cat about.txt

A domain that answers its own question

Run a whois on this domain and it tells you: status: ok. Read the name out loud and it tells you something else. That pun is the whole reason this page exists.

The address is a small piece of internet trivia made real. .it is Italy's country domain, and underneath it the registry reserves a set of geographic second-levels for the Italian provinces — .is.it among them, for Isernia. Nobody can own is.it outright, which is exactly why a third-level name like forest.is.it can exist beneath it.

There's a catch, though: a .is.it domain can only be registered by someone in the EEA, or the EU or Italy, and I'm in the United States. So this one came the long way around. A friend I've known for many years over the internet — Toby, in Austria — registered it on his side of the Atlantic and handed it to me. We met online, but it's a real friendship; he's came and visited me, we've gone fishing, etc. So the site is a forest, living in an Italian province, registered by a best friend in Austria, and run from a bedroom in New Jersey. None of it would exist without him. Thanks Toby!

The stream

The forest you're looking at is real and live, 24 hours a day. It comes from a permanent camera run by Danish wildlife photographer Morten Hilmer. This site just frames it. All credit for the view is his.

The stack

There's no server here. The page is a single static file served from GitHub's edge, encrypted with a Let's Encrypt certificate, pointed at by a handful of DNS records. It costs nothing to run and there's nothing to maintain — which feels right for something whose only job is to be a window onto some trees.

forest.is.it