∞ /notes/owning-your-content-on-the-web 🖇🖇🖇 | 2016-03-23 | web programming

Owning your content on the web

Owning your domain and URLs is the first step to owning your content. —Manton Reece, so true.

A few years ago, I had my wordpress.com blog set up with my own custom domain, fsteeg.com. At some point in 2014, I’ve set up my own site at that domain, and put in place redirects for the old blog posts, so that URLs like this would remain resolvable:

http://fsteeg.com/2008/05/23/reporting-research-the-way-of-the-future

They redirected to the wordpress blog:

http://fsteeg.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/reporting-research-the-way-of-the-future

I’ve now moved that blog content (plus older stuff) to my own site, and re-redirected the old redirects to the now internal content for the original wordpress-at-fsteeg.com URLs.

They now redirect internally:

http://fsteeg.com/notes/reporting-research-the-way-of-the-future

So the mere decision to use a custom domain for my blog many years ago made it independent of the actual hosting location (wordpress.com or self-hosted) and publishing system (wordpress or my own software). In a way I’ve been referencing a system for years that I only now created. Your own domain and URLs really give you a lot of control over your content, even if that content is actually stored elsewhere for years.