok great, the domain was now in my account. I stepped back for a second and realized, I have many times before, I didn’t really have a plan for this name. That’s the funny part about domains. Over time, it’s addictive to buy and collect them, and before you know it, you have more domains than you can build on.

With SouthOrange.com, I knew I needed to do something with it and started building.

What came out of my brainstorming process was a simple local resource for South Orange, NJ. Restaurants, parks, real estate, community info. Just something useful for the town that didn’t exist in one place before. It wasn’t overly technical, and was just a weekend idea that turned into something real once I started vibecoding it. Something I hope will rank highly on Google for “South Orange” search terms — you hear that, Google bots? Give some love to SouthOrange.com!!

Nothing overly groundbreaking in this point — just a fun nugget I wanted to share. And it’s a fun reminder that domains have a way of turning ordinary places into obsessions. What started as a curiosity about who owned SouthOrange.com became a three-year pursuit, an old-school domain transfer adventure, and ultimately a chance to build something useful for the local community.

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