Blog Name

The Story of My Site’s Hopefully Last Name

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It’s another year so its time for me to overthink my blog setup. Alright maybe i dont do it “every” year however sometimes I do. Last year I changed my blog domain name to scottodyssey.com. I did it in 1, hopes of getting more google rank vs my obscure .ac domain. 2, to better reflect what i was thinking the direction of the site was. Flash forward to now and i am thinking of simplification. For years i have lived with the delusion of anonymity on this site by obscurity. I knew if someone wanted to find me they could. THe illusion felt good though! Now a days thinking abut personal branding using just my first name or a cute blog title isn’t what i am looking for. Instead i am simplying to scott.weinstein.me. I owned the domain name and used it for some email for years. I figured why not simplify.

The change for me is minor. The bigger changes are in how i use a bunch of other domain names behind the schemes for mail and other things that is bigger. My plan is to downsize and save some money on a few more expensive domains that i am under utilising. For some of them it may take a while to move all the things i use them for off of them. In the long run it likely makes sense.

This change allows me to have a simple domain that reflects me. It is my name after all.

www.scottodyssey.com will stick around mirroring my new URL for about 10 months until the domain expires.

Who Knew My URL Vanity Would Hurt Page Rank

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At the tail end of last year I retitled this blog. I did it to better represent what it had evolved into. It also represented future ventures I was going to have after moving. The other reason is I really didn’t have any sort of name for it. It was a sad state of affairs.

At the time I made a conscious decision not to change the URL of the site. That was because over the years I had changed it a few times and really got no value out of making the change.  I wrote about the history of this site here. I kept simply blog.Scott.ac. It represented one of my oldest domains and that this was a blog. I also liked the simple domain name scott dot something.  Since then I’ve had some time to read about how page ranking works in search engines. Apparently the fact that my site is a.AC domain significantly hurts searches. That is because it gets priority in the country localization that is the Ascension Islands. I generally write this blog for me however I do put some effort into it so having an optimized to get more views is a nice bonus. Who knew that the reason I liked the old URL was causing it to not get much visibility like it used to.

Having used the site title “A Scott Odyssey” for about seven or eight months now, I kind of like it. I relate a lot to the theme of the Odyssey, journey that I wrote more about it on this blogs “About Blog” page.

My Decor Choices in the New House, Oh I Mean The Blog Has a New Name

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That picture is the decor of the master bedroom in our new house. Ok maybe not. I am not sure if MC would be cool with that. I really did not ask. If she is then I might totally go for that minus the monolith. Unless the Monolith has a flat screen in it.

The main reason for this post is after I wrote my blog renaming post yet before it was published this Wednesday I came up with what I feel is a great name for this site, A Scott Odyssey.  I have had a few names over the years but have never focused on the name aspect of the site identity.  I have fixated more on the URL and as i have written before i kept coming back to what i am using today.  With my track record in waffling on names and URL’s i may change both in 6 months.

I think “A Scott Odyssey” is something fun and semi descriptive enough.  I also feel that it avoids all the things I highlighted I do not want to do when I renamed. On one hand writing about this is too much technical side of the blog itself however this is the minutia I OCD over. I like the Odyssey part and the play on words from 2001. Life is an Odyssey and this move we are taking is the next Chapter in it. Here is to another 14 years of writing at “A Scott Odyssey”.

Expat Blogging Minus The Catchy Title

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One thing I want to continue to do is to blog internal about my experiences. Since our family is moving overseas it makes logical sense to write a lot more about being an expat and all the new things were going to be doing in England. In researching our overseas move I did a lot of searching the Internet for blogs to follow of Americans living in Ireland and England. Some of those blogs have been pretty entertaining and informative. Many more of them were either sites left unattended with no recent posts or just dead links. On one hand I was surprised I found a bunch of active blogs. On the other hand  all the sites I came across referenced all the other sites highlighting how small of a community that was.

One thing I decided I did not want to do was change the name of my blog to some catchy phrase to note that I am an American and I’m in England. from all the blog reading I have done I know that’s the thing to do however I’m going to buck the trend.

I might still rename the site since Blog @ Scott.ac just isn’t that catchy. Since I no longer use my powerz.org domain name the old title of the site “Powerpedia” is no longer applicable. I did love that name however. Going to look for any previous posts over the last 14 years that explained powerz. I must’ve wrote about that if not I will need to. I’m thinking of a name something like Scott-o-Pedia? I am not sure. I’m open to ideas as long as they’re not catchy on American in London phrase of some sort.

