Domain change/Domainaufgabe

I am about to abandon the domain www.margaret-marks.com.
The weblog has long since been at https://transblawg.co.uk. Anyone who entered the old address was redirected.
I gather that not everyone has noticed the change, so I may lose some readers!

Die Domain www.margaret-marks.com wird bald nicht mehr funktionieren.
Das Weblog ist seit Oktober 2007 unter der URL https://transblawg.co.uk zu finden. Die alte Adresse leitete weiter.
Anscheinend war diese Änderung nicht allen Lesern klar, daher werde ich wohl ein paar Leser verlieren.

What I didn’t like about the domain name: firstly, it had the old-fashioned hyphen in the middle, and secondly, the email address was hard to dictate on the phone (scarcely any Germans can spell Margaret, which explains why I once went to New York without a credit card and was once in hospital with several dozen misprinted name labels).

6 thoughts on “Domain change/Domainaufgabe

  1. Are you giving up the domain completely, i.e. releasing it?

    Be prepared that quite likely a domaingrabber will snap it up immediately and quite possibly put some content on to it you wouldn’t want to be associated with.

    I’ve seen several cases of that recently.

    Sad.

    • That’s interesting, Armin. What kind of domain names were involved in these cases – names of individuals like me who aren’t well-known? People just exploiting the relative popularity of the URL? I suppose I could keep the domain and just stop using the email address. On the other hand, perhaps any serious visitors will realize that isn’t my usual material? (Ignore the last entry about the Arschloch).

      • Unfortunately yes.

        In one case it was “luckily” only the pseudonym of a blogger, but there’s some really nasty stuff under the domain now. Very NSFW, so I’m not mentioning the name. That domain was still listed on the blogroll of a number of blogs until very recently, it might still be lurking in the archives of quite a few blogs.

        The other case isn’t that bad and the content is luckily pretty tame (just a normal search and ads page as far as I can tell), but it’s the domain of my late mother. I tried to transfer it into my name, but unfortunately something went wrong somewhere and the domaingrabber got it first. As I said, luckily no NSFW content on that site, so I’m not too worried.

        In any case, as far as I know these domaingrabbers use automated scripts/tools to snap up any released domains. I guess they are speculating on Google still giving those sites an old pagerank (at least for a while) and all the existing links to the site.

  2. I had/have the same problem with michele-johnson.com. No German can possibly spell my first OR last name correctly, so I registered sprachzeit.de for the German market, which seems to work well on the phone. But I keep both, partially because I like to pretend it makes a difference at google.

    I’m with Armin. At domainfactory, it looks like it costs EUR 1.05 per month for an additional domain. This would certainly be be worth it to me to prevent domain grabbing/squatting. Maybe they have discount pricing if you pay the next 10 years in advance.

    • Well, I will think about it. As long as I stop using it for email. I don’t find it expensive, I was just lookinjg forward to getting rid of it completely. I’m at domainfactory too.

      • Hi Margaret,

        Just wanted to set the record straight: I myself am not at domainfactory :) I had just checked the whois info to see if your provider was possibly prohibitively expensive.

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