Having heard horror stories about the process of registering a domain name in the Living Museum, I have to say that I managed to register a new .it domain quite easily. I did this though my website hosting company, but this still meant that I had to print out, sign, and send a document to the Italian NIC which is down in Pisa.
Not so long ago, it was necessary to fax the LAR – domain registration document – to the NIC and this process, apart from being a somewhat antiquated, often resulted in problems caused, in the main, by illegible faxes. Now the Italian internet domain registration authority has arrived in the 20th century (Yes, I do mean 20th), in that instead of faxing stuff to them you can actually send them a copy of the required document by email (!) in PDF format. Only, you have to have signed the document before you can send it off. This means you need a scanner, which I do have, but which is not in use at the moment. So, to resolve this slight problem and to avoid going to a local stationers to fax the documents for me, I got out my DSLR and photographed the two page document, edited the photos and placed them in an Open Office document which I then converted to PDF, whilst taking care not to exceed the 500kb limit for the file size of the PDF file.
Stop reading, start speaking
Stop translating in your head and start speaking Italian for real with the only audio course that prompt you to speak.
Must have all worked OK because my nice shiny new domain was active in around 24 hours. Not too bad and, surprisingly, my photographed, edited, converted-to-PDF application did not cause problems.
The domain I registered? englishisin.it – ‘english is in it’ – which is quite snappy I think.
