Gobán Saor

Over the weekend I transferred this blog over to my own sub-domain, http://blog.gobansaor.com. The blog continues to be hosted by WordPress.com and the old http://gobansaor.wordpress.com addresses will continue to work. Most RSS readers will also gracefully (I hope) handle the transfer of the RSS feed, but if not, you may wish to resubscribe via http://blog.gobansaor.com/feed. If you encounter any problems please let me know via the comments below.

As a result of the remapping, I’ve temporarily lost all my Google mojo, but the 302 redirects should restore that over time. My yearly blog hosting costs have now risen from nought to the princely sum of $10 (plus the cost of the domain). So why do it? Three main reasons:

• I’ve decided to carry on my datasmithing business under the www.gobansaor.com banner (moving it from www.gleesonIT.com). And as this blog is my main presence on the net I wanted to harness it as a marketing tool. Also, gleesonIT is mostly associated with my wife’s home IT coaching/support service and as she has now returned to her full-time career as a civil servant we need to rethink its focus. (I may use it as a vehicle for offering IT consulting/services to others like myself , i.e. digital free-agents; but, to use marketing speak, I might end up “diluting the brand”, maybe I should offer all services under the a single banner, i.e. the Gobán Saor “brand”; but then that might “overload the brand“, decisions, decisions ).
• Increasingly, at least for those of us in the technology game, your online presence(s), be that your blog or your facebook profile or your forum-based contributions, act(s) as a surrogate CV. As this blog is starting to gather some traction I figured now, rather than later, is the time to bring it more under my own control and “brand”.
• I wanted to give something back to Matt et al. for providing me and others (including my son) with the fantastic product and service that is WordPress.com. I figured $10 a year is the least I could do.