www. is not deprecated

Initially one of the things that I really liked about choosing my new website URL was that http://rik.onl looked so nice and short.  However, I stumbled across a blog post written by Troy Hunt which covers how he created his new blog, and it points to a website called www. is not deprecated.

Having read his blog post and the site in more detail, I agreed with them entirely, that the technical benefits outweighed any slight aesthetic incentive that I saw, and so I switched my site to use www.rik.onl as the canonical URL.  

Now that I've switched, I quite like it and feel it looks nicely balanced, but maybe 3.3.3 characters is not something everything looks for in a URL!

On a more technical note, this is achieved by adding the following meta tag to the source...

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.rik.onl/index.php">

I've also changed WCG Online to use www.wcg.onl as the canonical URL, instead of the original wcg.onl, and I encourage you to do the same with your websites.

Website launch

It's way beyond time that I had my own website, on which to host my own projects.  Whilst working on this, I've been researching and making decisions, and learning new skills along the way.  So I've decided to create a new blog, documenting some of this as I go, mostly for my own benefit looking back, but maybe it'll be of use to someone else too.

So, my new website... http://www.rik.onl

Firstly, how did I go about choosing this URL?  The classic format these days is (firstname)(lastname).com, so that would be riklewis.com for me, which was available to me.  In fact, riklewis.co.uk and riklewis.uk were available as well.  Apparently "riklewis" isn't a very popular name!  I guess I liked that fact that it was a short top level domain, but also gave me the flexibility to just use Rik.  If you want more information on .ONL, you can check out... http://www.nic.onl/

I've previously had projects on different URLs, but I'm starting to merge those into my own site now.  These include...

• http://trixmoto.net now redirects to http://www.rik.onl/mediamonkey
• http://editor.watch now redirects to http://www.rik.onl/watchmaker
• http://wcg.onl is remaining where it is, for now at least

There's a few posts I want to write to catch up to where I am now, and then after that I'll be continuing to update as I go.