I’m starting a new web project today and I’ve decided to do this one a little different. I’m going to document each step of the project on this blog and make the source code available too, so it’s kind of an Open Source Web 2.0 site.

I’ll be using Ruby on Rails to develop the site, which is one of the faster growing Database backed Web Application environments. If you have not read the book Beyond Java I would encourage you to read it, Bruce Tate has done an excellent job of explaining some of the problems Java is facing and how Ruby on Rails solves those.

The idea for the site is to make it easier for entrepreneurs to come up with nifty Web 2.0 domains themselves. The number of .com domains registered has skyrocketed to over 50 million as of last year, according to Domain counts but at the same time a .com domain is still the gold standard for your presence on the web. Trying to come up with an unregistered site is getting very hard and that’s where this new site will help. I also need to give credit to this site Domain Generator which got me thinking along these lines, the problem with this site is that there seems to be a fixed list of names and most are not available, I plan of fixing both of these issues with my site.

There are a couple of ways to find a good domain name, the first one is to make a word up like google.com, ebay.com or skype.com, which is feasible for some creative types out there unfortunately I’m not one of those… Or you could use foreign words like yugma.com or nexo.com, but many of these are taken and to me they are harder to remember. So that leaves us with another way which is to use compound words, like hotmail.com, fogcreek.com or livewire.com . You are not going to find these in the standard dictionary like other compound words such as newsstand, flowerpot or ladybug but they are easy to remember and they can be used to describe a concept also. They also have a nice feature for engineers in that they can be created by an algorithmic process.

The site I picked for this website is JargonFly.com (see compound word sites make sense), which is a site I registered a while back. This is also how the title for this article came up, because a couple of weeks ago a company made me a cash offer for the JargonFly.com domain and they were willing to pay $2500 dollars for it. I obviously didn’t sell, but it did motivate me to go ahead and get the site developed so I can generate revenue from it (hopefully much more than the $2500 I turned down).

Now I’ve got the idea, the domain, a machine to host it on and the framework I’ll use, now I have to figure out how to monetize the site. The obvious things that come to mind is to become an affiliate for an ICANN registrar and collect money for registering sites. The other thing is to have other advertisers such as how to form your own corporation, raising venture capital, etc, plus there is always adwords from Google. I will research those a little later, for now I need to get the site built.

That’s it for now, hopefully by next time I will have the framework laid out for creating the domain names and a way of verifying they are still available.