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So you've decided to join the movement against your old fashioned, SOPA-loving (or not loving, or maybe loving), redneck domain registrar — but are not quite sure how to transfer your precious domains. Never fear, we've created a special automatic domain transfer service just for you. iWantMyName aims to make domain management painless, simply fill out the form and let us deal with all the messy details.

Unfortunately transferring a domain from one registrar to another is not always a straightforward exercise. However, our team of industry veterans are expert in untangling red tape and solving life's little administrative problems. Provided you are willing to supply us with access to your existing account, we can handle everything for you. That leaves you more time to spend enjoying your holidays!

What can we do for you? First we will send you a quote for the cost of transfer (you get a 12 month extension with each transfer). Once you agree to the quote, we contact your existing registrar and gain all the required codes and permissions to make the transfer of your domains. Of course we will also migrate any DNS settings, so you get a completely seamless changeover. We've included a detailed FAQ on our domain transfer page in case you have any questions or concerns.

Remember, at iWantMyName we will never try to up-sell you with stuff you don't need, plus we make domain and DNS management a breeze with our clean dashboard and simple one-click DNS set-up on your favourite hosted apps. Want to find out more? Here are some testimonials from our many happy customers. Welcome to the movement!

We're excited to release a new version of the iWantMyName domain search today. During 2011 we've been paying a lot of attention to all the great feedback we've been getting from you about our service. Over the last few weeks we've worked really hard to implement some new ideas on the site that we think you'll love.

With almost 100 different domain extensions on offer, the main focus has been on improving speed and more efficiently displaying the search results on a single page. We've also added several different optional display filters such as categories and domain availability:

It's now also easier to search for two-letter domain names as we will only show TLDs supporting these little goodies.

The new search currently runs in public beta mode, so please let us know if you run into any issues via our support center. We're looking forward to your feedback!

This week we've been working on improving our dashboard in response to great feedback you have given us during Startup Weekend Wellington.

Ability to add notes for a domain

You can now add free-form notes to any of your domains with additional information. Fill in whatever you want, e.g your girlfriend's birthday (you can never have enough reminders), links to external services (you can use basic HTML) or hosting-related information:

Marketplace App search

With almost 100 entries in the iWantMyName marketplace, it has become increasingly more difficult to find the app or service you're looking for. The new marketplace search will help you to set up domains even faster from your dashboard now:

Choose your Heroku application stack

When setting up custom domains for Heroku, there's now a drop-down menu that let's you choose whether you're using the Cedar or Aspen / Bamboo stack. This will add the necessary CNAME and A record DNS settings for your app on Heroku automatically:

There's more to come in November, you should especially keep an eye on our domain search.

Domain privacy has been a long-awaited feature at iWantMyName and we're happy to now give you an option to mask your home address in the public whois record without giving up ownership or transfer control. The service is free of charge and can be easily added to your domains from the iWantMyName dashboard.

For those of you who don't know, domain registrations require your contact information to be provided for storage and display in the international whois database. This means that anyone in the world can view your address and phone number without restriction.

One of the primary goals at iWantMyName is getting out of the way of our customers when it comes to purchasing and managing domain names. We're also big fans of search engine DuckDuckGo which inspired us to add some special sauce to our domain search, called !bang commands.

Using these !bang commands, you can easily add DNS records or other services such as Amazon S3, Github Pages or Tumblr to your domains directly from the search box on iWantMyName homepage. The following !bang commands are currently supported:

• !edit domain.com — brings you to the domain status page where you can edit all settings
• !dns domain.com — forwards you to our DNS manager for adding new records
• !nameserver domain.com — allows you to update the nameservers for a domain
• !transfer domain.com — immediately starts a domain transfer to iWantMyName
• !hostdns domain.com — creates a zone on our nameservers to host any external domain
• !updatewhois domain.com — change the whois data for a particular name
• !gapps domain.com — easily set up Google Apps for your domain
• !s3 domain.com — lets you add Amazon S3 to your domain or subdomain
• !github domain.com — adds Github Pages
• !tumblr domain.com — adds Tumblr

Pro tip: DuckDuckGo !bang command chaining

DuckDuckGo users can also use !bang command chaining, for example try entering "!iwant !nsupdate domain.com" in the DuckDuckGo search field and you will end up at the nameserver update page in your iWantMyName dashboard.

