From “The secrets of the world’s happiest cities“:
As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert. The more connected we are to family and community, the less likely we are to experience heart attacks, strokes, cancer and depression. Connected people sleep better at night. They live longer. They consistently report being happier.
Originally this site used the hfz.io domain. I bought the domain over at Gandi.net, which I found to have the lowest price for .io (39US$ at the time). The problem came a few months later when I tried to renew the domain.
As it turned out, .io domains could not be renewed at any time. Instead, domain owners are given the chance to renew starting from one month before the domain expires. I understand that there are some business reasons why this is so, but this is annoying from a customer standpoint. The limited renewal time window is worrisome because there’s a possibility that I miss the notification; this had happened before with an old domain of mine. Additionally, the domain can only be renewed for a maximum of two years in the future. This makes it a bit more complicated if I want to keep the domain for a long time.
Then I realized that I had an unused .im domain laying around, and decided to use that instead. .im’s are cheap, can be renewed at any time, and is just as short.
The domain change process itself was relatively simple. First, as I’m using Webfaction, it was easy to point a new domain to the same WordPress install. Add a simple DNS change and done. After waiting a day for the DNS to propagate, both hfz.im and hfz.io pointed to the same WordPress install.
The Codex gives four options to do a URL change. The one with wp-config.php is pretty simple, but it hardcodes values to the site and I didn’t want to do that.
The function.php method is silly (“So, you use your theme to change the URL of your site?”). It’s a bit hack-ish to load the site once and only once for the function to work, and make sure to delete it afterwards before someone loads the site and triggers the function again. I ended up using this method, though, because I knew what I was doing and the site was not getting any traffic during the process.
Afterwards, everything was running normally.
Just to be safe, I used Velvet Blues Update URLs plugin to seek-and-replace any instance of hfz.io to hfz.im. That’s about all I did to move my site to another domain name.
For a big site there might be more works that needs to be done. Like redirections, to ensure that the site’s search engine rank is preserved and that visitors with old bookmarks don’t get stranded. My site is a very young, low-traffic site, though, and traffic is not important. It’s likely that this site will have to start over SEO-wise, but that’s fine.
Fred Meyer raised a good argument about the need for a WordPress writing style guide:
Words have power: power to define new users’ impression of the seriousness of WordPress and its creators; power to alleviate users’ frustration or aggravate it; power to provide information or smugly withhold it. WordPress’s current written content sporadically disregards that power, making WordPress seem like a cheaper, more irritating, and less well-executed project than it really is.
As a non-native English user, I’d also like to echo what Zé Fontainhas wrote on the comment area:
I have nothing at all against colloquialisms (or americans, for that matter), but limiting the style to a particular subculture of a particular country makes localization (and not just translation), incredibly hard. Each of our countries’ subcultures may not be divided along the same lines, for one, and any translation always ends up being either unnatural (and hence irrelevant) or, even worse, specific to a very limited group.
Overall, I like that this discussion exists in the first place. To me this signals WordPress’s maturity.
Hafiz Rahman 