Some time ago I picked up some new personal domains, benward.me and bnwrd.me. I’d somewhat dismissed the .me TLD, but as time goes on and the opportunity to claim benward.com seems distant, I’ve decided to switch over.

I spend a certain amount of time thinking about what makes a good URL, and the old ben-ward.co.uk set-up has a number of problems.

• Country affiliation, even though I’m fairly nation non-specific at this point
• The United Kingdom registration system requires that the .uk TLD be prefixed by .co.
• The hyphen was clumsy, it’s difficult to pronounce to people, and people keep going to benward.co.uk instead, which isn’t me.
• The result out loud was “ben-dash-ward-dot-co-dot-uk”. Clumsy.
• People unfamiliar with the UK also hear the initial “.co” and assume that’s going to be “.com”, or “.com.uk”. It’s really not a very good domain name.

So, with my pair of .me domains in hand, I can gladly switch to a nice simple “benward.me” whenever someone needs it out loud, and confusion is forever gone.

benward.me and bnwrd.me are also siblings in the .me TLD, so when the latter is used for short URLs to the expanded, vowelled-up* version, the transformation will be smoother, too.

Of course, all the old domains work, hurtling you around the internets with 301 redirects. Apparently this means I won’t get destroyed by Google, too. We’ll see.

One other semantic change I made whilst doing all this tweaking, is to move this Scattered Mind blog onto blog.benward.me, dropping this whole micro nonsense. It turns out that ‘microblogging’ is… blogging. And so, the domain is fixed. Again, micro.ben-ward.co.uk will 301 redirect over to the new sub-domain, although it’s taking a little time for the DNS to update.

* Yes, I said ‘vowelled-up’. ‘vowelled-down’ is going to be my new way of describing Web 2.0 branding.