What is Red Bat

We had been a Rogers Internet customer since 1999 and still used my original anthonyhunter email address. I have also used the same Rogers Yahoo geocities website for a long time.

I had been super extra special careful not to use my Rogers account anywhere stupid, but somehow I still end up getting spam email.

Spam seems to come in waves. At one point I was getting 200 spams a day. Then Rogers Yahoo spam software seems to figure it out and you suddenly do not get much, only to rocket back up again.

You cannot ignore the spam either. The software frequently thinks your friends email is spam and flags it as [BULK]. So you have to keep going through the crap or you miss emails.

I had attempted to change emails addresses several times. There is a huge problem getting a half decent email address, all the good short address are gone. Seems that there are lots of Anthony and Hunters out there. So a new one at rogers was impossible to find.

I also started looking somewhere else, I went through hotmail, gmail and yahoo accounts, but the good email addresses were taken and mail service just did not quite cut it to move all my email over. And I still had the geocities web account.

The end was when Yahoo killed geocities. I tried to find a decent free replacement website service, but no luck. Google sites was the best I could get working, but it did not like my old web pages and my javascript.

So the end had arrived, I need a new email address and website and it needs to be my own.

Where did Redbat.ca come from

Step one was to figure out a domain name, the part after the @ in your email address.

As I said before, there are too many Anthony and Hunters out there. I tried searching the various combinations, but everything I tried was taken. So any domain name containing my name was out.

So the next task was to figure out a short cool domain name, say less than ten characters. No sense having a really long domain name.

Trying to find a dot-com domain that was short and not taken was impossible. So I hitched on to using the dot-ca domain, which is the Canadian top level domain. And dot-ca is one character shorter than dot-com anyway.

I also got hooked on a colour in the domain name, so I could use it as a theme on the website. Colour in the name sounded better too. Red and blue were short and ok colours.

So if you can see where I am going, I wanted short, red or blue, ten characters, dot-ca. So three or four characters for the rest of the domain name.

I tried a ton of names for several hours. Anything I could find was taken or associated with something else.

I somehow found RedBat.ca was not taken.

If you google Red Bat, you can see why. You get over 18 billion matches, mostly related to the Eastern Red Bat (Lasiurus borealis). No sane company could build a web presence using red bat.

I needed to make sure Red Bat did not have a rude meaning somewhere, so I went over page after page of google matches. I did find a few companies called Red Bat out there, Red Bat Publishing, Red Bat Press. I also found a Red Bull energy drink rip-off in Eastern Europe called Red Bat. All pointed to Red Bat looking good.

I was satisfied that Red Bat was a safe, so that was it. That is the simple story for RedBat.ca.