About a year ago, I decided I’d put a new face on my crusty old web site and start blogging. You’ve heard the story about how I started on Blogger.com and then moved to hosting my own WordPress blog (okay, so Jason Johnson & Dreamhost do most of the heavy lifting as far as that goes). Well, back when I was signing up at Blogger, I needed a name for the site. It felt an awful lot like naming a band, for some strange reason. Some people just use their own name, others come up with stuff that I have no idea what it means. Other’s use some combination or play on their names, which I really like.
However, I wanted something that sort expressed my engineering side as well as the idea that this would still be a personal site. Somewhere, I decided on the term superstructure, which of course is the part of a building or bridge above the foundations. However, just the word seemed boring and not quite tech/geek enough. Somehow, in my mind, adding a bit of random punctuation was just enough of a twist to make it different. So the word super_structure was born. Lot’s of web pages, image files, and e‑mail address have underscores instead of spaces to prevent that whole or %20 thing. I thought that by separating the words, the word just had a different emphasis.
Later, I realized that while you can have an underscore character in the directory or file name, you can’t have one in the domain name. I couldn’t ever use super_structure.com (or .org, .net, etc) because it wasn’t an allowed name. So, I just stuck with jasoncoleman.net while continuing to use super_structure as the title.
There was critiquing, to put it nicely.
I finally decided to try and make a change today. You’ll notice that the underscore has been replaced by an en dash character (fully sanctioned for domain usage). I have also registered super-structure.org Yeah, I know, wouldn’t it be nice if they were both .net or .org, but just like dates to prom, the good ones are always taken when you get around to asking.
So, you’ll notice the universe, at least as in regard to this Jason Coleman, has now moved from super_structure to super-structure, and what’s more, you can now just type super-structure.org into your web browser to get here. The re-direct is on me.
Note: Unfortunately, as of writing this in the wee hours of Sunday morning, super-structure.org was still just being parked by GoDaddy. Hopefully, that will be corrected soon. It’s all good.