Over the last few weeks I’ve been heads down doing research to identify new, interesting, unusual town names. And because the focus of Dufur.com is to feature town names that say something about your personality, not every odd town name is a good fit (although Odd, West Virginia is on the list). For example, while Zzyzx, California, is funny, it’s not an oft-heard characterization of someone. “Wow, she’s really a zzyzx.” I don’t think so.

The other realization is that while some towns may be funny, and may actually describe a person well, they may be unlikely candidates for purchase. For example, how many copies of the “Stalker, Pennsylvania” shirt do you think I’d sell? Or Stoner, Colorado? On the other hand, some are just too good to pass up even though the marketability may be suspect… like Assawoman, Deleware, for example. Gotta have it.

I’m also taking a different approach to sequencing the development of new towns. To this point, I’ve wanted to develop about 10 towns in a given state before moving on to another state. The idea was to cover one area reasonably well so there would be choices for people in a given geography. Now, however, I think it’s more important to get the best names out there regardless of state. It means I may only have one or two towns for a given state for some time, but I will eventually make it back around to add more. So you’ll see more states covered sooner, but with fewer towns per state.

As always, if you know of some place you think I should feature, please let me know by sending me an email.

thanks,
Mike