New domain

July 4, 2009 / Zero to One-Eighty has moved to http://ztoe.net.

This weekend I moved Zero to One-Eighty to a new domain name. You should be redirected automatically, but please update any bookmarks and feeds. The old domain is zero2180.net. The new domain is ztoe.net. The new feed is at ztoe.net/feed/atom. Sorry if this change causes your feed reader to barf up duplicates of the last twenty or so posts. It did in mine.

Technicalities

For anyone interested in the nerd story, here are some notes.

• When I first registered zero2180.net back in 2005 I wanted something fairly short, but I was never happy with it because the meaning was unclear and it was hard to verbalise (“z, e, r, o—the letter, 2, 1, 8, 0—the number” ugh… just delightful to have to say all this over the phone, way to go Mr. Usability).
• I also had all kinds of parts to the site back then—the portfolio was called “Pixel Rebellion,” (zero2180.net/pixelrebellion) the photos were called “Longitudes,” (zero2180.net/longitudes) the blog was “Dead Reckoning” (zero2180.net/deadreckoning) and the URLs, well: http://www.zero2180.net/deadreckoning/2007/03/02/they-came-from-the-north/. I changed most of this a while back, and the new domain fixes the last problem.
• Late last year, when I registered ztoe.net, I stopped being a tightwad for five seconds, did it right and went with a good registrar.
• When I set up the new domain on my shared hosting account I created a new location for it on the server, and used Subversion to install the latest version of WordPress (2.8), which takes, like, two seconds, seriously.
• The tricky part was updating the site URL in my database. The afore-linked instructions are great, based as they are on the original (and best) Podz guide. I wound up having to find and replace the URL in more places than are specifically mentioned here, but the section on “changing the URL directly in the database” was the place to start, of course only after making copious backups.
• I had some problems with wp-cache at first that had me stumped for a while (the server kept spewing encoding errors). Deleting and reinstalling the plugin from within WordPress did the trick nicely.
• Since then I’ve been spending most of my time fixing images in posts, because I originally had them in a separate assets folder back in the days of WordPress 1.5, but then the media gallery came along, etc. One nice (newish?) feature is that if you have enabled the option to place uploads in time-based folders and you add an image to an old post, it creates folders for the resource based on the post’s publication date rather than the current date.

I’m still working on fixing all of the images, but if you notice any 404s or other glitches that don’t seem right, please let me know.

Update: see the Changes page for additional information.