John Jago

Choosing good personal domain names

Today I changed the domain of my Chinese language blog from xiaobiji.co to gaozhang.co. Silly me, or perhaps not so silly me, bought the former for many years into the future. I hate sitting on unused domains, but at least the redirects will be up for a while!

I did this now so that I don’t have to change it in the future. The previous name was “Little Notes” which could eventually not be what I want to write about. It’s kind of limiting. The new domain is simply my Chinese name, so as my life changes, I’ll have a semi-permanent home for writing about whatever I’m interested in at the time, without having to worry about the branding.

Along with this, I changed all the emails of my domains to follow the same pattern, since it was becoming a hassle to remember what I used where. Now it’s always jc@example.com or gz@ for Chinese language content.

Why jc instead of jj? I hate how the two j looks together. It doesn’t look clean. This is actually another reason why I didn’t like xiaobiji too much. The iji is just so hard to read.

I also remembered the jc+spam@example.com trick, which allowed me to cut down the number of emails I have to manage on each domain to one.

I’ve designed a (I hope) future proof way to divide up my online content and emails so that I don’t have to think about it anymore, and instead I can focus on creating!

This is part of a few things I’m doing to stop having to waste time thinking about things that are, at the end of the day, completely trivial.