This is a personal web site. I am not interested in maximizing "hits," so I don't advertise it or invest time in giving it a slick image. I expect that the people who visit here will be friends or family or people who are specifically interested in one or more of our various projects. I put the URL on my business card and resume. The URL is also deposited elsewhere on the Internet in a few places (such as the Project Mac web site).
You could call it a vanity site. I take some pleasure in showing off both odd things I've done in my spare time and odd things I've done professionally.
I like having a server in the house. It's an always-on remotely accessible appliance, like an answering machine. We can put files on it and then access the files wherever we are (given only an Internet connection). We can also read our email from anywhere. The domain name gives us permanent URL's and email addresses that are independent of whatever our current employers and ISP happen to be. I can set up as many mail aliases for myself as I like -- this helps in tracking and containing spam.
The criteria were: available, easily pronounced and spelled, and not based on either Oakley's or my names. As anyone who has tried to obtain a domain name knows, it is very difficult to find names meeting even such modest criteria. "Mumble" was an available, memorable English word in use as an old ARPAnet slang expression, and so has sentimental value (I first worked at MIT in 1979). It's also suggestive of Mumbles, a village on the Gower peninsula in Wales that Oakley and I visited in 1996.
It's a personal site, not a commercial one, so ".com" is not appropriate. The remaining choices were ".org" and ".net". I felt that ".net" sounded more distinguished than ".org", and I was also inspired by the example of Philip Greenspun's vanity site, photo.net. But I admit that unlike photo.net, mumble.net does not have any particular networking aspect.
Jim Rees maintains the family vanity domain. We (Oakley and Jonathan) wanted a neutral domain name that referred to the entire household, not to any particular individual in it. We sometimes call the house in Arlington "Rosebud", but all the rosebud domain names were already spoken for.
The machine runs Debian GNU/Linux, which is easy to configure as a server. It's always connected to the Internet via SDSL service provided by Megapath. We used to buy cable Internet service from AT&T, but they don't allow customers to run servers so we had to switch to SDSL. The machine consumes about 60W of electric power, which costs roughly $4.40 per month (assuming $.10/kWh). I keep it in the basement so that we're not bothered by fan noise. The home LAN connects to the upstairs computers, and Debian acts as a firewall and does network address translation.
The domain name is $35/year through easydns.com. Their package includes DNS (name-to-IP-address lookup service) and a backup mail exchanger (so that I don't lose email when the machine is down or unreachable).
The server hardware is a 1U rack-mountable server purchased in June 2001 at Trenza Corp.'s liquidation auction. At Trenza it was called "nurb" and served as the company's external presence, running HTTP and SMTP servers. It has a 500MHz x86 processor, 512M of RAM, a 30G disk, and two network cards.
Cheers,
Jonathan