REDdimension
REDdimension is the primary internet domain and website of Jon Reddick , the website of Jon's freelance internet consulting enterprise, and is used as the permanent email server of his immediate family members and friends.
The preferred method of writing the name is with the first three letters capitalized as in "REDdimension.com". This convention was devised to visually emphasize that it is comprised of two unqiue words, and to reinforce that there are two consecutive letter d's.
Contents
Origin
Jon first experienced the pain of changing an email address (including notifying all friends & family, changing all subscriptions and updating all online services) in the fall of 1998 when changing from his first ever address with Tallahassee Freenet to his new "real" ISP, Vistech.
The difficulty and frustration of that process, combined with early forays into freelance website design and the need for a web host for those projects, led him to the conclusion that it was time to choose a truly permanent online identity and residence for him and his family which could be kept for a lifetime.
On September 16, 1998, reddimension.com was first registered with Network Solutions, LLC (then the only licensed registrar for top-level internet domain names) for two years for $70.
During those first two years, domain name registration become decentralized and Network Solutions's monopoly on the market had been dissolved. Jon transferred reddimension.com to Dotster.com, where it is still maintained to this day for $14.95 per year.
Choosing a Name
The domain name, reddimension, was decided after exhausting several other choices which were not available.
Shortly before choosing a name to register, Jon had been re-watching the Carl Sagan PBS series, Cosmos, and had many of the concepts and terms from the program fresh in his mind. The first choice was "redshift," which refers to the apparent chromatic distortion of an object toward the red end of the visible spectrum as an object moving toward you approaches the speed of light. Jon thought a reference to the speed of light might be appropriate for an internet identity. But the name "redshift.com" had already been taken (today it is an internet services company).
The next choice was "blueshift" which refers to the same phenomenon, but to the distortion as the object moves away from you at near the speed of light. But "blueshift.com" was also already taken (today it is an HR firm).
Jon liked the idea of including "red" in the domain to mirror his last name, so he then explored other scientific and astronomical terms coupled with the word, "red" ("redphase," "redplanet," "redgalaxy," "redcosmos," etc.), but none were available.
Finally he hit upon the combination of "red" with "dimension," which had not yet been taken. He was further pleased to notice that the coupling of the two words even more closely resembled his surname (Reddick, reddimension). Without further search, he registered reddimension.com immediately.
Criticism
Like the cobbler whose shoes go unmended, the design of reddimension.com has gone unchanged for more than five years, and shows it age. Its rudimentary construction shows no dynamic scripting, no cascading style sheet usage, and is aligned with html tables.
Ironically, all of reddimension.com's customers' sites are much more modern and show fewer or none of these signs of age.
Redesign
Finally, in late May of 2014, Jon finally embarked on a refresh of the site. The new foundation was a simple WordPress installation with a custom theme and introduced a logo which resembles a Rubik's puzzle cube with all red faces, and the title in Agency FB font.
The puzzle cube is symbolic of the geekery of internet and internet technology in general, and it being all red is of course a reference to REDdimension, but a puzzle cube with all sides the same color would not be difficult to solve. A thus REDdimension's logo symbolizes that IT need not be geeky and cryptic, but can be much simpler and can be solved.
