I changed the domain for this blog. The old domain redirects to the new domain so if you’re following this blog you don’t have to make any changes to your bookmarks, RSS feeds or email.

I started this blog using the domain mitchw.blog in late 2022, when I switched from Wordpress to Micro.blog. I didn’t want to use my full name on social media because at that time I was working for a company that was sensitive about being associated with potentially offensive speech. “Mitch” and “Wagner” were already taken on .com and .net and all other reasonable top-level domains, and I couldn’t think of anything cute that I liked, so I went with MitchW. I used the .blog top-level-domain because I was swept up in the fervor for the revival of good old-fashioned blogging.

I quickly got tired of that domain, but couldn’t be bothered to change it. I couldn’t think of anything I liked better. And I couldn’t even figure out why I didn’t like the domain mitchw.blog.

I had an insight recently, from a throwaway comment John Gruber made on his podcast The Talk Show (I think it was this episode with Stephen Robles): He said he doesn’t like the word “blog.” And I realized I don’t like the word either. I love blogging, but I don’t like the word “blog.”

Also, I don’t ever think of myself as “MitchW.” I think of myself as Mitch, Mitch Wagner and could even go with a Wagner domain name if it was available (which is was not).

I already owned mitchwagner.com, so I changed the blog domain to that. I followed these instructions. In my case, I already had a website hosted at that domain at Micro.blog, and so I didn’t have to mess with DNS settings; I just had to follow the instructions at the preceding link to point the domain to my blog instead of to my other website.

The whole thing took just a few minutes and was no trouble at all.

In addition to the blog, I had used mitchw.blog as my handle on Bluesky. I changed that to mitchwagner as well. This broke all the links to my previous Bluesky posts, but I don’t care about that.

Then I changed my ActivityPub username to @mitch@mitchwagner.com. Now, I can better take advantage of a feature of Micro.blog where I can read and reply to Mastodon and Bluesky responses from the Micro.blog timeline; people on both those services will see responses as coming from names extremely similar to the ones I use on those respective services (though not identical, they’re close enough).

And speaking of domain names: Twenty-some years ago, I saw a woman named Micki Krimmel used the blog domain mickipedia.com. As soon as I saw, I thought, “That’s brilliant!” And “Damnit! I wish I’d thought of that!” I didn’t follow her lead and use the name Mitchipedia because it would seem like stealing. Finally, two years ago, I thought, “Why don’t I just ask her if she has a problem with it?” And she was gracious about the whole thing and I changed my tumblr handle to mitchipedia but stopped short of using it as my primary blog domain because it seemed like too much of a commitment, like getting a tattoo (something else I once decided to do but then decided against it at the last minute and still have not followed through on). Also, the .com and .net domains were already taken and I grabbed .org but I feel like I’m not a .org. Yes, I overthink this kind of thing.