We will be constantly adding new commands to our domain search and would also love to hear your suggestions in the comments.

After last week's announcement of some newly transferable domain extensions, it is now also possible to move domains within iWantMyName from one customer to another. This is especially helpful if you want to separate domain management for clients or if you have sold a web address to someone else.

To internally move a domain, the new account holder simply can use our regular website transfer procedure. All that is needed to start the process is the authorization code from the current owner which can be found on the domain status page in the iWantMyName dashboard. Internal transfers are processed in real-time meaning the new owner has immediate access to all domain settings. Now that's easy!

Over the last few weeks we experienced some issues with our DNS manager. The result was that a small number of our customers could not update DNS records properly. For this we sincerely apologize. First our back end played up, later it was a problem with the user interface after we changed our website form framework. We should stress that the continuity of the DNS service was maintained at all times.

Changing our website forms also resulted in some of your support inquiries not reaching us. So if you did not receive an email response to a support request within 24 hours, please re-submit your message. Again, we are sorry for this problem and the delay in getting back to you!

We take our responsibilities to our customers very seriously, so we have made some changes to set things straight. We've now released a new iteration of our DNS manager and also switched to a more scalable back end. As a result, all domain registrations will use the following nameservers hostnames from now on:

• ns1.iwantmyname.net
• ns2.iwantmyname.net
• ns3.iwantmyname.net
• ns4.iwantmyname.net

Existing domain names will be migrated to the new DNS infrastructure over the next few days without any service interruption.

Thank you very much for your support and patience whilst we experienced these growing pains. Responding to feedback from our customers is how we improve, so please feel free to yell at us on Twitter, drop us an email or leave feedback if you encounter any problems in the future.

We've recently released major upgrades to our dashboard which dramatically improve the setup and management of your domain names. Hopefully this will make things even easier for you!

Web application setup

There is a new overview page that lists all available apps and services. We've also added more documentation and information within the dashboard for custom domain mapping of your favourite service.

Our web app directory now contains more than 30 services in the following categories: email, blogs, website builder, forums, ecommerce, portfolios, social networks, url shortener and wikis.

New DNS manager

This tool has been completely re-written. Let us know if you have any troubles using it. We've got big plans for DNS management which are especially interesting for developers so stay tuned!

We are happy to announce the iWantMyName affiliate program! Start referring customers or blog readers looking for international domain names or domain registrar alternatives and you will get rewarded on each sale originating from your links.

The iWantMyName domain registrar affiliate program is ideal for:

• Bloggers and website owners
• Hosting companies
• Web apps and services
• Application developers

Just place a text link, domain search box or banner on your site. When visitors register or transfer domains using the affiliate link from your site, you get 10% commission on each order for 90 days. The program is also valid for promotional offers, unless marked otherwise.

It's free to join: Become an iWantMyName affiliate today.

You can now download an auto-generated QR code for every domain name in your iWantMyName dashboard. QR codes or 2D barcodes are square images that can contain different data, e.g. URLs, an email address or phone numbers. The "QR" stands for "Quick Response" and was created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. They are very common in Japan already but start gaining popularity in the western world as well with the wide adoption of the iPhone and Android-powered mobile camera phones such as Google's Nexus One.

QR Code example for the iWantMyName homepage:

Your domain QR code can be obtained by clicking on the respective domain name in the iWantMyName dashboard. Feel free to download, print or put it on a sticker.

There are many use cases for QR codes. One of our favorite blogs ReadWriteWeb had an excellent article series on "The Scannable World":

• Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners
• Scanning Your Web Printouts
• Barcode Scanning In The Real World
• Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things: Barcode Scanning

The iWantMyName crew will be at the LCA2010 Open Day on Saturday 23rd January at the Wellington Town Hall. Be sure to stop by our booth, supply us with your favourite URL address and we will print a free QR code sticker for you.