malvasia bianca

I’m beginning to feel like my choice of URL for this blog is hopelessly unstylish. Back in the dawn of time, I used my job for e-mail and web pages: carlton@math.stanford.edu, http://math.stanford.edu/~carlton/, and so forth. But when I realized that I was going to be leaving academia, that strategy obviously became inappropriate, so I grabbed bactrian.org. Which is definitely a good move; honestly, everybody should grab a domain name for their own use.

I still stuck with the ~carlton at the end of my home page; the theory was that Liesl or Miranda might want to start using the domain at some point, too. Which is a possibility that I might still want to allow; but there really aren’t a lot of people using URLs with tildes in them these days, are there? I suppose I could just get rid of the tilde, or go to something like http://carlton.bactrian.org/ – after all, the ‘www.’ part isn’t exactly pulling its weight, either. I’ll stick with http://www.bactrian.org/~carlton/ for the time being, though – there’s no compelling reason to change, and honestly I don’t spend enough time on my home page to really care how people access it.

The more blogs I read, though, the stranger the URL for my blog looks. And I did get a separate domain name for my go bibliography; I’m spending more time on this blog than I did on that bibliography, and I’m not planning to stop any time soon; why not get a domain name for it, too?

Here’s the current (tentative) plan; no ETA for carrying it out.

• The current URL will continue to work, presumably being forwarded to the new one, so there won’t be a need to change RSS feeds to point to the new location.
• I’ve just bought the domains malviasiabianca.{com,org}. I’m planning to use the latter, with the former redirecting to it.
• While my fingers still habitually stick www. into a URL, I’m pretty sure that’s going the way of the dodo. Plus, just typing ‘malvasiabianca’ is already enough work. So the official URL for this blog will become http://malvasiabianca.org/.

Another possibility would be to use malvasiabianca.bactrian.org. But that’s way too much typing; and malvasia.bactrian.org sounds wrong to me, too. Besides, domain names are cheap enough. Anyways, I think my mod_rewrite skills should be enough to carry all of this out without too much work.