Social Media University, Global is still hosted on wordpress.com, but thanks to the wonders of domain mapping, we now have a URL worthy of a higher education institution:
social-media-university-global.org
I have said previously that I would only put things on this blog that were free. The reason for that was so I could tell FUD-plagued prospective bloggers, “If you see it on my blog, you can do it without spending any money or involving your IT department.”
I decided to make this one exception, because it’s only about the URL, not what you actually see on the blog. And maybe I’ll create a new page called “What’s not free” where I can indicate this and any other enhancements I decide to purchase.
This blog has been at leeaase.wordpress.com since its inception, but with the rebranding I did last month, it seemed reasonable to spend the princely sum of $19 to get an appropriate URL. That way, as I recruit new faculty members, they’ll be writing for social-media-university-global.org, which sounds a lot better than leeaase.wordpress.com.
So I registered this new domain with GoDaddy.com for $8.99, and then paid the $10 to WordPress.com for domain mapping. It took a while for my WordPress.com credits to go through, but all-in-all it was a painless exercise. The gang at WordPress.com gave really clear instructions, and if I would have purchased my domain through them instead of GoDaddy it probably would have been simpler (although it would have cost an extra dollar.)
I mainly used GoDaddy to better understand how the domain mapping process works. If I had bought the domain through WordPress.com it would have been simpler (they would have managed steps I needed to do manually), but the process would have been opaque to me, and I wouldn’t have learned as much. And practical, hands-on learning is what SMUG is all about!
I will be writing about this experience in a future course in the SMUG Blogging curriculum, Blogging 305: Domain Mapping.
Meanwhile, I’ll be seeing if this change creates any problems for RSS feeds or anything else. I expect it will drain some of my Google juice for a bit, but I think it will help a lot in the long run, having descriptive words in my URLs.
Let me know what you experience with this change.