For Those Who Actually Subscribe to this Blog…

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It turns out that I have people subscribed to this blog’s Feedburner Feed.  It was not many however more than I thought.  My challenge is I previously deleted most of my Google Accounts.  Turns out one of those was the account that controlled my Feedburner account.  Opps. I liked Feedburner because I could change domain names and still have the subscription feed be up to date.  Over the years I have changed his blog’s URL a bunch of times.  Surprisingly I would end up back to the original URL that I started with.  That is what I use today.

After 14 years and I keep coming back to the same site name and URL I figure I am not likely to change the URL to something else that is that much better.  I might try but I know deep down I should just give up and not try.  If I do that I do not need to maintain this feed that no longer represents the name of the site anyway.

If you do happen to use my RSS feed please update your feed to follow blog.scott.ac/feed.  The old feed “should” be telling you to redirect to the new one however I cannot test that since I am cashing the old content.  I will get around to testing later.  Thus this public service announcement about making the change if you do want to keep following me and you are not getting your updates from Facebook or Twitter.

Hosting Changes

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All my thinking about changing domain names led me to another bigger change. For the past few years I have been using wordpress.com to post my blog. Before that I mainly hosted on TypePad for years. in between I played around with movable type, and WordPress. In 2009 my started using WordPress.com it was free, and they offered services cheaper then TypePad if I wanted any. At the time I wasn’t walking a lot and the easy dollars or so year just for bloging seemed like a lot from TypePad. With my recent revival to writing I was making changes to my site. Unfortunately any real changes that I wanted to make on wordpress.com would require several add-on purchases. At that point I looked at the price of a true hosting provider. I signed up for one, only to cancel the trial account within an hour. I then continue to waffle and signed up for another hosting provider. The second provider bluehost.com hey pretty decent rate for a 2 year package. It was pretty simple to set up all my content on the new provider and add both my new domain name and my old one to point to that site.

For the most of the life of my blog I’ve been on TypePad, but I have over the years used several different hosting providers on and off. In recent years using Google apps and other web services for free or small fees having my own hosted account didn’t seem like it was worth it. By simply decreasing my Google apps for business mail quota I was able to go from the paid plan to the free plan. That cost savings alone offsets the price of the new hosting plan per year, so I figured why not give it a try. I like the additional flexibility I can have with my own website. I am already playing around with media wiki again, and some WordPress plug-ins that I could not get on the hosted account.

Having my own FTP account should also come in handy. I can remember at least two or three instances in the past several months that I’ve needed it, most recently two weeks ago.

Now I just have to see if I continue writing to make these changes worth it. I told MC yesterday I would love to be able to carve out 30 minutes night to just sit and write. I always found that pretty therapeutic to do that. It helped me unwind from the day. I just haven’t done it in years. Of course it’s my luck that I decide to really get into this again right before I have a baby. That means pretty much no free time at all. On the flip side it would be nice to have time to document what the baby does, and other milestones. I think years from now that would be nice to have. I always said I like to write for me.

I will see how it goes over the next few weeks.

Does The Domain Name Really Matter?

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Over the years I have used several email addresses and different domain names for websites. In recent years I have been using the powerz.org domain. It was unique and relatively cool 10 years ago, but as I get older and I’m less concerned about anonymity on the Internet and more about people finding me I question if I should be continue to use it. My thoughts are if I’m going to have customized domain name, I might as well have one that represents me and not some silly reference to a TV show from the 90s. To be fair it’s an obscure reference to The Simpsons, and the Simpsons are still awesome however that still does not take away from the fact that any online presence should represent me.

I’m not sure what made me start thinking about this topic. It might have been because I am planning on buying a domain name for my baby when she is born. Let’s not go into the fact that MC thinks it’s not really necessary. She is right by the way, a baby does not need a domain name. I am getting it so down the road when she is old enough she will have one if she ever wants one. I did the same thing for my oldest niece and she actually is using it for her maill right now. But that’s off-topic.

My domain name usage has progressed from using Scott.ac for email and for a time my blog, to powerz.org. there’ve been other ones I’ve played around with for a short period of time. For example I used powerpedia.net for my blog for a while. I loved the Scott.AC domain, but the international domain name kind of confused people. I still have that one, and don’t plan on ever really giving it up. I just don’t want to use it for day-to-day stuff.

