The x is the Bit.ly Pro short url service. After much consideration I went with ja1.me since it was appropriate and it wasn’t overpriced. I’m not sure yet if short urls are good or bad. Well, let me rephrase that. I think obscuring where you are sending someone could be used by bad people for bad things. As more and more tiny-urls come into existence you won’t be able to assign any trust to the url you se as you read it since it may redirect any number of times before it resolves. So, hopefully when you see an URL which loosely renders my name at least it’s recognizable from an authorship standpoint (maybe).

Lastly the two other 5 character, animal-based, awesome names I came up with were hundreds per-year from a domain registration standpoint so I passed … for now.