Goodbye stephen-brennan.com, Hello brennan.io!

Stephen Brennan • 17 February 2016

Regular visitors to my site (if there are any!) may have noticed that, starting today, stephen-brennan.com is redirecting to a new domain name, brennan.io. This change was motivated by a few reasons:

  1. Long domain names are unwieldy! stephen-brennan.com is 19 characters long. Put that in an email address (like stephen@stephen-brennan.com) and you have a very long and somewhat difficult to use address. Compare that to brennan.io, which is 10 characters, and stephen@brennan.io, which is 18 – fewer characters than the original domain!
  2. I didn’t like the hyphenated domain! I originally wanted to have stephenbrennan.com, but that domain was (and still is) already taken, so I went with the hyphenated one, which I didn’t like too much. Now I finally have taken the time to get rid of the hyphen.
  3. The top-level domain .io has been a somewhat popular one as of late, especially among tech-related sites. I suspect that the popularity has to do with two things. First, with the surge of new TLDs such as .tech and .site, which both seem rather silly and untrustworthy, older and less verbose TLDs such as .io seem more normal and trustworthy. Second, the abbreviation I/O (for input/output) suggests computing and technology. Since I mainly use this site to write about those topics, this choice of TLD makes sense.
  4. Finally, using just my last name gives me the opportunity to create subdomains and email addresses for family members, should they want a personal site or email address.

So, please update any bookmark or links you may have. I plan on having stephen-brennan.com around for a while, since there are already a lot of links to my site around the Internet. All links to stephen-brennan.com will simply redirect to their corresponding targets here on brennan.io. Hopefully in the next few days, search engines will pick up on the change and update their rankings accordingly!

Legal • RSS

Creative Commons License

Stephen Brennan's Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License