victory: askamanager.com is mine!

by Alison Green on November 5, 2010

After years of harassing the owner of the domain askamanager.com to sell it to me, victory has been achieved! I finally own askamanager.com, albeit at a somewhat extravagant expense.

(Side note: People need to say “albeit” more. It’s a very useful word.)

So now, the question:  What to do?

It was only two months ago that I gave up on ever obtaining askamanager.com, bought askamanager.org instead, and switched my URL to that (from the terrible askamanager.blogspot.com). I’ve already nagged my RSS subscribers to switch over to the new feed, and had a bunch of incoming links changed. Do I do that all over again? Or leave it alone for a while? Just keep askamanager.com redirecting here? Or switch to using it as my main site?

At some point I’m going to switch my blogging platform to WordPress and this all may matter more. For the moment, it’s more of an irritating question that I don’t know how to answer.

But the larger point, for now at least:  askamanager.com is mine at last!

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{ 19 comments }

{ 19 comments… read them below }

  2. Anonymous*

    I vote to make the change to .com now, get everyone to change their feeds and links just one last time, and be done with it. Then you won't have to worry about changing again. Congrats!

  3. Anonymous*

    You can usually set up your domains to redirect automatically to another domain…I saw switch to the .com then have .org (I would still keep the .org domain) set up to redirect automatically to the new site.

  4. Julie*

    The anonymous poster right before me took the words right out of my mouth. (Out of my fingers?) I'm pretty sure there's some way to do an auto-redirect, so that visitors to askamanager.com are automatically redirected to askamanager.org, or vice-versa. That way, no one needs to change their feeds again, and you get the benefit of having both sites.

  5. Rob*

    To the above two posters: yes, setting up a redirect is trivial. It's the matter of the RSS feeds that's the problem.

    Is it possible for you to set up code on the front end to just redirect .com, while continuing to RSS feed out of .org on the back end?

  6. Eva*

    Hmm … Personally, I love askmanager.org better than .com as it reflects on the value you provide here (advices are free, and the ebook is well worth the price!).

    My opinion: use 301 redirect from askamanager.com to askamanager.org. (301 redirect ensure to the traffic value from the .com is transferred properly to the .org)

  7. Anonymous*

    Ugh, glad to see askamanager.com go — it was advice on how to make it in the music business, and all stuff that you could basically infer from watching American Idol. No loss to the broader internets.

  9. Waldo*

    Set up the redirect to the .com now, keep the feed available on both sites, but send out periodic notifications that the .com is the preferred and will be the permanent home of your feed. It may be helpful to mention the approximate date that your .org will expire.

    Send notifications periodically reminding us to change to the new feed.

  10. Jeff Hunter*

    Keep redirecting it to the askamanager.org domain. Next time you make a big change, do both changes at one time.

  12. Richard*

    Set up your DNS to point to the same server as your askamanager.org site, and then ask your web host to set up the virtual host entry for askamanager.com to point to the same physical directory on the server as askamanager.org: Assuming that all of your internal links are relative, your site should function as normal on both domains.

    The only problem I can see if you move to WordPress is that if I recall correctly, the WordPress setup asks you for your site root, which may complicate things.

  16. Emily*

    I didn't (and still don't) have a significant feed readership when I switched from Blogger to WordPress in 2006, so I didn't look too far into the technical matters, but now I'm utterly perplexed and very curious—why would switching to WordPress (which you should do; it's awesome!) affect your RSS? You won't be switching from .blogspot.com to .wordpress.com. You'll just be switching software. Am I being naive?

  18. Emily*

    I came back to see if there'd been an update. I wish I could provide an expert's definitive answer, AAM!  I will say that after thinking about it for a week (okay, I wasn't thinking about it this all week, but), I still have a strong hunch that your publishing software will not affect your RSS feed.  Whether you're running Blogger or WordPress on the backend, now that you're using your own host and domain, switching software will not entail switching URLs, and so it won't make any difference to the feed.  Good luck! 

  19. Ask a Manager*

    Emily, thanks! I think you're right about the RSS feed. So at this point my worry is just that there are a ton of old links out there linking to me, but using the old URL (askamanager.blogspot.com). Currently, that's fine because Blogger automatically redirects them to the right page, because I'm still using Blogger. But when I stop, I assume that will stop working. So there will be lots of dead links around the Web. But I guess I can't really do anything about that.

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