“Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”—JFK

Welcome! The thomasseidman.com website was originally a gift to me from my old friend and Internet-marketing guru Chris Ripley. His mantra is “If your name is available, buy the domain—and do it before somebody else does!” or words to that effect. All the other Thomas Seidmans out there (and you know who you are) who thought about setting up their own websites with their own name would have had to to go through Ripley. He got there first. (I only took full responsibility for the website in 2023.)

There is some common sense to Ripley’s logic. Consider what happens every election cycle when a candidate (let’s call him Ted Cruz) seeks to set up a site (let’s call it tedcruz.com) in cyberspace to have a presence on the World Wide Web only to discover that somebody else has already bought the rights to use the domain name; not only that, the site is deployed to parody said candidate’s platform. This happens every so often; media reported (http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/23/politics/ted-cruz-president-announcement-website/) on the phenomenon.

Indeed, some people make a business out of snatching up domain names they believe may have value in the future, so they can resell them at a profit to people or entities down the road. It can take real money to buy the rights to a domain name—even your own name—from one of these speculators. The thomasseidman.com name, for instance, was independently valued at $8.95 as of the second quarter of 2015.

A site can be like a tabula rasa or a blank canvas or a white sheet of paper—choose whichever simile best applies to you. There are many ways to go with it. The key is: you have to start somewhere. This site represents my start.  It is a work in perpetual progress, ever changing and ever changeable.

A site is the best place to learn what goes into making a site work. There are plug-ins and widgets for almost anything you can dream of and all you need to do sometimes is install them. There is also a robust online community of do-it-yourselfers who are always coming up with mods.