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.

Own goal?

I think so. Not many companies have widely read websites named in tribute to their product. Even fewer have websites named in tribute to their product that get more traffic than their own product's website. Deciding to threaten them with legal action seems counter-productive. It offends the marketer in me.

And?

Ultimately, the big guys got their way, and ilovejackdaniels.com has had to go. I don't believe I've misused their trademark but I'm not in a financial position to argue.

I agreed to change the logo immediately (as you may have noticed if a regular visitor) as it was designed in tribute to the Jack Daniel's one and I can appreciate their concern that it was a bit too close to the original.

So the site has been rebranded and moved to a new domain, and the vast majority of the content (some of the out of date stuff has been removed along the way) is still here.

The Jack Daniel's folk have agreed to allow me to redirect the old domain to the new for a period of time (until at least June 2009), after which they intend to remove the redirection from the domain and break everyone's bookmarks and links. Always helpful.

On that note, I have been contacting major bookmarking sites asking them to update saved bookmarks once the site has been moved. I will post more about this later, once all the replies are in, and will be writing about the problems involved with moving the site as well, as I came across some interesting issues I'd not encountered before when moving smaller, less established sites.

Ultimately, I decided to try to treat the Jack Daniel's issue as an opportunity, rather than the disaster I initially thought it was. The whole thing gave me a great reason to clean up and rebrand the site, and I've had fun working on it for the last few weeks - so while this has been an unpleasant experience, it's not been entirely negative.

Added Bytes?

Added Bytes is new! It's essentially a replacement for ILoveJackDaniels.com, but (hopefully) without any trademark issues. Over time, I hope it will become as useful to the wider design, development and marketing communities as I always hoped ILoveJackDaniels.com was.

Still love Jack Daniel's?

Umm. I know it should taste the same - they've not changed the recipe after all. Yet for some reason, I find myself drawn to alternatives. After some hard work sampling several alternatives, I can so far highly recommend Bulleit and Woodford Reserve. Any suggestions for other drinks to try always gratefully accepted.

What about the cheat sheets?

No change to the cheat sheets, except that they now say "Available free from AddedBytes.com" instead of "Available free from ILoveJackDaniels.com". They're still free, and still released under a creative commons license.

Actually, thinking about it, there are a couple of changes. The entire series is being re-designed and re-released. All the originals are still available (and always will be) if you prefer them, but I think the new ones are smarter and cleaner. And more accurate.

To get the ball rolling, I have re-released the CSS, PHP, mod_rewrite (I reckon this is probably the most improved) and Regular Expressions cheat sheets. The others are all coming along nicely and I'll be re-releasing most of the rest over the next few weeks (some will be "retired" as they are out of date - they'll still be available, but won't be updated the the new format).

You can also now request new cheat sheets and vote for requests you'd like to see turned into real cheat sheets - see the right hand side of the cheat sheets section or any of the cheat sheets pages.

Was this always planned?

The idea of changing the name and domain of the site had 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.

Ultimately, while the thought had on several occasions crossed my mind to change, I had decided against it. 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.

In Conclusion then ...

The old domain is pointed here, and I will endeavour to keep that redirect up as long as I possibly can. The cheat sheets are all being re-released with a shiny new look, and you can request new ones. The site also has a shiny new look (which I'll write more about shortly). My new email address is dave@addedbytes.com. And I need a new nickname if I ever plan to use IRC again.