For the past year or so I’ve been constantly annoyed with the blackapache.net domain. Not because I think it’s awful, but because it’s such a PITA to say to people. Here’s an example of a very common conversation:

Them: “Do you have an email address?” Me: “Yes, it’s ‘oh-oj’ …” Them: “ooohhhh-jaaaaaay” Me: “at black … apache …” Them: “at back scratchy …” Me: “No no! ‘black’ bee-ell-ay-see-kay” Me: *thinking* - sh*t, if they’re struggling with ‘black’ this next bit is going to be fun. Them: “Oh BLACK! Yes …” Me: “apache …” Them: “bless-you!” Me: *sigh*…

You can see where this is going. While the above example might be slightly exaggerated, the point is still valid. At the same time I was a little tired at the length of the original URI had chosen.

For some reason I felt the need to put the ‘rant’ subdomain in to give people an idea of what the content was going to be like. Hence, rant.blackapache.net was born (the origin of blackapache as a name is related to the combination of my favourite song and my wife’s favourite song).

It served it purpose rather well and over time it’s managed to get linked here and there and thankfully has around 100 readers on a regular basis! I have learned a great deal from both researching my posts and from reading the comments that others have left. It has been a great experience.

My plan now is to take it up a notch. Write more often, try and get more technical, cover a wider range of things, etc. But I didn’t want the same URL. I wanted something fresh, shorter and a bit more indicative of what it is that this site is about.

So last night I bought a new domain and migrated all of the content over. Everyone please welcome buffered.io. Those geeks out there will hopefully appreciate the meaning and agree that it’s not a bad indication of what goes on here.

In the grand scheme of things the new URI doesn’t really mean much other than the links will be a little shorter and both the site and the emails hanging off it will be a little easier to say :)

I’ll be keeping the blackapache.net domain and all of the old content will redirect to the new URI and point to the appropriate articles. Hopefully after a period of time the respective links will be updated in the search engines and people will fix up their bookmarks.

Those of you who subscribe via RSS shouldn’t have to do anything. The feeds were running through Feedburner which has been updated to reflect the new address. Having said that, if anyone has any issues then please let me know as soon as possible.

As always your feedback, both good and bad, is greatly appreciated. Thanks!