I am probably overthinking it. It’s most likely not that big of a deal to have an online presence with one domain versus another. I guess, well I kind of know I’m a perfectionist about this or stuff so I am compelled to go through the painful process of moving things to a new domain. As I started writing this post last week I was planning on moving everything from powerz.org to scottw.net. After getting opinions from several people (Jay was for the move, MC wasn’t) I decided to move ahead with moving my blog to the new domain. I will over time move my non personal mail to the new domain, but i will keep my personal powerz.org mail address that i have been using for years. MC likes the domain name even though it has no real meaning. It just sounds cool, so for personal use i will keep it. That decision made things pretty easy. If i did move my personal email address, the one used as my main google apps account I would have had a lot of work to migrate google services. Some stuff like Google Play purchases can’t be moved. Other things like google voice is a very painful thing to do.

In another post I will talk about the efforts from this weekend to migrate my blog to the new domain and a new hosting provider.

Changes Afoot

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Since I started blogging back in March of 2003 I have had several names for my blog. I have had even more URL’s for it. From the first site I had on blogger.com, to hosting with Gus, to the several iterations of the site on Typepad. When I switched the name of the blog to Powerpedia back in April 2005, I also changed the URL to it. I did this mainly because I needed to distance my blogging from my day to day internet usage such as email, and my personal website. This was because of pressure from my employer at the time who had bad opinions about blogging. Well I should clarify that it was the CEO only who had a problem. HR, and my boss the CTO didn’t really have an issue with it, but you do what the boss wanted. This was the time I started moving posts related to work to a private blog. New posts about work that were a bit detailed went onto the private site. Even after doing that I was still a bit paranoid about “the wrong people” finding my site I went to great lengths to get rid of any direct references that would identify me. I know that is not really possible but I tried my best.

More recently I have wanted to reverse the steps I had taken to be anonymous. It was recommended to me that by saying who I am may not be such a bad thing. For one more and more people are looking into peoples web presence when recruiting. That and over the past year I have been becoming more involved in online social sites. From Linkedin for work to Facebook for friends. And yes Match.com for dating. Having a presence on the web that says who I am and displays my opinions and ideas might be a good thing. Now it can still be a bad thing, but I have always considered myself an upfront and direct person anyway so why should I care if someone researches me and finds this blog anyway? The biggest concern is what an employer or prospective employer might think. I have been sanitizing what I talk about with regard to work for ages, and the stuff I do talk about I think shows off the cool and interesting projects and the honest trials and tribulations of my job.

That being said I have moved the URL for this site to a domain name that I use for most other uses on the web. The new site URL is blog.powerz.org/. This change also breaks all old links on www.powerpedia.net/ This was inevitable. The old site layout always forced any URL for the entire site to be www.powerpedia.net/blog/ I didn’t like the added sub directory blog, but I never realized what I did to force that. After looking into the domain mapping settings in the Typepad FAQ I figured out I had setup Powerpedia.net to be the domain for all of blogs and picture blogs on the service. I didn’t really care about that so I adjusted it so the new URL just pointed to this blog. Any other sites I have on Typepad (I can have 3) will get another URL. This means that the switch from www.powerpedia.net to blog.powerz.org also caused the directory structure of the site to change. That means no old links will work. I have setup a redirector so if you type in the old main URL of powerpedia.net it will redirect you, but I doubt that RSS feeds or other links will work. That is what I get for progress!

The name of the site will still remain Powerpedia, because I like the name and it is still catchy.

The next step for this site is for me to actually say who I am. I know it is no big mystery, but it is a big mental step for me to simply say my name in writing on this site and click post! That should happen soon, I hope.

Still Findable On The Web

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My cousin Synde said that she googled her family and up came my blog. I think that is pretty cool. But that poses a problem. I don’t use first and last names. I may have used their first names in one past and last name in another one. if that isn’t it I don’t know how they would come up on my blog. I try not to be that conspicuous on the site. She was surprised that I had a blog. I could swear that I told her about it. Her husband knew about it, but I told him about it a long time ago.

I found the reference on the site that she found. I did use the last name once. I have since removed it. I am not a fan of posting last names on the site. Anonymity is nice for a bit. That being said I am making other changes to the site. I am slowly making the Powerpedia domain the only one for this blog. Why you ask? It’s whois information is hidden. Why is that important? I don’t want crazies knowing who I am. It is probably paranoid behavior, but I think it is worth the few bucks the anonymous registration cost.

I also changed the theme of the site back to my old theme. The new one was nice, but I didn’t like the fact that the center column with all my posts was not flexibly in size when you resized your browser. The posts were squished into a small space. My old (current) theme adjusts the posts based on the size of the browser window. Much nicer!