ericfaller.com Pithy Quote Goes Here

New URL

If you've visited this site recently, you've probably noticed that it has a new URL: http://ericfaller.com. It took a few years, but the old owner of the domain finally let it expire, and I was able to capture it before it got taken over by domain squatters.

I've finally moved everything over from efaller.com to ericfaller.com. It was more difficult than I expected for a couple of reasons:

• All of the pages on the old domain needed to point to the same pages on the new domain with a HTTP 301 "Moved Permanently" redirect. Google lets PageRank goodness flow through a 301 redirect, so you don't need to give up all of your PageRank points when you switch to a new domain. This means that you don't need to worry too much about updating all of the external links which point to your domain - they will still count for SEO purposes. It took a while to get the Apache mod_rewrite rules set up, but I think everything's redirecting appropriately now. It already appears to be working: a Google search for "eric faller" now has ericfaller.com as the #1 hit even though this site has only existed for a week. efaller.com still shows up in the results for some less-frequently crawled pages, but those should be updated soon.
• All of the internal links on the site needed to be fixed up. I have a lot of blog posts which link to other posts, so just copying the contents of the posts would leave them pointing to the old domain.  WordPress helped a little bit here - it was somewhat easy to update all of the internal links which were tracked by the WordPress CMS database. Unfortunately, that didn't cover everything because I had a surprising number of links not stored in the CMS. These links used hardcoded URLs instead. Whenever I edited some HTML by hand because it would be "easier and quicker", I often created a hardcoded URL, not thinking of the consequences. Each of these URLs required fixing by hand, though I did come up with an easy way to find all of the URLs: run 'wget -mirror' on the site to create a fully-crawled local copy, and then grep for the old domain.

The result of all this effort is that everything should just work and nobody should need to update any bookmarks which point to the old site. Even the RSS feed should theoretically still work fine, as long as your client knows how to follow 301 & 302 redirects.  However, if your RSS client keeps track of unread posts based on their URLs, you might suddenly get a bunch of new 'unread' old posts - rest assured that it should only happen once.