Stephen Rees's blog

There was an opportunity recently to secure the newly released top level .blog address. Yes, this did cost money, but more than any other motive, I wanted to secure my name as I am only one of several bloggers with the same name. The older, longer URL still works, of course, but I will be printing a new set of business cards with the shorter, more easy to use one.

The process was pretty easy but there were some odd moments. As soon as I got the email from WordPress that told me I could reserve the name I did so. And then seemed to get reminders for exactly the same name several times over the next few weeks. And even when I was told that no-one else had bid on the name and it was now mine, I did not get the email telling me how – and when – to set it up. I started that process this week and found I also have to pay an annual fee to use it. Having done that I got a set of instructions telling me to reset DNS settings on the server. Which is, of course, WordPress. Oddly enough even though there was a list of instructions for all the other hosting services, there wasn’t any link to WordPress. So an email had to be sent to the “happiness engineers”. But I still have to refresh connections with Facebook and Google+.

What I have also noticed this week is the complications that seem to have set in with VanCity, which has installed new software – which required them to go off line for a few days – and still doesn’t seem to be working very well. I thought computers were supposed to make things easier!