The Thinking Blog Dot Com
Finally! The Thinking Blog Dot Com. Your daily dose of fuel to keep thinking has its proper domain name now. It's a whole new beginning and it feels like I'm starting to blog all over again. First off, I would like to thank everyone who is reading this and constantly encouraging the fitness of our gray matter. I've made so many new friends around the World through this blog that I possibly could not have imagined when I first started.Uber-Special thanks goes to Jim Keenan of Cre8Buzz, Brian Shannon of Alpha Trends, Alex Perez-Prat of Work Without Boss, Paula Mooney of Paula Mooney's Musings, Roy Cassas of Musings and Somesuch, Olerato Salepito of O Salepito, and last but not least, Hillary Bowden for their financial support. This would be a dream without you!
Domain and Hosting. Since I'm a big fan of MyBlogLog, I decided to go with Yahoo! for the new address. It was a logical choice for a secure and reliable domain name registrar and it had very reasonable yearly prices. Moreover, it was a provider that my bank trusted for online transactions as well. Any other option seemed unnecessary. By the way, I also got a new email address with it: ilker@thethinkingblog. As for the hosting, I still couldn't decide on which plan to go for at the moment. I should take one small step at a time. So, yes this blog is still hosted with Blogger and I made the domain switch easily by following the instructions on their help page. I'm not sure if everything is functioning smoothly but time will show the results.
The next step. This is where I run into trouble. What's next? Has anyone done this before? I have no idea where to start but immediately I rushed into thinking that I need to change all the links to the new address. Today I will spend most of my time looking through my old posts and fixing all the internal links. I'm not sure how Technorati will react but I remember reading somewhere that the rank doesn't change if I keep hosting on Blogger. When I headed there to claim my new domain address, I saw that all the posts written after I claimed my blog started showing up even if they were linked to the old address. For the posts written before that, I guess I need to go door to door asking for a fix.
Friend in need. There is SO much I need to do and you can help me get through this. Please save some time by changing the links on your blogroll and posts to the new address. Simply replace "http://ilkeryoldas.blogspot.com" with "http://www.thethinkingblog.com/" and we are done. Otherwise, I have to come looking for each one of the 500+ blogs that link to the old address! I also noticed that a change in the address requires a new bookmarks as if there is a new blog in town. Again I'm asking for a favor from you to Fave the new address in Technorati and Add to your bookmarks in Del.icio.us. The only place where there will be almost no effect is with the RSS subscriptions. Actually, I was thinking of changing the Feedburner name but I didn't want to risk loosing all the readers by doing something wrong. Perhaps you will only be affected when I edit the links in the old entries. I think they might show up as a new post in the feed reader. Bear with me as I'm making the transtition. Hopefully, everything will be settled in a few days.
Anything else I forgot to do? Please let us know in the comments. It would be a useful resource for others who would like to make the same switch and I can make a post outlining your valuable advice. Also don't hesitate to contact me if there is any way I could return you the favors, be it voting, linking, and almost anything else!
I guess this would be the right time to say that The Thinking Blog is here to stay. Get ready for some serious brainstorming following these few calm days. If you thought what we had over the past few months was something, wait till you see the 100+ posts I have in the drafts. It will knock your socks off, everyday!
Keep thinking.
