--- title: Blog Has A New Address date: 2008-04-04T11:09:55-05:00 author: Patrick McKenzie (patio11) permalink: "/2008/04/04/blog-has-a-new-address/" categories: - Uncategorized --- Its time for a little spring cleaning and I’m (finally) clearing out the cobwebs around here.  As a result, I’ll be moving my blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress installation, changing the theme a bit, and reorganizing things substantially.  Your old bookmarks and links will continue to function because WordPress is redirecting the old URL to here, but I’d suggest you update them to [https://www.kalzumeus.com](https://www.kalzumeus.com/) anyhow. Exceptionally diligent readers will remember that Kalzumeus was the code name for my webapp which did not end up actually making it to production.  Sadly, I just got too busy with the day job to get it out the door, and I lost faith in the business model.  Plus tweaking Bingo Card Creator has given me plenty of opportunities to play around with Ruby on Rails under the hood.  I swear, even in the all-Java, all-the-time world of my day job I find myself dreaming in Rails (as you would be, too, if you had just put in a 60 hour workweek doing a partial reimplementation of ActiveRecord and having to fight the environment every step of the way to make it happen). Anyhow, I am generally pretty poor at naming things.  Kalzumeus is hard to spell and not exactly the most natural of words, but I picked in it a fit of self-indulgence from a character I wrote into a story many years ago.  He was a sarcastic, intelligent, and slightly hyperactive dragon, and makes as good a mascot as any.  More importantly, he is the very first bit of IP I came up with while old enough to understand what the word meant, and I have a little bit of nostalgia for the moment of creation.  I think I’ll get a picture done of him for the masthead…  For branding purposes, eh, I expect most people will continue to find this blog through bookmarks or Googling variations of “Patrick the bingo card guy” for the time being.  If you’re just starting out your uISV journey, do as I say and not as I do here: obscure in-jokes which are not easy to spell are probably not the best of ideas. This reminds me: I have had the papers lying around for incorporating Kalzumeus LLC for a while but have never gotten around to it.  Ahh well, one of these days when I have a reason to do so… (Speaking of which: I finally found out how to **move a blog off of WordPress** without screwing up all your readers and search engine juice.  First, purchase a domain of your choice.  Second, point the domain’s DNS at ns1.wordpress.com , ns2.wordpress.com, ns3.wordpress.com for about a day.  Third, go to your WordPress control panel, click upgrade, click domain, click add the domain, pay WordPress $10 through Paypal, and then they will set up the new domain as an alias of your WordPress.com blog.  This isn’t quite what you want.  Go back to the domain panel and click the selection to use the new domain as primary, which will redirect yourblog.wordpress.com to it.  You’re now paying WordPress $10 a year for, essentially, a 301 redirect from your old blog to your new blog, and for blog hosting, but you can cut them out of the second half of the equation.  After you’ve announced the change and waited a month, cut your DNS settings to the hosting provider of your choice, where you have a WordPress blog set up with your old WordPress.com postings pre-loaded.  Nobody will even notice the second changeover, including Google.  Why would you want to do this? *
Control over the domain — you can now install whatever you want on it
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A somewhat more visually distinctive design than the oh-so-wonderful WordPress blue
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Branding, if you’re into that
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Gets rid of WordPress AdSense ads on your site
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You can commercialize your site, if you’re into that stuff
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You can integrate your blog with other content on the same domain.  I’m planning on doing some fun stuff later, after I get the new site changed over and looking pretty (likely at least a month from now).