In April of 2008, the people responsible for the Jack Daniel's trademark contacted me and asked me to stop using the name "ILoveJackDaniels", and URL "ilovejackdaniels.com", for my site, and to change the logo.
As a result, I moved the site to its new home here at AddedBytes.com.
At some point, I will write up some of the issues associated with moving a domain with this much traffic, especially bearing in mind that the old domain will not be redirected to the new domain indefinitely.
The idea of changing the name and domain of the site had of course crossed my mind before. Although I don't sell my services through this site, it still reflects on me professionally and the old name, while highly memorable, didn't exactly conjure up the sort of image I was after.
I liked the old name - it was personal. It wasn't trying to be clever or stuff keywords where they don't belong. It was interesting and memorable, which are both rare qualities in domain names. I will especially miss giving my old email address over the phone.
Ultimately, while the thought had on several occasions crossed my mind to change, I had decided against it. As it turns out, the universe had already made its mind up that I should move, and so here we are, on a shiny new domain with a shiny new site.
I appreciate all of the support, suggestions and gestures of solidarity. My thinking now is fresh domain, fresh start. Normal posting service will shortly be resumed. Thanks for all of your support (and long live Added Bytes)!
2 Comments
In the last week or so, ILoveJackDaniels.com started returning 404 errors. I had a link to your great Regex cheat-sheet, but I never saw a permanent redirect code from my link-checker. I wonder if the link was broken for the last year? Or was the site mirrored at both domains?
#1, Chuck Houpt, 10 December 2009. Reply to this.
To possibly answer my own question: I suspect the reason I never saw permanent redirects is because I was linking directly to the cheat-sheet PNG image, not the page (just a link, not an embedded image). From the Internet Archive it is clear that the site's pages was redirecting for a long time, but maybe images on the site were not redirected.
#2, Chuck Houpt, USA, 17 December 2009. Reply to this.