Questions covered (scroll down for sequential answers):

• Why the name “emfred”?
• When was emfred.com created?
• Why was emfred.com created?
• Where was emfred.com created?
• Is emfred.com a business?
• (Why choose a “.com” name then?)

The name “emfred” is derived from my full name:

Eric M. Frederickson
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e    m  fred

Its brevity was inspired by the UNIX tradition of naming command-line programs in the most concise way possible (e.g. “cp” for “copy files”, “sed” for “stream editor”, et cetera).

The first version of emfred.com went online in the summer of 2023. Looking back through my version control repository for the site’s code, the first commit¹ is dated July 28th of that year, and carries the message:

initial commit; site partially done

As of June 2025, the site’s repository has accumulated over 350 commits (all written by me (Eric) of course).

As a way for me to share my creative output with friends, and, hopefully, friendly strangers as well.

Back home, from where I recently moved away, and will end up eventually.

No: emfred.com has no corporate purpose or associations. In fact, I’ve intentionally designed the website to be as far from the corroded aesthetics of corporate, ad-riddled websites as possible.

Note, however, that although emfred.com is not a linked to a company, I do personally offer freelance services such as music production and composition that I describe in the /services section. (These offerings came into being well after the site’s creation, and pushing them is not the site’s primary objective.)

“.com” is the most widely recognized and reputable-sounding domain name suffix, probably due in large part to the “dot-com boom”² of the 1990’s. Hence, it tantalizes creators of personal websites (like this one) to use it even though the website they’re making isn’t for a company. In the contemporary collective conscious, “.com” just means “website”, so it’s a good choice for your domain name suffix (a.k.a. TLD) regardless of what your content will be.