You may have noticed that you’re reading this under a new (domain) name. The old name “Slight Future” lasted some 14 months and has now been fully replaced by “Ctrl blog” (“Control blogl.”)
“Ctrl” is a bit of a mangled letter soup, but most PC users should be familiar with it and will have a visual reminder of the spelling on their keyboards. The mobile web may be growing, but at least for this blog: most visitors use desktop screen-sized devices.
I feel the new name covers the topics I usually discuss quite nicely, as most of my writing whether it be tutorials or opinions are about controlling technology in one way or the other.
I wasn’t ever super-stoked about the name Slight Future, which was somewhat quickly chosen to resolve ambiguity with the previous name and South Korean pop-singers who’d suddenly begun dominating the search result pages. I wasn’t happy about the previous name before that either, so having a name which I like is a nice change.
A short domain name definitely performs better on search result pages and many other situations where the address is [partially] displayed. A shorter address allows for more of the URL to be seen by people before it gets clipped. For the same reason I’ve dropped the “www.” prefix, even though I consider it an accessibility aid as everyone will immediately recognize it as a web address.
Lately, the same thing that happened with the old Aeyoun name also started happening with the Slight Future name. If you searched for “slight future”, you’d often see results for “light future” instead. I believe that the new name should be better protected against this type of effect as its pretty far from any other English words at least in terms of Levenshtein distance.
I did get to register daniel.blog during the landrush period for the new .blog top level domain. However, Daniel Rey López got the domain as an employee perk. I could have paid 200 EUR extra during the sunrise period to secure the domain, but I believe I’m happier with ctrl.blog than sticking my own name on the blog.
I’ll share some notes about redirecting traffic from the old domain and the complete reorganization of most URLs on this blog in a few days time.