Today I suddenly noticed a spike in my site’s traffic, with an extra chunk of referral traffic. The traffic stats showed it came from http://www.nic.ren/col.jsp?id=105. I clicked in and found it’s the classic-cases section of the official .REN domain website, where my site sits last under the “Personal Blog: Programmer Tech Blog” category.
It seems the .REN registry has also been actively promoting itself, and I’m flattered. I did register neil.ren, but never used it as my primary domain — instead it 301-redirects to my main domain renfei.net. I registered neil.ren because my English name is Neil, and when registration first opened, the three-letter fei.ren wasn’t available yet; by the time it opened, someone else had taken it, so I never made .REN my primary domain.