Today marks the switch from alanlangford.ca to alanlangford.com. You might be asking “But why?” Not because I dislike the .ca. Nor have I moved to a new country. The .ca top level domain is great, when your audience is Canadian. Large portions of the rest of the world are less familiar with it. There’s going to be a lot of “.ca? What the heck is that?” happening. That pause is what we call friction, and friction is not a good thing.
I’ve coveted alanlangford.com for quite some time. For some reason I just didn’t think of grabbing it until it was already snapped by Another Alan Langford. This was an Alan with an Idea but Not Much Else. Nothing except a page that said “Welcome to alanlangford.com!” I’ve watched it, on and off for 16 years now. First it went to the host’s parking page. Then sometime around 2018 it went to a squatter who naturally wanted some ludicrous amount of money. I don’t pay ransoms but that’s when I started monitoring it. After 4-5 years of wasting their money, the squatter finally gave up on it and let it go, and I snapped it up for the same price as any other available .com.
That was 15 months ago, and all I managed to do was redirect to to my .ca which rather sadly had an extended version of “welcome to” and Not Much Else. It’s like a curse or something! Having finally managed to break the curse last month and launched a Site with Actual Content, I though it time to make the switch and actually use the domain.
Now if you happen to be one of the 1.2 people globally who has linked to something on the shiny new alanlangford.ca, never fear: all those links automatically redirect to the same place on the .com. Email addresses are another matter altogether. I won’t even start. Just know that whatever happens, everything that works now will continue to work going forward. Or more accurately, if it breaks, it won’t be broken for long.