“Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”—JFK
Welcome! The thomasseidman.com Web site is a gift to me from my old friend and self-styled 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, anyway. All the other Thomas Seidmans out there (and you know who you are) who thought about setting up their own Web pages with their own name will have to go through Ripley. He got there first.
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; the media loves to report[1]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.
I like sliders, like the one below. The only problem is that I can’t devise a way to get it to load faster. I have tried to surmount this technical challenge, but, at the end of the day, your load times are sometimes no better than you Web-hosting service. With that in mind, I have written this introduction. If you have read this far, the slider has probably had time to load. Again, welcome and enjoy.
![vote_counts[1]](https://thomasseidman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/vote_counts1.jpg)
