I hope you’ve noticed that when you access firstdigest.com (or a link associated with this domain) you’re getting redirected to ipnet.xyz. No, I didn’t got my blog hacked.
I’ve decided to go ahead with another domain for this blog.
If you ever had to curiosity to read the About page (yes, it needs badly an update), you’ve seen that around 2007 when I bought firstdigest.com, the plan was to use it for a kind of review blog (travel, food, social life, etc.) FirstDigest (inspired by Reader’s Digest name) seemed like a good name and to be fully honest was the only one free and for an acceptable fee.
Remember this was pre-ICANN-era generic top-level domains and there were limited readable names for .com or .net.
That project went well (please feel the sarcasm). It was mostly because I had no idea what to write about and no time to do proper research. Instead I was more drawn to write about topics that I deal with everyday in my network engineer life.
Since I had the domain already, I said why not to use it. The name never fit the topics on this blog, but I’ve made the best of it. And here is 10 years later, I’ve decided to change it. I was thinking for a long time to adapt the domain name to the topics of this blog, but I never took the time to do it.
The difference between 2007 and now is that you have other possibilities due to the surge of new TLDs. However, premium is premium and names like net [dot] something is still expensive. This is why I’ve came with IP Networks (ipnet). Looking at various TLDs, the .xyz seems to be good one. If it was good enough for Alphabet (aka. Google), it sure does the thing for me. Still, it may have some people raise an eyebrow wondering, holy cow what is .xyz, but at least the domain name match the topics of this blog.
Due to the large number of links pointing back to firstdigest.com and because most of my visitors are coming via a link posted somewhere, I’m keeping this domain alive with a 301 Permanent Redirect to ipnet.xyz. I think I’ll get some impact from search engines like Google, but eh, I’m not that keen on statistics. Is not like I’m making a living out of this blog :)
Now to get back and write something which is actually interesting for the tech savvy ones out there.
