Every once in a great while I need to make significant changes to this website. As usually happens, due to circumstances beyond my control, I had to make some of the new changes for 2012 much sooner than I had expected.

Old Domain

The personal domain that I had for 15 years will be renewed for one more year before being abandoned for good.

The .ws domain started off at $5 USD per year when the .com domain was really expensive (now $15 USD per year). When the renewal price jumped to $25 USD per year, keeping an underused domain that no longer fits my current business strategy became an annual expense I no longer wanted to pay for. Becoming a profitable business requires eliminating as many expenses as possible.

After setting up the new subdomain (see below), a 301 redirect was put into the .htaccess file and the old content was deleted. I’ll be renewing the old domain for another year as Google recommends that you keep control of your old domain for at least six months to facilitate a smooth transition between old and new websites. Most of the search results are pointing to the new subdomain now and you can still click through the old links.

New Subdomain

I was getting 80+ spam comments per day with Asian logograms after publishing a blog post about Rick Santorum. Who knew that he had so many Asian supporters making and selling fake luxury handbags?

After two weeks of cleaning out the spam folder, I turned off comments to that particular blog post. (I also started turning off comments for other blog posts that were getting too many spam comments.)  Everything was fine for several days, and then I couldn’t write any blog posts with the default editor. My WordPress installation was broken and maybe hacked. Not a good situation.

Since I was planning to move the website off the old domain to a new subdomain on the domain that hosted my author website, where I also have my writing blog on a different subdomain, I decided to go ahead with that part of the plan. WordPress made this ridiculously easy. Exported the content from the old installation, set up the new installation and imported everything in. After some minor adjustments and tweaks, I had the website running on the new subdomain within a few hours.

Please update your bookmarks with the new address: http://ouaa.cdreimer.com

Cleaning Up

I’ll be cleaning up the website as I compile the blog postings into free ebooks over the next year. That’s roughly 500 pages of material over a 15 year span, some of which was written a few years before the word “blog” became common place. The blog posts I write today are 500 words or less. Some of the older blog posts rambled on for 3,000 words. I might keep them intact or break them out into separate blog posts. Everything will be tagged and categorized correctly.

If you find a problem, send email to webmaster at cdreimer dot com.