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Turn and face the strange

One of these days, once I hammer out the CSS disparities, I'm bringing a six-pack of change to my blog. For almost a year now, I've flirted with the idea of hosting it externally so that I could go ahead and own the domain. That idea kept playing hard-to-get, though, mainly by asking me if I wanted to blog for the rest of my days under my current nom du 'sphere.

Well, I finally got over my reticence in that regard, and took the plunge. It's not live yet, but soon, I'll be directing people to link me either at collinvsblog.net or the pithier (but more obscure) cgbvb.net. Both URLs work, but they bring up a version of my blog from a few days ago, as I hadn't realized the extent to which (a) I'd modded my old old version of MT here, and (b) the CSS on MT 3.2 differs from what I'm currently working with. And while I'm at it, and almost reflexively, I should add (c), which is that I'm going to make more extensive use of MT's code modules and maybe, gradually, throw down a redesign.

For the moment, you can keep your links pointing here, but eventually you'll need to migrate. My plan is to leave the old one here in place for a fair amount of time, so that I don't lose specific entry links (or rather, so that I don't end up killing the links of those kind enough to link to specific entries). And I'll be double-posting while I'm making the transition--well, except for this entry, which doesn't make a great deal of sense to double-post.

Comments

When I upgraded to 3.2, I didn't have the patience to futz with the new CSS, so I just dumped in the old templates and the old CSS. It worked (mostly); spared me the timesuck of a total redesign.

Yeah, I'm thinking that I may end up doing that, too. Especially since I printed out the CSS for 3.2 and it came out to around 22 pages. Not that my own couldn't use a little strategic pruning, but geez. I appreciate their dilemma (trying to be everything to everyone), but...

and it might be worth using a redirect on what becomes your old site (I can just see the note: "Collin is still fighting blog, just elsewhere")

So, since we have you all here at the same time, let me ask you a question:

When you address technology in your first year writing classes, do you treat it as something they use or make?

Collin,

If I may make a small recommendation when it comes to domains. And you may already know this. But .net is so 1990's academic -- from a broad cultural standpoint. Academics know about .net but the common wisdom in the domain world and amongst internet newcomers is .com. If you set up your blog on .net, I would be willing to bet that within a couple months, a domain squatter will have purchased both of those domains in the .com version and will have a link farm set-up under "your name."

I think culturecat has mentioned that she has both the culturecat.net and culturecat.com domains. I think that is wise -- to own both versions. Just a small piece of advice. Domains are only 5-8 dollars, as you know.

I'm not especially worried about domain squatting, which to my mind is also a 1990's strategy. What it doesn't account for is the degree to which, particularly with blogs, traffic comes laterally. I keep pretty good server stats, and so few of my hits arrive from a title search. Instead, they come from other blogs, or from homepages, etc. I get my share of wonky search queries, but in each of these cases, squatting a com or org version of my domain wouldn't gain them much.

When I domain my books (but first things first!), I probably will go ahead and cover the gamut, but as there's no real profit to be had from squatting an individual's blog domain, I don't feel particularly pressed to guard against it...

thanks, though...cgb

oh, and robert, you might want to ask that question over at kairosnews. i'd provide a little more context, since i'm assuming the question is motivated.

after i take apart the word "technology," my answer would be "yes," followed by an explanation that varies from one day to the next...

Collin,

Fair enough. I am just saying. I've seen a good number of academic blogs get squatted in the past year. Of course, the squatters often aren't very smart, either, when it comes to traffic, as you note. But given the scarcity of good .com's in the market, they're looking to milk that last penny of revenue.

Excellent. Thanks for the tip.